William Vollmann - Kissing the Mask - Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines

“It must have required a certain level of accomplishment on your part for that to occur.”

“I studied for many years, trying to imitate the forms which had been maintained traditionally, 3to deeply understand the traditional standard of beauty. I have done that for many years, so it’s not that long ago that I finally started making masks of my own.”

“How long ago?”

Her elaboration of “not long ago” was in keeping with the manifold slowness of Noh: “I have been making masks for twenty-one years.”

She thought that “a really talented person can learn to make a mask in five to ten years.” It took her about a month to complete one mask. She had tried to use power tools, but they were too noisy. Sometimes she experienced wrist pain from working too hard with her chisels, and back pain from bending over too long.

“Is is difficult for you to say goodbye to the mask?”

“If it’s going to be used on the stage, I’ll be happy,” said Ms. Nakamura. “Last year, somebody from Ireland just passed by and bought a lot, and I felt a little sad.”

“Are there any stories about somebody who fell in love with a mask?”

“I can’t think of any story like that, but I wish that someday someone will fall in love with one of mine.”

“Since you are now so familiar with the standard of beauty for the Noh mask, can you tell me what proportion determines the perfect female face?”

“It’s very hard to say. Of course I cannot indicate any numbers. The standard varies. When I’m making something, that is the most beautiful for me, but when I start making something else, then it’s the most beautiful.”

“Why is there a different standard of beauty of the ukiyo-e face than for Noh faces?”

“Probably, depending on the time, the standard of beauty changes. Noh masks originated six hundred years ago. Even before that, a standard of beauty existed which the masks reflected. Ukiyo-e , on the other hand, is from the Edo period. The standard of beauty in the Edo period, I think it is different…”

I had brought with me a book of Utamaro reproductions, so I pulled it out and we leafed through it together. The mask maker said: “Here the face is long, an oval face, and the eyebrows are rather clear. That is totally different from a Noh mask.”

And she instantly began to sketch:

“The balance of the items on the Utamaro face, it’s just like a normal, ordinary person’s,” she said. “Whereas on a Noh mask, the eyes are somewhat lower, and the mouth and nose; this is like a child. And the eyebrows are here” — Ms. Nakamura pointed upward. “So this balance is totally different. And the reason, my guess is, these eyebrows have some meaning . Why they are so lifted and why the forehead is so large must be that probably in Heian period, their beauty was between eyes and eyebrows.”

“How often do you see a Japanese woman whose face is proportioned like a Noh mask?”

She giggled. “Whenever I’m in a train I always look at the other faces, but I never see such a face! But a person who has a nice forehead, I notice that and think it is like a Noh mask.”

“So if it is not lifelike, why is it so beautiful?”

“Probably it’s not because of that proportion of that balance, but something appealing inside, something that is attractive.”

“And what would that something be?”

“That’s what I’m always wondering, actually,” she said.

An Image of Kannon

Astanding robed figure of gold shows her round-cheeked face through the oval window of her ornate golden headdress. Her face, proportionately much wider than any Noh mask, is a golden cube with rounded corners, with long tresses of a darker, perhaps tarnished color. The blackish pupils are alert in her gold eyes. Tarnish or dirt has given her a slight moustache. She upraises one hand and extends the other, seated cross-legged in a spill of concentrically pleated metal skirts above her various lamps, her eyes looking straight at me. First her brilliant golden eyebrow-crescents in that slightly verdigrised face snatch my gaze; then I see more golden sweeps of under-lids, very geometric and distinct, more so than the golden places where light is caught upon her cheeks and chin. She is very far beyond and above me in the temple’s darkness. When I raise my binoculars to her, I find that her face is of stunning beauty. Her golden lips are slightly parted, shining.

On page after page of a fashion magazine, the movie star Kate Bosworth, twenty-five years old, parts her dark pink lips, showing me a sliver of white upper teeth framed by darkness, her lower lip ornamented in each photograph with a segmented stripe of gloss-glow. Her skin is a flawless blend of pinks; I suppose it has been powdered and airbrushed. Her mascara’d gaze beseeches me with the appearance of melancholy or erotic intimacy. Her mouth pretends to say: “Kiss me.” This professional signifier appears on many women in pornographic magazines and in the long slow sequences of romantic films. For some reason, I rarely see it on the faces of strangers in the street.

That knowing, almost half-smiling face of Kannon, which first seems merely watchfully aware of me, then does perhaps offer me lurking gentleness or even pity, metallic pity, what does it project and what does it contain? Kannon is what? How feminine is she? How human is she? Among the thirteen best-loved mandala deities of Esoteric Buddhism we find Amida and his attendant, a certain Kannon, more obscurely known as Avalokiteshvara. Sometimes she is male, often not. Never mind that or even her ancientness in that twice-bygone capital of Nara; how could I kiss those lips of hers? Grown man that I am, I remain small enough to be born from them…

A waka-onna, zo-onna or ko-omote possesses this same inhuman beauty. So does a geisha; so does a maiko; likewise the woman I love. The grace they shower upon me surpasses even my capacity to desire.

The Three Beings of Three Women

But where to start? Who is any woman? In the Tokyo National Museum, a certain cosmetic box depicting a scene from the Noh play “Kikujido” is squarish, with golden flowers on a speckled gold-and-black background — a heavenly zone rendered still more lucent and distant by the lacquer. What is kept inside I will never know. 1And as I revise this chapter in an airport I look up and see across of me a middle-aged woman with stringy hair, her glasses halfway down her nose as she reads a book beside her husband; who is she? I will never know that, either. A slender, elegant old lady sits down with her legs pressed together and her feet precisely aligned; she begins to operate some flat silver electronic device.

THE NINETY PERCENT GIRL

“Who is a woman?” I inquired of an American woman whom I had never before met — that way the “who” that I “knew” her to be might be less likely to occlude the “who” that she “really was” (thirty-eight, a wedding and portrait photographer, well-muscled, tall, Aryan) — whether she would answer questions about her female self. She was kind, and said that she would. Just as a geisha’s shamisen has three strings, so a person has three beings. I thought to ask Hilary Nichols about each of them.

I began by asking: What is your soul? and she replied by subdividing the entity of which I was thinking into two parts:

“I think our spirit is our life-force. It’s the god-force rather than the beautiful mystery which is life. And the soul is our persona. I think my energy is eternal and will continue and will carry some essence or knowledge. It sort of reforms and becomes a new life. I kind of feel a connection which is not really of this lifetime, something I have no choice in. I feel that we’re working out whatever issues we came into this world with, and if we don’t work it out in this lifetime, it will continue in the next.” (This point of view is not so far from a Noh play’s: Characters who fail to release their loves, griefs, angers and suchlike attachments remain on stage as masked ghosts.)