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

In Kanazawa I hear the rain on the square grey paving-stones, and within many walls of shingle and latticework, some glowing yellow, some glowing blue, many dark, there is a quiet teahouse whose ochaya-san sits beside me, Fukutaro-san smiles sweetly over her shamisen, tuning it while the geisha Masami-san bows on the tatami, her head toward me, and I wait until Masami-san has commenced to very slowly flip her sleeve in time to the thrilling of Fukutaro’s lovely voice. I am striving to see ; this dance, which connotes the New Year and is called “Fresh Water,” is for me and no matter how many times she performs it will never be repeated. Whatever I miss comprises my failure to her . And Masami is kneeling, her hands clasped together on the floor. Slowly she opens the fan, lifting it to her lips; I suppose it must be in that moment a sake cup. Her snowy face is paler still by contrast with the shining black wig. Her expression is much more mobile than an Inoue School geisha’s.

I hear the sharp snap of her fan. Fukutaro is staring down at her music, singing, the fan has frozen over the geisha’s head; Masami bows, and it is over. I loved what I saw, but already I have begun to forget. If I last out many more winters and summers upon this floating world, and if I remain at least as prosperous as a sake merchant, then perhaps, if I come to Masami over and over, I will someday succeed in adoring her with the gaze her grace deserves.

In a certain bar in Los Angeles a beautiful woman stands on the chessboard-tiled floor just outside the entrance to the women’s room (about which my companion, who was born with a vagina, remarks with smiling innocence: “I wonder why the toilet seat is always up?”). The beautiful woman shines through her smooth collarbone and pale white thighs. Her smooth new breasts fill her black top to the best measure of abundance. Her tartan skirt charmingly infantilizes her chubby knees. Her beauty is a shock. Smilingly she offers her lips to be kissed. I feel happy to remember her here.

Zeami’s notion that the spectators arrive at a performance in a given mood based on external conditions — for instance, the degree of heat and darkness — surely applies to the preexisting factors of male desire; and a woman who seeks to best exploit her audience might as well know what those are. A cherry blossom seems “appropriate to a highly cultivated audience.” Beauty with provenance, he writes, such as a shrine associated with a specific poem, makes a greater impression than beauty without. Provenance depends on the audience’s lives, the man’s proclivities; and the cunning performer knows these. How could this chapter’s attempt to generalize about grace fail to be an objectification? And what are props for, but to assist in objectification? Sharon Morgan employed her corsets to help herself and perhaps others believe that she could be categorized in a certain way (as female). But she remained Sharon Morgan, not some anonymous upholder of womanliness. And so it seems to me that the male gaze, which benefits so much from feminine grace, can increase its own pleasure, and nourish each bearer of grace with its respect, first by recognizing category, as does Pontano when he draws our attention to particular body parts of the women whom his poems adore — and the rare Noh spectator who can distinguish a zo-onna mask from a ko-omote acts likewise — then by paying homage to uniqueness.

Memorializing the poet Kanoko Okamoto, the great woodblock artist Munakata took up his chisel and “express[ed] his joy at being able to openly take up female verses, thanks to the arrival of the age of ‘freedom of expression.’ He commented that he created this piece by purposely using a ‘U-shaped gouge,’ perhaps in order to express the roundness and softness of the female’s body.”

What is a woman to me ? The answer must be: A projection. Who is projecting, and for what reason, I cannot necessarily know from the performance itself. Mr. Umewaka and Mr. Mikata do not when playing their feminine roles feel themselves to be women; they strive, as I so often in my wonderment repeat, to be nothing ; yet when they enact women I see them as women. Meanwhile the psyche within a male body which mechanically performs itself as such may see itself as female. One eloquently canny researcher of such matters concludes that femininity may be defined as “the possession of either a vagina that nature made or a vagina that should have been there all along, i.e. ; the legitimate possession.” The presence or absence of this emblem remains conjectural to any stranger; yet its enactment, and the stranger’s response to it, will confirm the performer, or not. The performance of gender is received by an audience whose members then react. Were the audience unnecessary, the mask would remain safe and unmarred in her dark box.

“Let the glow of Radha’s breasts endure!” begs a twelfth-century Indian poem. Alas, a young woman’s beauty resembles a single performance of a Noh play. It would be unkind and untrue to equate that with the “false flower” of the young Noh actor who portrays her. Basho, the great haiku poet, writes that “the old-lady cherry / is blossoming, a remembrance / of years ago.” I certainly believe that the beauty of the true flower, surpassing mere remembrance, can remain in an ancient woman. In fact, it can bloom all the more, nourished by what it has already been. I think of Mr. Kanze playing Komachi near the end of his life; in a play in which almost nothing happens; in which the weary old lady scarcely moves; in which the priests sadly ask themselves: “Is this Komachi that once was a bright flower?” 5Played by Mr. Kanze, she still is. When I remember that performance now, I am moved almost to tears.

In the Noh play “Aoi-no-Ue,” a witch or medium summons Lady Rokujo’s spirit. First we see a noblewoman in a deigan mask. Her face is lovely and almost unlined, but she bares her teeth just a trifle; she broods; perhaps she has begun to be predatory. When the witch fails to break her hold on her rival, Lady Aoi, who is now perilously ill thanks to the emanations of Rokujo’s jealousy, the court sends for an ascetic. This man impels the spirit back. We now see the noblewoman muffled in her cloak. For a considerable time she bows before her summoner, writhing beneath her robe in anguish. Then, as his magicking becomes more imperious, she begins to raise her head; and we discover her in a sickening hannya mask, her head now an angry grinning skull’s, horned and shining-eyed, with enough flesh left on her — a nose, for instance — to render her all the fouler: a decomposing corpse which cannot find peace, nor even crave it, such is her desperate malice against Aoi, who (represented by a kimono) lies on the front left of the stage, perilously pregnant with Genji’s child. And now Aoi’s hannya dance begins, a pantomime of battle against the ascetic, who of course will win out (“never again will I come as an angry ghost”). But first, defying his Lesser Spell of Fudo and much of the Middle Spell, Rokujo dances her dance of hideous menace. And in so doing, she follows Zeami’s prescription, holding her invisible branch of flowers. What I see behind her horribleness and hatefulness is firstly her anguish — I pity her — and secondly her grace, her feminine loveliness.

Well, then, what is grace? How does it differ from beauty itself, or from yugen ? Can the lovely impression projected by a certain woman hold its own over time, or even increase, like the alluring pathos of Matsukaze? The Komachi embodied by Mr. Kanze is a bright flower, yes, but she is not as lovely as she was. Her accomplishment, her noh , has increased, but in her anatomy she has obviously decayed. Still she holds us. Well, what would or should this positive outcome entail? If desire is the essential problem of the Noh situation, then what does that say about this book’s celebration of desire?