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

Might there be not merely ambiguity but hypocrisy in Noh’s representation of feminine beauty? On the one hand, most of the plays under discussion address the suffering of delusional attachment to this world, and in particular to Eros and Agape. On the other hand, just as Milton’s Satan overshadows the other characters in that great poem, so the beauty of the masked Noh figure is such as to invoke our yearning, sometimes to such an extent as to overshadow the warning, or even be augmented by it. When the ghostly “woman of the wooden well” who is the shite of “Izutsu” wraps her long dead lover’s cloak around her and seeks to reflect him in her dance, the chorus sings: “Blossoming sleeves, flakes of whirling snow.” And here the true flower of her supernatural beauty is likewise in full blossom, almost without pathos. At the play’s end, to be sure, she will sing: “Pine winds tear plantain-leaf-frail dream, too, breaks awake; the dream breaks to dawn.” And she dissolves back into death beyond the rainbow curtain. But in the dance of blossoming sleeves, her dream was not yet broken. What then is Noh-grace when dissected from pathos? Is the result approximately what I feel in gazing at a living woman? Perhaps it is the same as the dance in “Yuya,” which is elegantly gorgeous without being sad.

We know from “Kinuta” and other plays, even other prose, that the sound of a woman fulling cloth on a board is considered dreary, mournful, signifying the agony of delusional attachment. But Basho writes a haiku about how clearly the blows ring, travelling all the way up to the Big Dipper. This clarity possesses, among other qualities, beauty. The sometimes agonizing allure of the feminine might as well be contemplated as akin to those rising sounds. Blossoming sleeves must molder like the flesh within them; snow must melt; all the same, in the moment they triumph. Back and forth this book must go, from snow to water, all the while baffled or inspired by the slowness of a perfect Noh mask whose silent wooden alteration of expressions saves us from admitting the inevitable.

Beauty is grace. Grace is pose and poise, as in an ancient Greek bronze of a running girl whose smooth dark legs remain in balance; the bare feet remain flexed, the toes outthrust, the arms upflung in power and joy — but grace is life , hence inconstancy, which can inflict constant and perhaps even eternal attachment. A wise Sanskrit poet advises his heroine not to leave her flaring hips idle, but rush to the darkened forest where her lover-god waits. Her hips must die, but not yet. And the god desires her. Grace may be, as for a Noh actor who strives to feel nothing, projection alone; it can also be a woman’s living feelings. “A flower shows its beauty as it blooms and its novelty as its petals scatter.” This aphorism of Zeami’s must be true; otherwise why would modes and fashions change? And so the heroine goes to the dark forest and unties her belt. Whether she gives herself or refrains, a hundred years later the outcome will be the same.

In that ochaya in Kanazawa the geisha Masami was sitting before the gilded wall where her dances happened, and when I asked how many dances she had memorized, she replied: “Even if you know many dances, it depends on the season. If a dance is long, we may perform only a part of it. Right now the atmosphere of New Year is still present.”

Until yesterday, the fifteenth of January, her hair ornament had been a tortoise shell with rice-stalks ( inaho ) and a white crane, which for geishas was actually supposed to be an eyeless white pigeon. If a geisha’s wish came true within the fifteen days, she painted an eye on her pigeon. Two eyes meant that two wishes got granted, for instance fortune in love. Geishas would observe each other’s pigeons and make jocular or envious comments. Now her ornament had become a rat, to mark the beginning of the Year of the Rat.

“Each season is different,” added the shamisen player Fukutaro. “If you come here in the summer, there will be no paper on the latticework wall..”

What then is grace? Does its transience sufficiently explain it? Should we construe it as extrahuman? Royall Tyler writes about the play “Matsukaze” that the two sisters “are not actually people… they are the purified essences of human longing.” And how could they be otherwise? If, as Malraux opines, great artists are “conditioned” not by the world itself but by other art, then the sisters must be projected entities, like Hollywood actresses glimpsed through their limousine windows.

In this vein, a certain mid-twentieth-century Kabuki booklet makes remarkable claims about that art’s onnagata: “The art of female impersonation has refined feminine beauty to the extent that it exceeds the beauty of real women in many ways… a man will always have basically stronger, sharper lines than a woman, but in Kabuki, a level of sensuality… has been achieved that is not found in real life… a strength of purpose is required, along with a soft gentleness that makes it quite impossible for a woman to perform satisfactorily.”

This notion rests on the stale presupposition that women are capable only of softness, whereas a man can be both soft and strong, harmonizing and neutralizing those opposing characteristics much as would a Noh actor who is following Zeami’s prescriptions. Not incidentally, Zeami advises his female impersonators to reject any show of strength in their depictions — but this might be because their male strength will shine through regardless. An actor ought to “abandon any detailed stress on his physical movements (since, if the feminine spirit infuses his mind, a relaxation of physical strength will surely come about of itself).” — And what if his female projection relaxes too much? In 1912, the feminist novelist Tamura Toshiko made an exactly opposite claim to the Kabuki booklet, namely, that an onnagata may be able to express feminine weakness, but not feminine strength.

I once asked a Kyoto geisha whether there was anything in dance that women can do that men cannot.

“Women must look softer,” she replied. “A woman gives birth. That a woman can do better than a man. But if she wants to do anything else, a man can probably do it better.”

“Can a woman open a door or serve a drink more gracefully than a man?”

“Instructors of tea ceremonies, who are usually men, can do it better than we can.”

My own opinion is that telling other people what they are incapable of expressing is always absurd. We have already met the Noh actress Yamamura Yoko, whose career is a rejection of the Kabuki booklet’s logic. Originally she had begun taking lessons in the craft in her then home island of Kyushu because it was “nice for my parents.” She followed Mr. Umewaka to Tokyo and studied with him for twenty years. In the Umewaka School (in Tokyo, at least), six or ten percent of the qualified players were female. The Kita School still prohibited women. No school allowed a woman to perform “Okina.”

“The first women performers imitated very hard,” she said. “Fortunately, in my generation we don’t try to imitate men. We try to perform in a different way, exploiting the differences in sensitivity, strength and body figure.”

Even she believed that women were insufficiently adept at Noh to perform alone, especially for waki and kyogen roles. “At this point, we rely on male masters,” she said.

(With his customary openmindedness, Mr. Umewaka said about the few Noh actresses: “I tell them, don’t imitate; make Noh . Create your own female Noh.” He then added: “However, for me there is no female role or instructor.”)

“Why is it so difficult for women to perform the waki role?” I asked Ms. Yamamura.