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

“Because the mask is not used, and because the waki is a travelling priest,” she replied.

“Do you prefer playing female or male roles?”

“It depends. Boys’ roles such as Atsumori are easy for women. Hardest of all is playing an old demon.”

“How do you play a woman?”

Her reply was not too far removed from the thinking of an onnagata:

“As it stands, men put on a costume and a mask to become a woman. But if a woman is to play a woman’s role, the woman must first be a man and learn that. The costumes are made to express femininity. If a woman uses the same technique to play a female role but lacks male strength, then it will be a weak Noh. So you need a man’s strength.” 6

Once again, it would paradoxically seem that this species of feminine elegance requires a portion of masculinity. One transsexual speaks of the insecurity which once led him to “hyperfeminise” himself, “to adopt the artificial stereotypes attributed to women.” In time he realized that he could act “naturally,” making use of all the advantages of his previous male experience. Here we might remind ourselves that Zeami was at one time the Shogun’s pretty boy. The grace of the Noh actor dwells near the grace of the transvestite prostitute Ms. Tosaka. All the same, who am I to say that a woman’s grace contains no tincture of maleness?

But how strange to utterly privilege performance over anatomy! A scholar of ballet notes that when the ballerina performs a certain move such as an arabesque, “she’s calling attention to a shapely ankle, an arched instep… and the round hip and ribcage. You can’t mistake it if you’re alive yourself.” Ono no Komachi might have possessed these things when she was young. She could not have kept them all in old age. And how could an onnagata achieve that particular sort of ribcage? The obvious answer is that he avoids the issue by covering himself. He becomes a woman by becoming a female specter. He keeps his male parts shapeless.

A commitedly literalist female impersonator can indeed weigh down his lower body with pelvic prostheses so that his hips will swing like a woman’s. He can wear false breasts, or take estrogen. He can angle his forearms away from his torso to simulate the human female’s greater elbow angle. Because the male voice shares about half an octave of overlap with its female counterpart, a transvestite can train his voice to sound both natural and feminine, in part by pitching it between falsetto and the point where it breaks into its natural bass or tenor. All these props and performances make use of concretions, handicaps, efforts and distortions of nature. But while a man may broaden his hips, it is not so easy to narrow his shoulders; and even if he could, if we imagine a great Noh actor in the full bloom of his true flower, and a young woman possessed of a gorgeous face and body, and if we further imagine the two of them to be naked side by side, how could we guarantee that the judgment of Paris would come out as art would wish it to be? 7

“Do you try to become the character?” I asked Ms. Yamamura.

She said what almost all of them did: “I try to stay in my ordinary state, calm. When I’m taking lessons I think a lot. But when I put on the mask I try not to think.”

In the climax of “Izutsu,” the shite gazes down into the well, into which she used to look with her lover Narihira, and instead of her own ghostly reflection, or nothing, she sees his image. 8To me this seems to be less about androgyny or ambisexuality than about crossing the abyss, identifying completely with the beloved other.

So why is it that the overwhelming beauty of a woman’s face and carriage can so dominate the world that the latter becomes a bare and polished Noh stage?

Before attempting to answer, I must remind myself of Zeami’s caution: “A flower blooms by maintaining secrecy.” A scholarly book about courtesans concludes them to be “fundamentally elusive fantasies of the imagination.” This leads to the question: What would be gained and what lost by seeing a great actress or geisha naked? It also makes me worry that trying to dissect the flower of feminine grace will destroy its effect, which approximates what Zeami called mutuality in movement beyond consciousness . All the same, I will now take out my scalpel.

Just as the geisha’s dance is hers alone, and the fiftieth actor to use a Noh mask makes it his own just as much as did the first, so feminine elegance is unique to the woman or her impersonator. Zeami again: “The life and spirit of Noh is nothing without the player’s forming of his own style… The real shite is the one who studies various kinds of other styles after achieving a unique style of his own.”

“When a Noh actor takes on the role of a beautiful woman,” I once asked Mr. Mikata, “how is it that the illusion is so perfect? The actor sings in a male voice; we can see his adam’s apple, and yet he becomes a beautiful woman. 9To me this is even more magical than when an actor becomes a Kagekiyo or Atsumori. How is this accomplished?”

He replied: “I think it’s because what’s expressed is neutral: not man, not woman. That’s what we pursue. Since we are men, when we play a man, it’s just as what we usually do, but when we play a woman, if you move like a woman or sound like a woman, well, that is what an observer can easily see, but in fact we don’t really want to express a woman as such. Woman’s mind, what she feels, her pure mind or jealousy, that’s what we want to express through a woman’s figure. This figure should not stand out, even though when we play the role of woman or elderly man we do slightly change the voices and the moves.”

Here we find ourselves returned to the genderless soul independently posited by Hilary Nichols, Marina and Sachiko. An eighteenth-century Japanese scholar of classical literature writes that “the true heart is not masculine, firm or resolute; such attitudes are mere decoration. When one delves to the bottom of the heart, even the most resolute person is no different from a woman or a child.”

At any rate, the detachment within that masculine-feminine balance must to some extent require that grace be a set of conventions; indeed, part of what gives Noh its impressive effect is its very rigidity .

By no means can this be a universal characteristic of feminine grace. Sappho, whose girls of her desire are all soft, tender, supple, violetlike, informs us that “I love refinement,” just as a Noh connoisseur does, “and beauty and light are for me the same as desire for the sun.” 10Grace is, among other things, the voluminous S-shape of a standing courtesan in a narrow vertical ukiyo-e print, her hairpiece as many-spoked as a mushroom cap is gilled, utterly in balance in spite of all, and not rigid. But even that softest, tenderest and most violetlike expression of Noh, Yuya’s flower dance, could never be called supple; and in her stately glide across the stage bridge, any shite at all, no matter how girlish her mask and garments, reminds me of one of the prehistoric grave-figurines of southern central Europe: thick-legged, her ankles ending in rounded stumps, her thighs as wide as her hips, rendering her middle a sort of apron comprised of her stony or bony substance; this region is generally incised with the disproportionately large female triangle described by one scholar as a “supernatural vulva.” Her arms, considerably shorter and more slender than her legs, which they recapitulate with their own rounded stumps. Her head and neck are a single rounded vertebral cone. Archaeologists have named her the Stiff White Lady. And stiff she is indeed. In her utter rigidity she reminds me of a geisha’s black wig — but she is the color of death: bone-pale. Some of her exemplars are in fact nothing more and less than bones carved with a few stylized female markings. “The symbol closest to death is a bare bone.” I am categorically informed that she, like her sister avatars of the Great Goddess, “has nothing to do with sexuality.” That is one opinion. As for me, I find her beautiful, graceful, erotic. Like a Noh heroine, she has been stripped down, understated until she paradoxically towers before me: In the plate I now study she is not much larger than my finger, which makes no difference because, being a goddess, she has won the victory over ever so many things, including scale.