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

The Stiff White Lady’s daughters, the Cycladic marble figurines from 3000–2500 B.C., are a trifle more human, but still coldly, beautifully alien, with their noses jutting from otherwise featureless face-disks and their arms folded beneath their breasts. These items likewise seem to have been fashioned to lie in graves. Their smoothly abstracted geometries are their grace; their narrowness is their elegance. Their female triangles are their real faces. What are they, but perfect bones of femininity?

Their granddaughter, a marble statue of Tyche, Greek goddess of fortune, gazes through me with pupil-less eyes. Young and cold, smooth and whitish-yellow, with her arms broken off and her nipples erect beneath the folds of the robe, small-lipped, plump-cheeked like a ko-omote , veiled, crowned with a miniature city’s towered walls, what is she but perfect grace?

A man in a seventeenth-century ko-omote , a man who is now a woman, approaches us. Her cheeks are shadowed faintly black; the corners of her mouth turn upward in an ingenuous smile; the middle of her upper teeth have been blackened. She stares through us with the contentment of a young girl who is still tasting the sweet that she has been sucking on. Even when she gazes downward, she expresses no sadness. Her true face, his face, is as absent as the features of the Stiff White Lady (who may on occasion have a nose). Or are these their faces? How can a woman express perfect grace without supplenesss, without facial muscles, without eyes? And yet she does. I remember with affection how a certain straight pine tree in Nara tapered upward with surprising symmetry, each branch short, slightly upcurving like a fern-fingertip. A Noh goddess and a Stiff White Lady both partake of pine-grace. They also, it would seem, have been made specifically for their roles, and perhaps it is this specificity which distinguishes them from flesh. 11Hisao Kanze once wrote that Noh woman-masks pass “beyond all specific human expression.” What then is grace, if it leaves the human behind? Perhaps it is simply that it, like great poetry, brings us as close as possible to, and then points toward, what ultimately cannot be expressed. By the shite ’s pillar of the stage, the Noh mask of a young girl orbits my floating world, laurel of the moon; I cannot go to the moon but I can watch it rise through ever so many of my blue-black nights. And this Noh girl of the ko-omote employs a man’s tabi- socked feet to glide inhumanly across my life, like the moon, which is Elder Sister to Stiff White Ladies.

And so, in contradistinction to Sappho’s yielding lightness, I cite Fenollosa’s belief that “the beauty of the Noh lies in the concentration. All elements — costume, motion, verse, and music — unite to produce a single clarified impression.” And a Sardinian lady made of bone — she is perhaps six thousand years old — overpowers me through her horizontal eye-slits; she will not kiss me because she lacks a mouth; folding her bone arms across her breast, she displays her wide and simple vulva to me, standing upon her rounded stumps; she is femininity; she is grace; I would be comforted to sleep with her in my grave.

For women, goddesses and figurines, grace must be, again and again, performance . And the famous Kabuki actor Bando Tamasaburo once said: “All performance is essentially erotic. To really capture the attention of the audience — to fully ensnare the yearnings of each member of that audience — a performance must be based in eroticism.”

And we remember that Hilary Nichols told us: “I do think that a very big sense of self for me is recognizing my attraction. And I live in a very social scene, so it’s all about exchanging attractiveness and being recognized.” Surely this must be somewhat akin to concentrating on all elements of one’s female self-expression and creating a coherent, refined expression of that attractiveness. This process may require lies and absurdities. In a fashion magazine I find an ad for a skin cream whose magical ingredient is “savage cacao, delivering the antioxidant power of 204 pounds of blueberries.” If a woman buys it literally and metaphorically, perhaps she will perform with greater joy and confidence.

In this context I also want to quote Mr. Kanze Hideo, who in contradistinction to Mr. Umewaka, Mr. Mikata and Ms. Yamamura told me that in playing a role he did not simply remain himself: “First you have to be that role yourself, but you need another self to supervise the person, to control yourself. You need two gazes. Zeami wrote about that: sight from a distance. You have to look at yourself from behind or from the top.” — Here was a man old and surprisingly small, with pouches under his eyes; I had seen him as a beautiful woman; he was an expert; he possessed the flower. He was saying essentially what Hilary had said.

The mai dance characteristic of Noh entails, as we have said, rotating movements, stiffness, with the back straight, the knees bent just a little, the feet flat on the stage and the arms a trifle away from the body. This helps harmonize the actor with the mask, which expresses the hardness of its wood but can certainly swivel upon the turning neck. Maintaining the required stance calls for a measure of physical endurance, and it may be for this reason that so many authorities have disbelieved in women’s capacity to achieve the mai effect. Its grace is certainly tinged with eeriness, and part of the eeriness is that it can be so feminine when that is not the way most women comport themselves. 12In fact it is unnatural. Bando Tamasaburo once remarked on the fact that women’s clothes are more uncomfortable than men’s, which furthers the end because “when they are slightly uncomfortable, women are more erotic.” Most of my Euro-American women friends bristle at this; their vision of an erotic female is of a woman in freely flowing clothes, or a woman nude. Thus the eros of Matisse. What about the eros of Bando? Bare legs on a cold day, sandal straps abrading bare feet, tight-laced corsets, tiny and half-helpless high heeled steps, knees pressed carefully together when sitting, pierced ears, these and various Western signals of femininity do bear out the great onnagata’s assertion, and likewise of course the fifty-odd pounds of kimonos and hairpieces borne by a maiko in her formal glory, not to mention the wooden pillow she sleeps on in order to keep her hair well styled.

In any event, when playing a woman, the Noh actor keeps his feet slightly closer together than otherwise, and his glide is comprised of shorter steps. A feminist describes the old European minuet as expressing both sexes’ body movements “mincingly and decoratively, contrary to the latter delegation of this stylistic pattern to female.” — I quote again the transvestite bargirl Miss Tosaka: “When I’m a woman, I try to keep my knees together. I take very short steps. When I sit down, I keep my legs together.” — And I remind myself that Mr. Umewaka commented that this was Kabuki style. It can also be geisha style. All the same, it bears comparison to Noh’s feminine mode, which is known as nyotai .

Every performance must come to an end. Every fashion alters, even for the Stiff White Ladies, as when, for instance, Spedos Style A yields to Style B: “round modeling now gives way to flattish relief and a preference for clean incisions to mark transitions and details.” 13 Aware , that classical Japanese perception of this world’s autumnal transience, is sometimes associated with feminine sensibility, and both the woman who allures me and I myself keep conscious or unconscious hold of the fact that the petals of the true flower must fall. This feminine quality that we share, if it is indeed feminine, what does this make us? Does a woman’s grace inspire me to merge sexually and spiritually with its possessor, or to maintain my separateness from her so that I can better see her and drink her in?