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

Bo Ju-yi further envisions her flowered hairpins, jade hairpick, marble-white face, “and the fragile arch of her lovely brows.” Chen Hong calls her hair “glossy and well arranged”; and she was neither slender nor plump. The great poet Du Fu laments the loss to us of her shining eyes and sparkling teeth. In the seventeenth-century supernatural tales of Pu Songling, a semblance of the goddess Chang E performs “Rainbow Skirts”; and a beautiful ghost, whose name just happens to be Yang, presents breasts “as virginal and soft to the touch as freshly peeled lotus kernels,” a simile used by Emperor Xuanzong himself in his praise of the breasts of Yang Guifei.

But probably it was the Dance of Rainbow Skirts that made the Emperor pliable to her every caprice. I have never seen it performed, and the only description I know comes again from Bo Ju-yi’s “Song of Lasting Pain”: It was slow and stately, apparently. 1There was already a renowned melody entitled “Coats of Feathers, Rainbow Skirts”; this was what Lady Yang danced to. Her performance probably involved arm movements, and in Komparu Zenchiku’s Noh play “Yokihi,” Lady Yang refers to the dance of Rainbow Skirts as follows: “A young girl’s fluttering sleeves well express her heart.” In the play “Hagoromo” an angel performs the same, and we read: “The sky-robe flutters; it yields to the wind.”

Because the Emperor’s love for her disordered the realm and she can therefore be construed as sinister, I imagine Rainbow Skirts to resemble the serpentine dance of the demon-woman in the play “Dojoji”; by means of it she hypnotizes the temple servants, next vanishing into the bell she would destroy. But why not envision it as the writhings of seductive pseudo-helplessness?

The Noh actress Yamamura Yoko said to me, presumably in reference to “Dojoji”: “When I play a woman who becomes a serpent, I want to express the sadness rather than the scariness.” — And it is true that my vision of Rainbow Skirts must express pathos, given the doom of Lady Yang.

This would certainly be the Noh vision; for in Noh a man provisionally becomes a woman who temporarily controls a man. The Emperor kisses the mask. So he wounds his son’s happiness; she sickens the empire; she dies; he pines; it ends, and the actor takes off his mask.

We have said that the Japanese concept of aware refers to the beauty and harmony beyond direct expression which shines uniquely from various entities in their own occasion — for instance, cherry blossoms about to fall. “Gradually,” one commentator informs us, “aware came to be tinged with sadness.” In due course, the tranquil Heian splendors of Kyoto were razed by violence, the Empire shattered into myriad competing dictatorships, and aware “darkened to its modern meeting of ‘wretched,’ which represents perhaps the final evolution in its long history.” On another page this scholar remarks: “The court lady who in the past had brooded over a lover’s neglect was now likely to suffer more immediate grief on learning he had been killed in battle. In some diaries, women described their emotions on seeing their lover’s head on a pike being paraded through the streets.” 2And how did the Emperor feel while the one he loved was kicking and choking in the noose?

Lady Yang must have moved the Japanese nearly as much as the Chinese, for we find her haunting the very first page of the Tale of Genji . She appears two more times in close succession: Genji’s dead mother gets likened to her. Indeed, as early as the tenth century we find a tanka about the Emperor’s desperate attachment to Lady Yang: At dawn, it runs, his jeweled dais tries to remain dark out of compassion for him whose passion has not been slaked by the night’s pleasures.

And in the early fourteenth century, Lady Nijo watches the dance of Rainbow Skirts at a shrine, which “summoned forth my own nostalgic memories.” She sees a dancer wearing a fancy crown and hairpins, and imagines her to be Lady Yang’s image. A few decades later, a chronicler of a medieval Japanese war harks back to Tang Dynasty China: “While the emperor listened to the song of ‘Rainbow Skirts,’ the war drums of Yü-Yang came shaking the earth.” The Tale of the Heike makes a byword of the famous couple’s sorrow. In 1931, Tanizaki alludes to Lady Yang in his “Blind Man’s Tale.” In short, it is no wonder that Komparu composed a Noh play about her.

In “Yokihi,” which follows the narrative of Bo Ju-yi’s poem fairly closely, the spirit of Yang Kuei-fei, whose name has now been Japonicized per the title, dwells behind jeweled blinds in the Residence of Great Purity on the Island of Everlasting Youth. To visit her, the Emperor’s sorcerer must fly through the void, as all of us have to do in order to reach whomever we desire. The sorcerer begins the play with these words: “I seek a way to a world unknown.” (Hilary Nichols: “I do think that part of the joy in a male-female relationship is crossing the abyss.”) So off he goes, into the darkness of stars, the flutesong an evil wind of destiny, all the voices of the chorus like rocks in a river or wind in a twilight pine grove. Why not say that it is for him as for Kawabata’s protagonist riding the train into the snow country, finding the fields ever thicker and whiter, the houses ever purer, the ponds shining with ice, the horizon vanishing in white mist? Here he will presently encounter a heroine of incomprehensible beauty. Dark birds fly across white ricefields. Where is he going, but into the brightness of the wet snow beneath the dark sky, from which snow speeds down? On the grounds of many a Japanese temple stand tombs as close-packed as teeth, their rounded tops white with snow. A stone Buddha sits with snow in his lap, the snowy wind stirring the trees with the sound of rain. He goes into the snow, into the cracked and frozen urns. He goes into the peach-colored snowy twilight. Silver-forested hills of pines gather around the train. He passes between a man’s lips and a woman’s in the instant that they kiss. For him the rainbow curtain is raised.

When he arrives at the island, he discovers Yokihi’s ghost in the act — how could it be otherwise? — of grieving over her transient attachment. The mask she had kissed (or was it merely a crown?) abandoned her, as every mask must do. Had she sought to be her father-in-law’s wife? Did she then become guilty of abusing her exalted position? It hardly matters now. She gasped and struggled, like a child in a tantrum; then the play was done. Her desire should have died likewise. But instead, transforming her into a vampire who feeds hopelessly upon herself, it condemns her to consciousness upon the Island of Everlasting Youth. 3

Yokihi’s face is most often a waka-onna . Occasionally she embodies herself in a zo-onna or ko-omote . Although the latter customarily portrays a young girl who has not yet suffered greatly, the tsuki , the moon-style ko-omote , can project the inhumanness which is so characteristic of entities on the far side of the abyss. A mask-maker informs us that “the fundamental aspect of ‘Tsuki’ is that the nose is tilted to the left. From the audience, the left side of the mask is the best view. The right half has a rather peaceful expression, in order to show relief from hate and sadness, and enlightenment when she receives prayers from a monk while departing the stage on the hashigakari ,” the pine tree bridge. Yokihi, of course, obtains no enlightenment. Presumably she will show us her left side. The perfect-complected face of this mask is almost a squash-yellow, the double chin softer than in many ko-omote , the smile strangely wider, the upper eyelids darkly overlined, the lower ones shadowed; overall, the face expresses hard newness . When it swims upward, the peculiar smile begins to yield to a wide darkness beneath the black-grey crystals of the upper teeth.