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 mask-maker continues with a quotation: “ The ko omote’s cold brilliance which even reflects the shade of the accessories, touches one’s soul . — Baba Akiko. If this is about a program in which a crown is worn on top of the mask, this poem must be for ‘Hagoromo’ or ‘Yokihi.’ ”

The Noh mask in the box (in Yokihi’s case, usually a waka-onna ) desires nothing. I, a spectator in the theater, willingly trick myself in order to drink more beauty from what I see. Then the play ends, and I go out into the excitement of the crowds, the hurrying crowds of this world, in whose manic exaltation Baudelaire was caught up two centuries before me. Unlike the mask of Yokihi, I am still alive; so I seek out other masks to kiss, refusing to believe that crossing the abyss will cost my lovers and me any suffering. Soon I will creep across the stage in my stockinged feet with an old man’s movements, my face almost a skull; by then many of the other personages I now see on Tokyo’s streets will have already glided along the gangway with slow and spaced deliberation; in due time I will meet them behind the rainbow curtain. But if I am lucky I will no longer know them and they will have forgotten me, unlike Yokihi the damned, who informs the sorcerer: “Your visit only multiplies the pain.” 4Her complaint is misplaced; for she loves her agony’s cause: the Emperor. To him she would send that familiar token, a jeweled hairpin. (In Chen Hong’s version it is actually the golden hairpin that the Emperor gave her when he first slept with her.) But then she takes back her gift, I presume to use it while she now performs her alluring dance of Rainbow Skirts.

Here is Yokihi the beautiful, her bass soliloquies rhythmic, rising and descending in pitch, sonorous, guarded and respected by pause, not quite song; she inches through eternity upon her old man’s feet. In most performances she wears a gold kimono and a phoenix headdress from which angular treaures sharply hang. Her red lips remain eternally parted in what is both more and less than a smile; her black teeth sparkle like evening ice. The points of her long, narrow eyes reach her temples. Her eyebrows are high clouds of black fog upon her moon-colored forehead. Her painted black hair merges with the darkness of her tortured Paradise. Through the holes in her wooden face, an actor is gazing beyond all of us.

Has he entirely crossed the abyss? Is he Yokihi, or is he, for instance, Mr. Umewaka? And who is Yokihi to me? Can my aesthetic enjoyment of the play be reduced to male sadism in the face of female agony? — In her late middle age, a certain nineteenth-century Japanese lady advised other members of her gender that “human feelings are rooted in the genitals and spread from there throughout our bodies. When men and women make love, they battle for superiority by rubbing their genitals together.” Admirable consistency to this world-view drew her to conclude that no matter how feminine an onnagata (and presumably a Noh actor) might appear, “since he has a man’s body, in his heart he harbors abusive feelings toward women. As he performs he thus in fact takes pleasure in what should be a pitiable scene… that is why he performs in ways that appeal to the men in his audience. Women, on the other hand, take no pleasure in a villain’s capturing a beautiful young woman and doing with her what he wishes.”

Would love exist, if what she wrote were true? If the abyss could be transcended, why must Yokihi and the Emperor remain alone in the end? Who is a woman? If I understood, why would my visit to her multiply the pain?

The sorcerer presently departs, and the play ends when the chorus chants: “Oh, this futile parting! In the Tower of Eternal Life she falls, weeping, to remain for all time.” Bo Ju-yi’s ending was typically more ornate, and may well be echoed in the Noh play “Miidera”: “Heaven endures, and the Earth; but someday they’ll be gone; yet this pain of ours will go on and never ever end.”

The Dances of Kofumi-san and Konomi-san

In Kyoto there is a temple that I love called the Shoren-in. The eerie energies of the place’s camphor trees figure lovingly in Kawabata’s novel The Old Capital . Pagoda’d pavilions upon the sphagnum moss mark the resident priesthoods of abdicated Emperors. Closing my eyes to various wars and accidents, I agree to call the garden eight or nine hundred years old. 1Like any other stage, it can represent whichever time may be indicated. And I, waki of my own life, not to mention the lives of plants and rocks, exist here only to specify for you what I have been told I see. (“While this garden is not considered one of the major examples of landscape art,” says my guidebook, “its admirable details and fine plant material reward the visitor.”) Between the toes of an immense tree, I sit and watch the hours of my life blissfully idle themselves away. Gazing down from the bamboo grove at the stone lantern and the perfect asymmetries of the rock-bordered turquoise pond below it, I find no false alignments. A narrow porch runs around each edifice so that one can walk around it, gazing out at this changing world. Sometimes I do just that, or I might drink in the shadows of a wooden fence upon an ancient wooden gate. One October afternoon, with the tiny mosquitoes silently biting me and the leaves of the camphor trees as still as the tapering gable roofs, the reddish wood, yellowish wood and blackish wood in the gable lattices began to announce themselves almost with sounds. Beneath the trees, the immense bell seemed to vibrate beneath its gable roof. But then and always the favorite drink of my eye remained beyond the yellow wall: the many narrow turquoise-jade risings of the bamboo grove.

In the grove itself, particularly on cloudy summer days, bamboo and sky comprised a single jewel. Here might have been the best place to lose myself. But then, being a waki who lacked the power to release from attachment anyone, including himself, my desire wandered back to the carp pond and the camphor trees.

It was a smallish place, the Shoren-in; and so this circling completed itself easily. There was much to see, and all of it infinite, but the infinities were not glaringly daunting, like the night crowds of Shinjuku; they were almost as sparse as the cosmos of a Noh stage.

Wherever I am, I remain inside my body looking out; all the same, it is obviously possible, as at any other Japanese temple or shrine, to gaze into rectangular wooden darknesses with coppery or golden glitters of statues within. Thus gazing in, the horizon becomes silhouetted waves of roof-tile, with silhouetted leafy branches cutting very occasionally into the pale sky above it, and below the sky, a wall of dark wood studded with darker metal fittings, and in that wall a rectangular opening illuminated by three lamps just bright enough to reveal a bamboo railing within and then the dull gold glint of treasures in the darkness behind it.

NINE-O’-CLOCK

And in Gion, whenever my eyes are granted the thrill of a maiko standing in a half-open lattice-windowed doorway, with darkness behind her, she is still more splendid than those temple treasures; she is a jewel in the darkness!

Another maiko bows to us and darts across the street into a private teahouse, the dark knot of hair at the back of her darker than the darkness, the strange pastel look of her like neon subdued into elegance.

SPECULATIONS ON AN UNWRITTEN TREATISE

What is a woman? What is this woman? Can her soul possibly be ungendered? Could there be any unfeminine element to her grace? What makes her perfect?

Every act and gesture of hers that she allows me to see is, like its Noh counterpart, a performance. If I am the waki who witnesses her from the side, she is certainly the shite who blooms with ghostly glory. Mystery, yes, she possesses that. With his usual subtlety, Zeami defines fascination as a sensation which occurs before the consciousness of that sensation. So what sensation does a geisha first excite in me? Not lust, not quite excitement; almost awe, but not exactly… That is her mystery. Even the Noh mask-maker Ms. Nakamura, whose studio lay the merest quarter-hour’s walk from Gion, was thrilled to accompany me to a geisha teahouse; for a glimpse is one thing; but to really look upon a Kyoto geisha, perceiving any of her jewel-facets — for instance, the painted eyebrows and black-outlined eyes, the vulvalike patch of unwhitened skin on the back of the neck — as more than vague but thrilling light, one must pay extremely, or be invited by a client who does. Anatomy, performance, mental and emotional expression, embodiment, like a Noh actor, of old rote movements, these have something to do with whom or what she personifies, but they cannot explain it. Were some wise old female Zeami of the Inoue School of dance to compose a treatise on the secret teachings of geisha arts, I wonder what she would say? Concentration and self-awareness, how could a geisha of the true flower fail to master those? As Lady Yang’s ghost remarks in “Yokihi,” “a young girl’s fluttering sleeves well express what is in her heart.” She must know what she expresses. And regarding awareness of transience, that remains inescapable, both to her who performs and to me who pays — to be specific, a thousand dollars and more per hour. Moreover, her profession is associated with Gion Shrine, whose bell at the very beginning of The Tale of the Heike rings out this world’s evanescence.