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 PRICE OF THEIR FAVORS

Speaking of compensation, geishas are not prostitutes, although over the centuries they have certainly comprised much of the foliage in the “flower and willow world.” The courtesans were the flowers and the geishas the willows. As the metaphor implied, those two types of loveliness unfolded their leaves together in the meadow of delights. In the Yoshiwara, the red light district of old Edo, geishas performed alongside women of the other vocation. One of Utamaro’s woodblock prints shows the geishas Oiyo and Takeji preparing to dance around a lantern in an annual Yoshiwara event which was held in company with young prostitutes and their apprentices. And here is Chobunsai Eishi’s eighteenth-century painting of geishas in Yoshiwara, clutching their trains, gazing sideways up or down; black hair and subdued geisha colors.

In 1686, Ihara Saikaku assures us: “Even highly reputed maiko have the price of their favors set at one silver coin.” In the “Sleeve Scroll” of Torii Kiyonaga (1785) we find, among other erotic scenes, a geisha, identifiable as such by her black haori , with her mouth on her hand, grimacing and almost gnawing her finger while the man on her back slides his imperial-size penis into her anus; indeed, it is already almost all the way in and her eyes are closed, but every hair remains in place, as does her golden headgear. In Keisai Eisen’s woodblock album of about 1825, a client has just opened his geisha’s thighs and is about to roll her down onto the floor. From 1827 we see a woodcut by Utagawa Kunisada, showing two red-clothed geishas peering down into a bathhouse orgy, some of whose participants may be other geishas.

Writings on this subject sometimes insist on one or the other point of view: Either geishas are artists of a rarefied sort (and authors with this point of view love to berate Occidentals for their salacious suppositions on this score), or else they exemplify “a world where love is bought and sold like merchandise,” in which case they appear as victims or perpetrators.

In fact, the duties and reputations of geishas differ quite specifically. Instead of graceful white-faced goddesses, the early-twentieth-century novelist’s Kafu Nagai’s geisha characters are grasping, pathetic, jealous individuals of extremely variable appearances, talents and morals. Nor are their accoutrements uniform. Were I to describe a geisha to someone who had never seen one, I would probably, following the Peabody Museum, mention the black kimono, accentuating that eerie white of geisha skin, the wig with the hair ornaments, and the crisscrossing-in-front obi; all the same, I remember a certain mid-twentieth-century photograph of a geisha in a straw hat: stripes of shadow painting woodgrain on her upper face to match the stripes of her kimono; a character-studded sash traverses her breast as she beats a drum. I never saw her like in Kyoto.

Likewise vary their styles of dance. Once I saw geishas at the Gion Kobu Kaburenjo; they were performing the Miyako Odori or Cherry-Blossom Dance. Their movements were much less strict and angular than those of the Inoue School, two of whose practitioners will be described in this chapter. The Kanazawa geisha Masami-san danced with decidedly un-Inouean ease-enthusiasm.

Still another distinction between geishas is place of work, which offers clues analogous to those revealed in old times by a Japanese woman’s clothes — for instance, she might be a whore if her kimono is tied in front. A geisha in one of the hot springs might not receive great respect. In Kawabata’s Snow Country , the situation of many such women shows itself in a couple of lines of dialogue. The protagonist asks the heroine, Komako, who is herself a geisha, to summon him a geisha. She expresses bewilderment, at which point he says: “You know what I mean.” Although Komako insists that “no one forces a geisha to do what she doesn’t want to,” a geisha, who presumably has been apprised of his requirements, does in due course present herself. Shall we suppose that she wants to? 2

On the other side of the divide, the Heian capital retains its glamor. Kyoto’s geishas are high ranking, and those in Gion remain preeminent. We learn from Saikaku that seventeenth-century Kyoto ladies possessed an especially fetching way of speaking, “handed down from ancient times in the Imperial Palace,” and in my day the enunciation of geishas in Gion, at least — I lack the funds to widen my Kyoto investigations — remains distinctive.

In his final novel, Kawabata opines that “only the balconies along Kiyomachi and Ponto-cho were reminiscent of the old summer evenings by the river”; and by “old” he means deriving from a bygone century. Strangely, Gion figures seldom in his descriptions of Kyoto, although he does describe a photograph of two Gion geishas playing rock-paper-scissors in about 1880.

But what is actually the difference between a high-ranking geisha and a courtesan who dances? Doubtless the former have had to struggle continuously to maintain their distinctiveness. From a pleasure quarter of Edo in 1850 comes this dispatch from the arms race in rival fashions:

… the dress of the geisha now far exceeds that of noble ladies. But the common prostitute oversteps all bounds in modeling herself on the geisha. When the common prostitute adorns her hair with pins of glimmering tortoise-shell, the geisha must also insert a long tortoise-shell pin into the bun of her coiffure.

And so many geishas accumulate debts. Sometimes they find it necessary to pawn their clothes. 3

One 1913 essay about whether or not onnagatas should be replaced with actresses sees in geishas a “superficial purity which was their only weapon” against prostitutes. In literature they sometimes lack any purity at all; indeed, they can appear as interchangeable, rather commonplace companions whose association with carnality is the rule. A scholar from my own time positions geishas between prostitutes and artists — and between prostitutes and mistresses.

“THE FACE IS NOT ALLOWED TO EXPRESS ANYTHING”

In the establishment of the ochaya Imamura-san, to whom I was introduced through the good offices of my friend Mr. Kou (employing a geisha in Gion works as follows: you will not learn what you owe until a week or a month later, and for the first time the invoice will be sent to your introducer, who stands responsible should you default), I now await Kofumi-san with her kind smile and her stiff black wig curling upward from her white face. And this year, which marks my second occasion, she will bring her maiko, Konomi-san, who wears a flower ornament in her hair.

Kofumi-san belongs to the Noh-related Inoue School. Noh’s influence may be seen in other sorts of geisha dances. For instance, in a certain Utamaro print of an odoriko , a young geisha who specializes in dancing, we see the “Shakkyo” of Noh altered into a Kabuki dance. It is, we are told, a dance performed with a lion headdress decorated with tree peony à la Lady Yang. The caption continues, in my translator’s raw English which I have no heart to alter: “One of the good pieces in the series with a nice balance of the headgear and lowered hair, adorable hands and expression.” But Inoue dance is said to remain particularly close to Noh. Danyu-san the musician, who on that night would accompany each of the two geishas on the shamisen, explained to me: “The Inoue school is very unique. The legs and feet should not move too much. The face is not allowed to express anything.” This explains why the geishas of Gion exemplify, in some ways even more than Noh actors themselves, Noh masks livingly embodied. For the blurry understatement which the man’s inspired craft veils about his Adam’s apple, substitute the woman’s and her slender throat. In the Getty Villa in Malibu there stands a certain cult statue, Demeter, Hera or most likely Aphrodite, who reaches out to us with her broken marble fingers. The top of her head was robbed from her in a clean slant so that her face resembles a mask, a zo-onna perhaps, for it is, while equally smooth, less girlishly plump-cheeked than a ko-omote . Aphrodite stands, clothed in garments of limestone whose pink, blue and red paint remains only in hints and stains. A breeze is blowing her robe tight across her breasts and thighs as she prepares to step forward. In no way inconvenienced by her incompleteness, the goddess is alive! But how peculiar she is! A head upon a neck, a mask within a box, a masked actor, yes, I’ve seen those, but a hollow mask upon a neck, this proof that beauty is indeed, as the cliché runs, skin-deep, affects me like something between a paradox and a mystery. As for the geisha, she exists as a stylized body in heavenly robes. Her face has been painted until much of its fleshly individuality has been masked by the unearthly whiteness of the goddess. Here in short is another zo-onna . “The Inoue style is noted for its ability to express great emotion in spare, delicate gestures,” wrote one of its practitioners, a twentieth-century geisha. And Mr. Kanze told me: “Originally, there was a family who served the Emperor. The maiden from that family who was serving the Emperor, she created a dance which is similar to Noh. In the second generation a woman married a Noh actor, and her daughter got married with my great grandfather’s brother. A cousin of my great grandfather came to Kyoto and taught this Noh school dance. His name was Katayama.” — I wish I could tell you more about this famous branch of geisha dancing, which is said to be the most prestigious; unfortunately, its head, Inoue the Sixth, required me to submit my questions in writing and in advance, then declined to have anything to do with me. 4