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

About Kofumi-san herself I can say that she must be in the neighborhood of sixty (Konomi-san has been a maiko for two years and is now seventeen), and that she is at the top of her profession. Mr. Mikata paid her this compliment: “Kofumi-san is a very good dancer. Her mind and technique are very well trained. My teacher used to perform at the Gion school, and he teaches Noh dance there. When I was still learning from him, sometimes I was a substitute teacher, so I saw her then. Zeami emphasizes that you need to practice a lot, and she does know a lot about that; she is really trained. That’s how much she has practiced — even more than enough!”

When I asked her to describe her experience of dancing, Kofumi-san replied: “I feel just natural. I know how to do it artificially, but I just can’t.”

(And here I recall Mr. Mikata responding to a question of mine about his previous day’s performance of “Michimori”: “There’s a rule about the boat. Within the range of the rule I can do as I like.”)

“Is it really the case that there is a defined sequence of movements for a geisha to open a door?”

“When you enter a tearoom, you open the door a little bit and then another little bit.”

In fact, so I have read, the way she opened a door, and bowed, and many other such acts, derived from the fourteenth-century samurai code known as the Ogasawara style. 5

One transgender workbook defines “passing” for a member of one’s desired sex as “getting as many signals as possible lined up” — for instance, the “presenting” angle of the buttocks caused by high heels, the protrusions of womanly breasts. As with any performance worth accomplishing, the standard can be high. The rules of “passing” as a high-ranking geisha are more rigorous still.

What one noticed first about her as about her colleagues was the white, white skin, part of whose makeup was bush warbler droppings. In that classic twentieth-century short story “Portrait of an Old Geisha,” Okamoto Kanoko describes a thickly painted cheek as being “radiant as enamel.” As for Kofumi-san, her cheeks had hollowed slightly with age, so that the creases between the corners of her mouth and the wings of her nose could be seen as blue snow-shadows. The perimeters of her eyes did not appear young. All this was true especially in three-quarter profile. When she stood side by side with her maiko Konomi-san, her face showed at better advantage, widening and flattening like the legs of a Noh actor in his kimono. She seemed less at rest than Konomi-san, more conscious, more taut. A lock of her wig descended the center of her forehead, perhaps two-fifths of the way to her flattish painted eyebrows, so that her face expressed a heart shape.

Japanese women tend to mute the colors they wear as they age; and Kofumi-san’s attire was far more understated than her maiko’s. She wore a single reddish-gold hairpiece inset with sparkling hexagons. Her kimono was purplish-black with its obi making a red-overlined white square in the front, the braid whitely striping around her waist without any clasp. Around the knees and on the train went other clusters of much narrower horizontal stripes which ended variably. Some clusters were red and some were white. She had turned the whitish underside of the purplish-black outward to hold the edge with her hand, so that I could see the pale green leaf pattern on it.

As for Konomi-san, she knew fewer than ten dances as of yet. Here is Kawabata’s description of a prospective maiko: “The girl, about fourteen or fifteen, had beautiful white skin. Over her light summer kimono she wore a narrow red obi. She was shy… Her black hair glistened, the color of some mysterious water creature… As she walked away, her gait took on the look of a middle school student.” (The proprietress coaxes an old client: “Won’t you come with us? If only to see the young girls?”) Konomi-san was no longer a young girl as categorized by connoisseurs of the Edo period; but by the standards of my time she was almost still a girl; her beauty, which was breathtaking, had not quite completed its flowering into womanliness. She had smaller eyes than the other woman, and her painted eyebrows partook to a greater extent of the classic willow leaf shape. The lowermost edges of her hair (for maikos wear no wig) resembled a thick upturned U, sloping diagonally away from her ears; while Kofumi-san’s wig ended flatly. Her face resembled a perfect white egg, and her mouth was a crimson heart. The restful shadows around her eyes were of palest ultramarine; they served to accentuate the purity of her snowy cheeks. Her hairpiece was a bouquet of white and yellow chrysanthemums which might have been porcelain or stiff paper, a circlet of green grapes whose composition was glass or emerald but most probably jade, and a miniature shelf of crystal honeycomb from which hung long crystal fringe; this was almost surely a tortoise shell comb. Had I been able to see the crystal honeycomb more closely, I believe I would have found it to be a double row of glowing rings or beads. In my ignorance I cannot tell you why it was appropriate for that particular month.

She wore a night-blue hikizuri patterned with white and pale green leaves, flowers and huts. There were also widely S-curving stripes which might have been stylized ripples. Her right shoulder remained undecorated, an indication that she was a senior maiko, nearing the time when she must take on the more sober appearance of a geiko. Just beneath her breasts ran the wide red band of her obi -age , or silken obi support, whose pattern — eye-flowers within round-cornered broken diamonds — were all gold. (Kofumi-san’s lacked any pattern.) Beneath this was a band of equal width, the obi itself, 6made of orange, white and green triangles. These repeated below, much more widely — doubtless it was another fold of the same fabric, formed into a pubic-like triangle by the clasped sleeves of night-blue she held before her — and across it ran a red belt, the braid or obi -jime , which contained stitched or knotted or studded stripes of white, dark green, yellow or green. The clasp ( pocchiri ) was a glittering rectangle of pale crystalline whitish-green, bordered all around by white beads, perhaps pearls, and inset with a round ruby stone at each corner and an ovoid green stone at the center. For some reason she was not wearing the eri , or scarlet collar of the maiko; but just above her white-stockinged feet peeped a red robe with white chrysanthemums. (A Kyoto geisha informs us that red symbolizes female pubescence, “and we carefully show a trace at the collar and hem.” Thus the aesthetic known as iki. ) There were also very dark, perhaps black, glimpses of what must have been the underside of the night-blue outer kimono; here I could see one elaborate and lonely plant, probably a chrysanthemum in profile, crowned by one yellow and two white flowers; spear-shaped leaves, either green or white, rose up off its pale blue stalk in diagonals, and a white root snaked to the border of the red robe.

Although she had not yet reached the legal drinking age, of course nobody was stupid enough to enforce the law in her case — one mark of Japanese superiority over my own nation of one-size-fits-all Puritans. Tonight she was going to perform a dance whose name meant literally “Fan to You,” the implication being of a male lover bestowing a fan upon a lady, and indeed, Konomi-san’s two fans would be crossed in signification of the union of man and woman.

Kofumi-san seemed quite happy with her. “She takes care of me,” she said lovingly. It would have been inappropriate for me to ask, but I supposed that when the girl commenced her formal maikodom, the two women must have “married” in the san-san-kudo ceremony binding a maiko to her “elder sister.”