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

Mr. Kanze merely laughed and said, “I don’t think so” when I asked him whether the face of a geisha with traditional hairstyle and makeup reminded him of any particular Noh mask; and when I asked Ms. Nakamura if a geisha face more greatly resembled a Noh mask or an ukiyo-e print, she replied: “I have never seen any geisha face that resembles a Noh mask. Thinking about ukiyo-e may be closer.”

Of course there is no one ukiyo-e face any more than there is a single female style of Noh mask. Utamaro’s girls are more plumpfaced than many others, with slightly wider eyes. The faces of Eishi’s beauties tend to be elongated. But it remains possible to speak of types. A generalized ukiyo-e face would incorporate a small rosebud mouth, narrow slanting eyes and flattened crescent eyebrows at human height. And so I pursued: “What would a geisha mask look like?”

“Maybe in the middle, between the two.” 7

For many people, a geisha face would be Konomi-san’s, not Kofumi-san’s. It would be the face of a maiko. That is why a twentieth-century geisha of Gion remarks:

A maiko in full costume approximates the Japanese ideal of feminine beauty.

She has the classic looks of a Heian princess, as though she might have stepped out of an eleventh-century scroll painting. Her face is a perfect oval. Her skin is white and flawless, her hair black like a raven’s wing. Her brows are half moons, her mouth a delicate rosebud. Her neck is long and sensuous, her figure gently rounded.

I listened to the women giggling together and the sounds of the shamisen being tuned. Then the “Fan to You” dance commenced. 8

NEVER AGAIN

The maiko’s pale face, her slender pliant slowness, accentuated that freshness she had, that sweet immaturity so dear to Kawabata, which even now as I write, two years after the fact, must be gone, just as her crimson half-smile subsided once she began to dance. I hope that she is a fullfledged geiko now, like Kofumi-san. (It is said that only fifty or sixty maikos remain in all Kyoto.) Her gold and red fans were flashing. The sad slow pizzicato of the shamisen, which might not have sounded sad at all when the song was new, functioned like the chants of a Noh chorus to fill the performance with ritual and rhythm, adding volumes of that hushed slowness, so that her movements approached both carefulness and living perfection. I had time only to note down this or that instant, such as when she pivoted, and I saw the way she grasped the gold fan behind her back, the darkness of her hair-knot when seen from behind the feeling of never again ; and by now she had turned back round again, her face severe as she gazed down, crossing her arms, folding her knees, almost stamping her feet, the fans swirling, all the colors of her kimono imparting themselves in patterns that altered water-like, so that there was so much controlled multitudinous beauty that it was impossible to perceive it all at once; therefore it was infinite.

Her gaze was so far away. Sometimes her face was ivory in the electric light, and I remembered the hues of Noh masks in summer torchlight. The two fans touched. She whirled; she stood; she knelt. Danyu-san stared straight ahead, singing.

BLACK HAIR

The next dance was Kofumi-san’s, and the name of it was “Black Hair,” which may for all I know be the “Dark Hair” mentioned twice in Tanizaki’s Makioka Sisters and sung by the geisha Komako in Snow Country . The hero of the latter novel wonders whether it might have been the first song she learned, and it might well have been; for one night after a Noh performance I visited a Gion bar owned by a retired geisha in her sixties; she showed us an album of photos of herself from the days when she was young and beautiful; she had started at fifteen. She said that everyone learned the Black Hair song; it went with a certain style of hair; she didn’t know why.

When I asked Kofumi-san to explain it to me, she said: “This is the story of waiting for a lover or an ex-lover, and she cannot forget and the snow falls and she is remembering the past.”

“How old is it?”

“Maybe more than one hundred years.”

“Beautiful black hair is supposed to be a girl’s best feature, as important as her life,” Kofumi-san also said; and I thought: How could it be otherwise? Didn’t Lady Murasaki say the same? Near the end of the eleventh century, Izumi Shikibu composed a poem of ostensible indifference regarding the disarray of her black hair while she was lying either alone or with a lover, the verse does not say which; meanwhile, she expressed longing recollections of an unnamed someone who had caressed and combed it. And from the ukiyo-e prints I remembered Utamaro’s ladies, with their vast inky rolls of hair bristling with precious hairpins. 9

The sad white face of Kofumi-san, which was not supposed to express anything in the course of a dance but which I think did — but what? What is a woman? — showed me how lovely age can be; and Kofumi-san, whose own self, whatever that meant, must live so far away beneath her black wig, froze; then she stamped; she was still and she was still and then she stamped. For me, at least, part of grace is space , each expression of femininity’s performance being bordered by such understatement or blankness as the kneeling immobility between actions in Noh. (In another Utamaro woodcut, a woman reads a letter with parted little lips, slender-wristed, her skin the same color as the scroll she reads from; a caption hangs on the page behind her, everything flat, blankness given its due.) And so she was still and then she stamped.

Her hand brushed her face almost as would a Noh actor’s when he symbolizes tears. She raised one hand, touched both hands together, then slowly seated herself, drawing herself in as the singer’s voice slowed and descended, the shamisen slowing and enriching its mournfulness while the geisha gazed with black eyesocket-awareness into the heart of everything. One hand poured time into the other, and the edges of her pale aged hands swept the air. (In the first century B.C., Philodemos the Epicurean sings the explicit charms of Charito, who is in her sixties. “Lovers, if you flee not from hot desire, enjoy Charito / forgetting her decades’ multitudes.”) She stamped once, grasped her long sleeve with the other hand, crossed her wrists again and again, gazing along her crossed sleeves.

Even at that time, when I happened to be involved in a love attachment in whose transience I could not at all believe, the beautiful mournfulness of Kofumi-san’s art was almost unbearable. When I remember that dance now, bereft of my attachment, I am moved in a particularly painful way. But when she was actually dancing, what I felt was simply, as I do at a great Noh performance, recognition of the moment. Although they certainly cause the future and fulfill the past, moments remain themselves, perishing as they flower; and because in order to live we perceive so many of our moments as identical or nearly so, this comprehension with the heart, which is to say this being aware of aware , is rare, and for all I know may be rarer for Kofumi-san while she dances for me than to me while I watch her. Like Noh’s slowness and the brevity of a Heian tanka, the gestures of this great geisha articulate my present instant into art, into beautiful meaning. Once upon a time, the secret moans of the woman I loved did the same, but only for me (or so I hoped). And what Kofumi-san now did was only for me, and only for my interpreter, and only for whomever else might have been there (at that time only the ochaya-san was present, and then only between dances). Her fingertip-gestures were as delicately open as the ferntips before the base of an ovoid rock rising from the moss in a temple garden.