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

“HIS CARRIAGE NATURALLY BECOMES IN ELEGANT TASTE”

So what is a woman? How is this geisha’s superb womanliness constructed? Much of it comes into being in her dressing room — for instance, when she dons her wig, whose crisp edges remind me of the way a perfectly manicured pine offers distinct ovoid lobes of needles to the eye. But what artifice or fluency occurs when while dancing she raises one sleeve to her mouth? Looking into her red-underlined, 10black-overlined eyes, I asked her: “When you’re dancing, do you try to think of anything or not?”

“I wish to think nothing, but it’s rather hard. Nothingness would be the best.”

“Do you feel?”

“I strive to feel nothing.”

Mr. Mikata had remarked to me that “Inoue the Fourth says that she does not think anything. Their sons, they’re professional, too. Her second son used to ask her why she could do what she did, and then she said, well, you just practice, practice and still practice, and there’s nothing that you need to think.”

Could this be all there is? If grace is indeed a performance, how can it be accomplished without thought? No beautiful woman has yet explained to me in detail how she expresses her beauty; probably the grace of the body lives in the body and therefore beyond words. I used to think that Zeami’s instructions on these matters tended to beg the question. “If the shite dances and acts with elegant speeches his carriage naturally becomes in elegant taste.” How did Zeami arrive at his determination of what was elegant? Who decided what and how to practice, practice and still practice? Or did this elegance, like a folktale, derive from the collective consciousness? For that matter, might not it be that dance also exists beyond words? (Danyu-san for her part said: “Because songs have words, I have to think.”) I never became sufficiently experienced to perceive much of geisha dance’s expressions. And the geishas gave me less guidance than had Mr. Umewaka. Perhaps they followed Zeami’s spirit, and kept secrets. (“Secrecy is the essential art of geisha,” says a Tokyo member of the profession; and a frequenter of geisha houses in Kyoto remarks that he has seen geisha making themselves up but prefers not to because “I don’t want to know their tricks; I don’t want to know their sad stories.”) Perhaps there was nothing that I needed to think.

But I frequently felt myself to be on the verge of learning quite specific matters. For instance, Konomi-san had said that her most significant challenge was this: “To turn the fans. Turning the fans you must do many other things at the same time.” 11(Here again I remember Zeami’s dictum that whether an actor plays woman, warrior, demon or old man, “it should seem as though each were holding a branch of flowers in his hand.” The geisha’s branch of flowers is of course her fan.) And so I supposed that these many other things that she did could be itemized and categorized. After all, it had helped me to learn that an actor’s finger slid down the cheek of a Noh mask from the corner of the eye signifies tears. Just as in mai dance the Noh actor glides his fan up and down before his heart to represent joy, so the way that Konomi-san turns her two fans presumably means something. But the maiko did not seem inclined or perhaps able to tell me which other things she needed to accomplish when turning the fans; and when I asked Kofumi-san what I should do to prepare myself in advance to appreciate geisha dances, and how I could learn their vocabulary, she replied: “It’s a personal feeling. Isn’t it better that you don’t get anything in advance? It’s all up to the viewer.”

A translator of the thirteenth-century German Nibelungenlied remarks of its unknown author that “he did not reduce his characters to a mechanism, however refined… He has greater insight into human nature than he puts explicitly into words, and to find it we must read between the lines, adding nothing of our own. His characters’ actions are mostly so incisive that although we cannot always show their continuity we sense it and accept it.” When I read between the lines of, say, Kawabata, I sometimes feel confident to identify a specific motive or event which has not been spelled out; at other times I sense no more than a continuity not even of plot but simply of style or atmosphere. At such points I grow haunted, and do in fact add something of my own. What is the meaning of a certain silence between the old man and his daughter-in-law in The Sound of the Mountain ? Does Komako in Snow Country truly believe her own assertions regarding the futility of her attachment? As Kofumi-san said, “it’s all up to the viewer.” And when feminine movement engages me, perhaps it does so only through continuity. What does a geisha dancer bring to my gaze? What does my perception add? What, indeed, constitutes understatement in a woman I desire? In part, it comes from the fact that she wears clothes. When I see her, I want to undress her. There is more to her than she allows my eyes to know. This restraint upon my gaze cannot be the thing of value in and of itself. After all, the erotic woodcuts of Utamaro, which depict genitalia in frank and sometimes even exaggerated detail, are far superior to most of Japan’s contemporary photographic pornography, which blacks out, white-encircles or else pixellates the clitoris, pubic hair, etcetera. In other words, if it is to enhance the aesthetic effect, the restraint must itself be beautiful, like Shun’e’s thirteeenth-century example of a curtain of mist which teases us with incomplete glimpses of the scarlet leaves of autumn. The titillations of keyhole voyeurism’s glowing jewel-like little image swimming in perfect darkness, and then again the spectator’s peculiar ease of vision — vision led or misled — when watching a Noh play, may both achieve a comparable impression, the first most likely unintentionally on the part of what is perceived, the second thanks to art. Dress, stockings, earrings, lingerie, all these make barriers, to be sure, but, like the robe and mask of a Noh actor, they ought to be beautiful in and of themselves. One American fashion star praises the erotic allure of her black high heels’ red soles. And in the case of a geisha dance, the greater elaboration of dress, completed with fan motions, and left still more unknowable to me than Noh’s arcana, makes for any number of beautiful mysteries. Just as when for the first time a man glimpses the skin below a woman’s neck he can envision her nakedness more plausibly but certainly not exactly (and, as I have mentioned, the W-shape of the unpainted skin on the back of a geisha’s neck — adjoining fangs — is said to represent the vulva), so when I see the edge of a geisha’s under-kimono I begin to imagine not her naked body necessarily, but the layers and layers of unknown colors, dances, thoughts, all the way down to the woman herself, whom I can never hope to know. One observer opines that a Noh mask is in fact more expressive than a geisha’s white-painted face, which nonetheless he calls “electrifying,” I suppose because it is simultaneously pristine and alien and because it understates. What might the geisha be expressing otherwise? There’s another mystery.

These enigmas may in fact have no solution; they may be meaningless. In “Black Hair,” which stillness or fan sequence of Kofumi-san’s specifically represents remembering the past? This might be asking the wrong question. Shostakovich insisted that the dissection of his great compositions into program music was spurious, as may be the case with “Black Hair.” Then again, it may not. Perhaps not even Kofumi-san knows the answer, which might have died with the original choreographer — or was never born.