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

Here the divergence from Noh felt most significant to me. When I asked Mr. Mikata how one learned and progressed as a Noh actor, he said: “Well, first you try to do your utmost, just try to shout loud, and move a lot, and these are the very basics so that you can get the sense. After that, if you work hard, then, you need some spiritual training. The body-sense and the mind-sense are also needed.” As for Mr. Umewaka, when he was a child his grandfather taught him to visualize the loveliness of imaginary cherry blossoms. The geishas never mentioned either visions or spiritual training, and their silence on that subject was appropriate, for their dances did not simultaneously express and distance themselves from attachment; they created it.

Some geisha performances resemble Noh less than they do kyogen . It is not uncommon for geisha singers to make fun of Noh; the Inoue School aside, many do not want to be too serious. The music may sound Noh-like; the flute is similar and the three kinds of drum, which may or may not appear, are all the same.

Kofumi-san did tell me this: “What my elders used to say was: You have to spend all your life carefully. If you live every day carefully, then you will flourish in your dance. They kept saying that. If you’re on stage, it’s as if you’re completely naked. A perfect artist needs the grace and dignity to exist in that situation. This advice will become even more important to me as I grow older. When you’re young, people will look at you no matter what.”

This of course was equivalent to what Zeami had written about the true and false flower.

I have already proposed, following the spirit of Zeami, to progressively forget a woman’s appearance, identity and soul in order to perceive her grace; what Zeami means by the last two categories is obviously quite different from what you or I would; otherwise how could such deep seeing be possible for a spectator as opposed to a lover? When I myself experience this sort of forgetting at, say, a symphony, I may be closer than I imagine to the people who fall happily asleep at Noh plays; but the way it feels is as if I have been taken beyond my path in an autumn forest, the brass instruments creating a ground of red, brown and yellow leaves, the flutes breezes, the piano something icy; I no longer know that I am listening to a specific composition, or that I am sitting in the dress circle, gazing down at the orchestra; I have forgotten the composition, the composer and my life; this must be the cliché called “reverie.” There were moments when I entered into a similar state when Kofumi-san danced for me. When I study the photographs of her I made, I see ever more distinctly the lovely decrepitudes of her cheek; I grow familiar with the texture of her painted lips; but when she danced her face became, as she wanted it to be, a mask; she herself became a performance of gorgeous movements. I never lost my sense of the transience of Konomi-san’s dance; while Kofumi-san, I suppose because she is the more experienced artist, can lead my perception into a place which is fuller than time, not a forest, exactly, but a realm of stillnesses and angular motions. What is her identity and what is her soul? How could I dare to say I ever knew them? But although I may be incapable of perceiving as Zeami might wish me to, I can say that this place or space, founded as it is upon Kofumi-san’s continued dancing, takes me away somewhere. Is what I feel then her grace? I cannot say. And (so I suspect) neither can she. — If only I had thought to ask about her three beings! — Zeami: “Genuine Perfect Fluency in fact has no connection with the actor’s conscious artistic intentions or with any outward manifestation of those intentions,” since he now transcends his training.

Thanks to Mr. Umewaka I have been privileged to see Yuya’s dancing, which is as pure as the leaf-breath of the Shoren-in, breath I have longed to breathe, and while there was a natural residuum of erotic desire in my longing, it was also peace that I longed for; the more I breathed, the more I craved to keep inhaling the purity of those afternoons beneath the camphor trees. Thanks to Kofumi-san I have lost myself in stillness, swirling, ruthlessly stylized flashing movement; and the sadness of her “Black Hair” dance, like the pathos of attachment in a Noh play, achieves neutral tranquility, in much the same way as the green segmented cylinder-towers of the Shoren-in’s bamboo grove grow grey as one falls into their shadow, silver-grey, not lead-grey; greyness becomes simply one more precious pigment in their light.

JEWELS IN THE LIGHT

At the end of the eighteenth century, Chobunsai Eishi’s grand courtesans come palefaced, serene as moons, escorted by their pairs of little girl attendants. Sometimes one can see them boating on the Sumida River. In Chokosai Eisho’s Kansei era woodcut “Two Beauties Holding a Lantern,” the white faces are especially delicate against the pale greyish wash of grass and faintly yellowed sky, each lower lip full as in a Noh mask, the black hair spiked with ornaments. And in the early twenty-first century I glimpse geishas; their hair was black and their faces were powdered ever so white, because a millenium before the Heian Emperor wished to watch court beauties from behind his screen; they were jewels in the darkness.

In that Gion bar owned by the retired geisha there was an unspeakably beautiful maiko whose client was an old gentleman; he was drinking little cups of whiskey and she was drinking tea. What can I say of her except that she was beautiful, so beautiful that I cannot remember more than the light her face cast upon me? When she left, she knelt and bowed to us with heartbreaking grace.

I lacked the funds to hire Kofumi-san again that year, so I went out, and rapidly reached the grounds of Yasaka Shrine, or Gion Shrine as it is also known. By day I sometimes saw distant reflections of gold things in the latticed windows; but the day had ended long ago. Once upon a time, a certain eight-headed snake, symbol of all evil, was defeated by the shrine’s god, the younger brother of the lovely Amaterasu; that had happened almost as long ago as today’s sunset. Around the beginning of the fourteenth century, Lady Nijo (who also visited the Shoren-in) made a one-thousand-day retreat here. Gion Festival, now twelve hundred years old, is centered around this shrine. Here the geishas still come to pray, so it is said. Although I have rarely seen anyone in geisha dress pass through these grounds, I am but a foreigner who perceives little; and it may be that some of the women who come here in early afternoon are geishas wearing the attire of this world.

It was a midnight of crickets, glowing white and orange lamps with red crests on them, and lightless stone lanterns. My desire for attachment did not circle round and round as at the Shoren-in, because this place was less a world behind walls than a compound of trees, or of wide flagstoned alleys with lamps and trees on either side. The main building with its lanterns and golden-tipped vermilion roof-beams was not the center of anything. Passing between islands of wooden darkness surrounded by glowing lamps, I felt lost. The tops of the wide steps glowed in the greenish lights. And just as the white, white face of a geisha can shine out of darkness like the moon itself, the ancient laurel moon of Prince Yuhara, so the labyrinthine void of Yasaka Shrine rose out of my expectations’ darkness; but it shone around me rather than at me. I remembered the maikos of Gion and Ponto-cho, whom I was occasionally lucky enough to glimpse as they flitted out of a gleaming black taxicab and into the teahouse where they had been called upon to dance; at those times they showed themselves to no more purpose than the moon did. In the few seconds allotted to me to gaze upon them, I was thrilled and fulfilled; afterward the memory became one of my treasures. And something of this came to me from the orange light which shone through the shrine’s latticework.