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

Compulsions, Costs, Achievements

Her own training, Kofumi-san remarked twice, had been quite different from Konomi-san’s. “The people around me were good people but very strict.”

“It must have been very painful at times,” I said.

“The dancing was, yes. When you start learning to dance, you’re disciplined for how to bow, how to remove your footwear and everything, it’s true. I would just look at the senior maiko and copy her.”

As for the musician Danyu-san, she had begun when she was six. She looked young but might have been close to fifty. I asked whether she would have chosen her career of her own accord, and she said simply: “They make it so that the child realizes she cannot do anything else.” — And who is a woman? Perhaps her identity is founded on the realization that she can be no one else.

What is a woman? A twentieth-century American classical ballet dancer remarks upon how in nineteenth-century Vienna “a gentleman would place a handkerchief between his hand and his partner’s when he embraced her to dance, so that he wouldn’t touch her even with his gloved hand. Spiritually and aesthetically, a woman was untouchable, unobtainable, the dream for which he longed” — at which point the feminist critic who has just cited this reminds us to consider that period’s “gynecological ignorance” and the resulting suffering of women, in order for us to better “appreciate women’s enjoyment of this illusion.” What Kofumi-san suffered during her apprenticeship, and the choices Danyu-san never had, not to mention the sorrows of all those women who for centuries were sold into geishadom, their mercantile value fading year by year like the dyes of those woodblock prints of teahouse girls, overtower my imagination. I hope not to insult any of them with the false sympathy which derives from imagining myself in their situations, being all the while half-blinded by my own particular fantasies of self-actualization. Nor would I care to dismiss their “enjoyment,” such as it may be, of whichever femininities they must perform.

A modern-day Tokyo geisha informs us that most of her colleagues began very young and poor, and that they needed to find patrons “as early as eleven.” The translator of a rural geisha’s memoir of heartbreak, exploitation and abuse opines: “The romanticization of geisha life as dedicated principally to the pursuit of traditional arts ignores the poverty that drove many parents to indenture their daughters to geisha houses. Such romanticization also erases certain geisha from the collective memory and overlooks the bottom line of the whole geisha business,” which is, “of course, sex for money.”

Kofumi-san would, I suspect, be less than pleased if I dared to refer to her bottom line in any terms, let alone these. Of course she must survive; I hope that she profits. I have been privileged to witness her accomplishment of excellence. The relationship between us was formal, asexual, mercantile, aesthetic — much as when I bought a ticket to one of Mr. Umewaka’s performances. I proudly do romanticize my experiences of both of their performances. That is the greatest compliment I can pay them.

Once upon a time there lived a Noh actor named Takabayashi Ginji. In 1956 he was disbarred from the Kita School for the offense of “impertinence.” He seems to have offended his teacher’s son. He wrote: “I was a defendant who did not know his crime.” And once upon a time there was a Noh actor, or a geisha — come to think of it, there were thousands — who attempted the dance of feminine grace, and received “discipline,” shouts, beatings, punishments. They had not yet learned to imitate beauty with sufficient exactitude to make it their own. They could not glide while bearing an imaginary branch of flowers.

This book is about representations of feminine beauty. I hope that I never lose sight of the price that so many transvestites, transsexuals, Noh actors, onnagatas, prostitutes, courtesans, geishas, elegant women, women longing to be elegant, women who believe that they exist for men while men do not exist for them, 1women keeping themselves “decent” or hoping against hope to look five years younger, lonely widows, ancient ladies who weep when they look in the mirror, desperate high school girls, careful executive women, and so many other expressers of femininity must pay. (Here again, and still without comment, I cite the onnagata Bando Tamasaburo: “When they are slightly uncomfortable, women are more erotic.”) To the extent that beauty and grace succeeds as performance, I fail to see behind the mask. What is a woman? Doubtless she may also be, among other things, someone who suffers. All the same, she must also be, at least sometimes, someone who actually does enjoy the illusion she projects, the power she commands.

My dear friend Shannon has sometimes expressed bitterness that she is not a man. She says that men are freer, more powerful. I once remarked that surely an attractive woman, for instance Shannon, can be envied for her ability to turn heads. She replied: “I’ll tell you how it actually is. You go downstairs in your high heels and you worry about tripping. You worry that your lipstick is smearing, and you need to find a restroom to check yourself in the mirror and there’s no restroom. You constantly repair yourself, and you have no time to be in the moment. When you’re young you don’t understand what little power you have, which means that you don’t have it; and once you start getting older you spend your time worrying.”

Disagreeing with her, Zeami wrote in 1428: “The actor will be able to discern clearly his strong and weak points and lessen his bad, thus becoming a peerless master in his particular art.” He “no longer needs to think out his performance, but can perform without artifice.”

But lessening one’s bad points requires continuing discipline, no question about it. Mishima Yukio, whose sexuality was ambiguous, spent the final years before his suicide “cultivating my orchard,” which is to say his body, “for all I was worth. For my purpose, I used sun and steel.” In short, he became a bodybuilder. Meanwhile, the glamor queen Molly Sims keeps a spoon in the fridge and touches it to each of her eyes for five minutes straight. She refrains from eating soy sauce at night in order not to look “puffy” in the morning; for the same reason, she sleeps with the heat low. As for the onnagata Shozo Sato, he makes it his habit for a full three hours before any Kabuki performance to abstain from drinking, in order to avoid ruining his face with perspiration.

Those who eschew or fall short of such professional constancy may fight more temporary campaigns against ugliness. As I write this, I wonder how many dedicated soldiers are presently engaged in the “Goodbye Cellulite, Hello Bikini Challenge,” which is “a four-week program designed to get you bikini-ready in four important areas”? Fortunately for them, a manufacturer of skin cream stands ready to furnish munitions for their arsenals.

Self-loathing complements discipline. “We’ve all been there — that feeling of not wanting anyone to look too closely at your face.” Thus runs an advertisement in Allure magazine. New Beauty wants us to know that some women are humiliated by “the appearance of their genitalia or enlarged labia,” not to mention vaginal looseness during intercourse. “Feel Feminine Again,” New Beauty invites us; and why not? “Vaginal rejuvenation” requires merely pain and money! Another procedure explicated in this same publication is called “balancing your ethnic features.” A self-dissatisfied woman can, for example, buy a rhinoplasty to overcome the frequent hump and sagging tip of the Mediterranean nose, or increase the prominence of the tip and bridge of the flat Asian nose, or narrow the nostrils and correct the “under-projected tip” of the African-American nose. Cost as of 2008: Up to fourteen thousand dollars. Breaking the nose “is not necessary in every case.”