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

Several women I know rip out their pubic hairs in globs of hot wax. “The child realizes she cannot do anything else.” Some subject themselves to breast augmentation operations, despite the twenty-four percent reoperation rate (for breast reconstruction, that figure is nearly forty-one percent). A friend of mine got breast reductions. Now she feels self-conscious about her two grinning red scars. There is a proven market for the buttocks lift, whose mildest form involves slicing into the small of the back, then pulling up the buttocks “like a pair of pants,” as one doctor describes it. The injection of botulism toxin into the face is almost commonplace among my middleaged female executive friends; the effects last only about four months. For women to whom the danger is a secondary consideration (or, more likely, unknown to them), Brazilian hair-straightening treatments will anoint them with the carcinogen formaldehyde.

Sometimes one part of the body gets transplanted to another. A commercial photographer who proposed to employ the “liquefy” option to digitally edit a picture of me explained that at my age (I was then forty-five) the flesh of the face has begun to ooze down the sides of the skull, so that one develops both hollows under the eyes and sagging jowls. Needless to say, surgeons offer a solution: fat grafting from the lower cheeks to around the eyes. Pulchritude’s technicians can also graft skin from the soles of a male-to-female transsexual’s feet to the walls of her new vagina, whose attempt to heal shut must then be excruciatingly frustrated three times a day through the insertion of a vaginal dilator; I think I would prefer laser lipolysis, which “literally melts away fat in trouble spots like your abdomen.” Meanwhile, how many ten-year-old girls are weeping at this moment while their mothers grip their faces and pop their blackheads?

“It’s no fun being a geisha,” complains the heroine of a Nagai Kafu story, to which her on-again-off-again lover replies: “It’s no fun being anything else either.”

A WISH FOR CHARLOTTE VON MAHLSDORF

“They make it so that the child realizes she cannot do anything else.” “It’s no fun being anything else either.” The efforts made to accomplish femininity may derive from exploitation, false consciousness, or what the actress may consider, or come to consider, as her very nature. “Ultimately, ours is a journey of anguish,” writes the transsexual woman Aleisha Brevard. A girl playing with makeup or an apprentice of Mr. Umewaka sets out, one hopes, on rather more pleasant excursions.

When I first met Mr. Mikata, within that temple in Kyoto, in a room of tatami mats and whose sliding partition showed a hint of shining floor beyond, he was giving a lessson to an older lady who knelt chanting from a text. He sang with his pale hands clasped in his lap, stern and a trifle severe, as a Noh teacher probably is expected to be. Or could he simply have been serious about the craft and his own duty to those who came to him? He was darkhaired, much younger than Mr. Umewaka, less naturally sunny. It seemed to me that he was singing from the bottom of his throat, frowning, closing his eyes, holding the syllables and lifting them upward like the corners of pagodas. His voice resonant, projecting, powerful. Nodding in time with the singing of his pupil, listening with closed eyes and downcast head to that timid old lady, he steered the lesson to its end. She bowed and thanked him.

I complimented his beautiful voice, and he dismissively said that he had a sore throat, thanks to the dry air.

Next came a lesson to a young man. I tried to interpret the golden flash of Mr. Mikata’s fan, which moved first in a circular motion parallel to the ground, then up, then down, every aspect of its journey very careful and exact. It rotated, then the foot stamped; he was singing all the while. I found it surprising to see the expressiveness of his face with the mask off, even his eyebrows moving dramatically as he sang, although perhaps this was to emphasize some point for his pupil.

It all seemed arduous, and to me tedious, like observing the practice of any musical instrument, but not unpleasant to the participants. Perhaps it even gratified them sometimes. As my best friend Ben remarks, “I can’t say I’m against it.”

Self-effacing repetitions of a dance, of a hammer-stroke or a particular calligraphic twist, not to mention the dilations of a transsexual’s neovagina by means of graduated plastic stents, may eventually bring the practitioner to a state of perfect accomplishment. This notion is called muga , selflessness. The strict discipline required to become an Inoue School geisha dancer (in contradistinction to the intoxication of a Greek maenad who throws back her marble head in ecstasy) evidently produces a similar result. Might the accomplishment of femininity, or its performance, sometimes be characterized by a state of being in which the woman realizes that she cannot (and hopefully would not) do anything else?

Such being entails continual becoming. Once upon a time there lived a young woman named Agnes, who did whatever she had to do to keep her boyfriend from discovering that she had a penis. When she finally told him, it still remained essential to conceal the fact that she had been raised as a boy. Eventually she succeeded in gaining permission from the Gender Identity Clinic to have the operation. What then? “A review of Agnes’s passing occasions and management devices may be used to argue how practiced and effective Agnes was in dissembling,” a researcher concludes; he also writes: “It would be incorrect of Agnes to say that she has passed. The active mode is needed; she is passing. Inadequate though this phrasing is, it summarizes Agnes’s troubles.”

In her apprenticeship, the famous Gion geisha Iwasaki Mineko was sometimes punished without cause — but of course with reason. One need not approve of this procedure to comprehend its possible effectiveness for inducing muga . She writes, much as Zeami did: “I believed that self-discipline was the key to beauty.”

What is a woman? Here comes a maiko. “More of a painted doll than a woman, her oval face is painted lustrous white,” writes one observer, bringing back to my mind any young-lady Noh mask with its depths of pure white oyster shell and hide glue before coloring. “At the nape of the neck, which Japanese men find especially provocative, is a lick of naked, unpainted flesh.” — But to me, she is a woman, a painted woman, not a painted doll. Her face and neck entice and sometimes awe me. Perhaps they provoke me. But her self remains fundamentally whatever it is, with or without her self-discipline; I believe that neither she nor I could be anyone else. To be sure, she could perform her geisha femininity more or less expertly, perfecting her imitations and then inhabiting them. In more than one of his treatises, Zeami quotes the proverb that “the truth and what looks like it are two different things.” This is why a beginner’s exactest imitation of any gesture made by a possessor of the true flower will not achieve that flowerhood.

But what is a woman? Unlike Hilary Nichols and “Sachiko,” the renowned Berlin transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf believed herself to be a woman in her soul ; her male sexual organs “meant nothing” to her. The compulsion to be a woman was so great that she dressed up, curled her hair, picked up her purse and went out with her similarly minded friend Christine — in the Third Reich, after curfew. Later, when the Russians arrived, she risked rape by continuing to appear in public as a female. Christine was in fact raped. Charlotte lived into old age, and was honored by her government — indeed, honored as a woman . I wish the same for Aleisha Brevard, for Konomi and Kofumi, for all achievers of femininity, in all degrees of pride, longing, suffering.