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

A Geisha Gets Ready

Early on a cold evening in Kanazawa, in a small square tatami room on the first floor of the ochaya, the young geisha Suzuka kneels before the mirror and seats herself neatly on her crossed heels, which of course are snow-white in their tabi . Her long hair hangs straight down her back. She is a very pretty girl, but not yet a jewel in the darkness.

Rapidly wiping the white foundation onto her face, she begins to pale. Now the second layer has already touched her left cheek. Its whiteness stands out against the first layer as much as that did against her natural skin. It has been reformulated, she answers me; it no longer contains lead, and (how sad!) may not have bush warbler droppings, either. To me it seems to be paste, not powder. In many light, expert dabs, rubs and pats of the little cloth, she makes her face snowier, whiter, then white on white. Her untouched ears take on a peculiar conspicuousness; they will be hidden beneath the wig.

She has agreed with her ochaya-san (who soon will be sitting cross-legged over a low table with my interpreter one sliding door away, first serving her tea, then accepting from her careful hands an envelope filled with the appropriate number of clean ten-thousand-yen notes) to show me how she prepares for the night; hence supposedly I can ask her whatever I like; she always replies, but her mind is quite properly focused more on her face than on me. To be honest, I cannot tell whether she is curt, absent, indifferent, hurried or simply shy in this slightly intimate situation. I kneel on the tatami floor well behind her; twice I request the interpreter to remind her that I will leave whenever she wishes. Most likely I am less an embarrassment than a moderately lucrative annoyance. 1I ask her what defines a beautiful woman, and, tilting her face toward the mirror, she calmly says that a beautiful person must face the issues and make her best effort. Watching her resembles standing in reddish darkness above my developer tray, which I gently, ceaselessly rock while the lovely silver image begins to bloom forth from the snow white photographic paper; except that in Suzuka’s case it happens in reverse: her face is perfecting itself into something new, but this newness is ever lighter, more featureless and masklike. Now she is whitening her neck, which seems to lengthen into a swan’s. She pats the cloth upon her eyebrows; they fade; her lips whiten. What is she, this shining feminine being with white lips? I ask her how she feels when she looks into the mirror, and without much interest she replies: “It makes me feel that the atmosphere of my face is different.”

Her lips are snowy! I never could have imagined the resulting eerie gorgeousness.

The little round hand mirror and the squarish wall mirror give me three images of her, two from the front and one from her back. Carefully speeding round and round her eyes with a little brush dipped in red, she continues her construction of extrahuman femininity. The water-based red paste will stay on all night. The white foundation will need touching up, just as does the foundation which the Tokyo makeup artist Yukiko applies to her clients (male cross-dressers); like Yukiko, Suzuka uses the special paper from Kyoto to remove oil from the skin when those touchups occur.

Now Suzuka brushes a layer of black over the red. Each woman finds her own style, she says.

More slowly now the brush goes round and round. When she tilts her chin forward, her white face in the hand mirror shockingly resembles a Noh mask. This mirror she holds approximately at mouth level, looking down, brushing around her lashes. Her eyes are now more contrasty, the lids very black, standing out. Three long locks taper down the back of her neck.

Now she is brushing on her eyebrows, in broad arcs whose outer side continues down around the eye nearly twice as far as where they started. Rapidly, like a tongue stimulating a lover’s body near the point of climax, she goes over and over it. And suddenly the geisha face is there.

I step out for a moment. The ochaya-san helps her on with her kimono. 2

Brushing the whiteness down her throat, which seems to lengthen like a swan’s, kneeling at the mirror as if at an altar, she now gives the sponge to the ochaya-san, who has been coming in and out of the room. The older woman pulls down the back collar of the kimono to brush semicircles of whiteness on the back of Suzuka’s neck. There will be no three legs of paint; those are for maikos, who exist only in Kyoto.

The ochaya-san, who made her debut at fifteen, used to be excellent at both dancing and drums; in those days one had to be accomplished at two things. She knew how to dance much younger than that, she says. I compliment her on how well she has trained Suzuka-san, and she says that the girl learned quickly; she herself had been very slow and stupid, she politely adds; I reply with my own stab at politeness that I will never believe the latter.

The obi-tier already sits in the next room watching television. He is a cheerful, burly man in late middle age who no longer possesses all his teeth. His main profession is the manufacture of shoji screens, but he has fallen into this other work because, he reasons modestly, he happens to live nearby. I tell him that he must be very skilled, and he laughs and said that nothing is required except for physical strength.

At the summons, he comes into Suzuka’s dressing room and yanks her obi tight. Together, he and the ochaya-san wind it round and round the girl until it seems to cut into her waist. Her hips protrude at first, but they commence stiffening her like the rings of bamboo in a paper lantern, the green kimono flowing out from her hips like a bell. The zoologist Desmond Morris believes that the ideal waist-to-hip ratios of men and women (nine to ten in the former, seven to ten in the latter) defy cultural differences; the protrusion of the breasts above renders female waist indentation still more of a gender signal. 3The obi-tying most definitely contradicts this. (Morris does admit: “The tightly laced young woman is forced to adopt a stiffly erect, vertical posture of a kind that gives her an air of graceful aloofness.” And Kenneth Clark praises the Capitoline Aphrodite, who half crouches with one hand under her breasts and the other almost shielding her crotch, as an exemplar of “compactness and stability. At no point is there a plane or an outline where the eye may wander undirected.” Thus, excepting her hairpicks, the form of a geisha.)

Now the ochaya-san stands behind her, tying the second strip of obi under the breast so as to pull in those wide, wide sleeves near the armpits; that way only the outer portions hang down like wings. From the rear, Suzuka-san looks ever more like a stylized angel.

Next comes the red sash, the man pulling it extremely tight across the back of the waist. Sudddenly the girl has become a confection of wraps and knots, the red sash going round and round, stiffening her further, thickening her from buttock to armpit.

Then the brocade strip goes on, the girl turning round and round as the other two spool her in. I see golden arcs and white flowers, golden fronds of grass, the man pulling tight, tight, with all his strength, the ochaya-san raising verticals, then tucking in, the young woman growing ever stiffer and straighter, so that a rectangle of brocade hangs down her back, almost reaching itself in its previous fold.

The ochaya-san takes a slender white cord and laces Suzuka in more, firmly pushing and rapping her hips and back.

Suzuka-san is tying a scarlet cord over her front. The obi-tier has departed. The ochaya-san goes out to make tea. Now it is time for the wig.