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

Across the stage bridge comes a white-faced onnagata. The bell sounds. The geishas sing. Thus begins “Sukeroku Yukari no Edo Zakura,” starring Nakamura Fukusuke as the first-ranking geisha Agemaki, and Ichikawa Danjuro as the warrior Sukeroku.

Instead of recounting the plot (only a portion of which was performed), let me tell you about the lovely strangeness of the feminine imitations, the opulence — for instance, of that geisha in high thick shining clogs; she is crowned with a spike-studded golden crescent, and her voice is wavering, breaking and almost whining, with falsetto cadences.

On the bridge, a whitefaced geisha in green stands beneath a tall parasol, her black katsura in golden spider-ribbon, a giant golden jewel on her speckled turquoise breast. As a little child sings in falsetto: “ Eeeee! ”, she undertakes slow fantastic steps in her clogs, which resemble towers.

Kabuki femininity expresses itself through the lovely wooden clopping as the lavender-clad courtesans run, not to mention the way an onnagata crosses her wrists, raises her hands, unfolds a scroll-letter from a lover, her voice resembling a pouting child’s, the low, majestic wiggle of the exaggerated buttocks of a lady with a rather squeaky, raspy voice. As for the breasts, those are created with a padded apron tied around under the waist.

A courtesan takes off her green mantle and shows red and gold long sleeves. She is very high-waisted (her waist comes almost up to her armpits, in fact). Long strings of jade beads spill down her front and make fringe between her widely spread legs. She resembles a queen in a deck of playing cards. Her lavender-hued attendants rush to kneel at her back to adjust her. Her square hips sway like panniers. Her female voice is rising and falling, often ending in a descending wail.

The feet mince up and down when a Kabuki lady passes through a doorway, her full buttocks swaying. How important is this person or that? Inspect her buttocks. Those of a great lady are stacked, sparkling half-doughnuts. Lesser goddesses wear less padded skirts.

Their kimono sleeves have been specially elongated in order to miniaturize their male hands, the hems lowered to partially conceal their feet. Sometimes they feel the need to wax the corners of the eyes and the eyebrows. (An older Kabuki actor may pull up his eyes by wrapping silken gauze around his forehead.) Their made-up faces are cruder but much more mobile than Noh masks. Their meowing voices sound weird, yet feminine. Exposing the backs of their necks much as geishas do, they accomplish, for instance, the semiformal female walk: slide the sole of one foot forward, then slide the other ahead almost on a parallel line; walk with the legs always together (for practice, the apprentice ties his knees together with silken thread, which must not break even when kneeling or standing).

A princess thrusts her shoulders back and keeps her body out; she has a low center of gravity. The next category, more feminine, weaves her face, shoulders, torso and buttocks in figure eights as she goes. A courtesan holds up her kimono with the left hand, an aristocratic lady, with the right. A “simple woman from next door” moves more rapidly.

The onnagata Mr. Ichikawa Shunen had been an actor for twenty years, and before that a student for two. He had an active fan club. When I met him, he was out of costume, but his face was so lovely and delicate, his hair so long and caressable on his neck, his lips so smoothly pink (by the way, he wore a little padlock around his throat), that I told him that I could see he would be a beautiful woman. He thanked me.

“Is there a difference between a man playing a woman and a woman being a woman?”

“Yes, I think it’s different. The strange aspect of being an onnagata is that we do not seek to be closest to the real woman. 1Our training is otherwise. That’s what we call the onnagata skill. We have four hundred years of history. This skill is something we learn. My teacher said that onnagatas don’t have to be beautiful creatures from the beginning. However physically male a person might be, he can be a woman.”

“To what extent is femininity a matter of movement?”

“It’s close to the Noh feeling. The voice is a man’s, but you can see that compared to Noh, Kabuki is more visually real. We are closer to real women than Noh actors are. We learn that for this role you move this way. The angle of the neck, the hand movements, how one walks, depend on one’s age and rank as they would have been expressed in the Edo period. The Snake Princess’s movements will be different from a geisha’s.”

When I asked which roles he preferred, he said: “Rather than princesses, I like geiko-sans. I like a look that is witty and sophisticated and even flippant. Simply put, I like to be a bad girl. There are many such roles in Kabuki — sophisticated delinquents.”

His makeup began with the stick of “oil” (which might in fact have been some sort of oily wax) that a sumo wrestler uses for his hair. There are many consistencies, and the onnagata chooses the one most appropriate to his role. A different sort of oil hides the eyebrows. Then comes a brown cream foundation, followed by oshiroi paste thinned with water and applied with a hake brush. Sponge and pat. Next comes the pure white powder in two layers, “then pink gradation, depending on the person.” Some people use a stick of red oil first, then pink, making a kind of foundation. The red oil is also used as lipstick. 2

The red applied to eyes (around the outer corners and the undersides) is called mehari . “Each onnagata uses his own way,” he said. “What I’m explaining is very basic. An onnagata does not use black around the eyes. Pink oshiroi may be applied after the white for some people.”

“This is the base,” he said. “Pink gradation is between the upper eye and the eyebrow, and also on the outer cheeks. Then the eyebrows are painted with oil mixed with charcoal.” Again, different onnagatas did it differently. “I use red dissolved in water without oil, but water when I mix the paint for my eyebrows.”

Regarding the eyebrows, those are supposed to have the same classical “bamboo-willow” shape that we have already encountered in the ancient poems of the Manyoshu . 3

He said that there were “many variations” for the mouth, but that it was lipsticked very small; one shrank it down to two-thirds of its previous size.

It took him only a quarter-hour to make himself up, but of course he had been doing it for twenty years.

His wig was a custom-made solid copper plate, made and fitted, like Suzuka-san’s, by a wigmaker. “You apply it like a metal helmet,” he said. Over this went human hair upon a base of white silk and black cloth, the white to match the onnagata’s face and the black to border the hair, which by the way required a beautician to attach.

Customarily onnagatas worked twenty-five days a month, then redid their hair.

“Do men and women have different souls?”

“As a Kabuki actor, I don’t feel that my soul needs to play a woman’s soul,” he replied, perhaps a trifle offended. “Because the soul is the most important thing we show.”

I told him how different the person who looked at me from the mirror had seemed when Yukiko had made me up, and I asked how it was for him. “When you start doing this, it’s strange to become the role itself,” he agreed mildly. “That goes away.” I asked him at what point he actually became the role, when you put on the makeup or costume, or immediately before going on stage. “In my case,” he said, “it’s when I see myself in the mirror just after I make up. What I am feeling is not soul but appearance. But he” — he indicated the man who sat beside him — “is also an onnagata, and he feels differently. Immediately before I enter the stage, that is when I really switch.”