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

“Is it exhilarating, or just work?”

“Exhilarating. For example, if you have a high fever but cannot cancel the performance, then you do it, however sick you are. During such times I can be standing in front of an audience and physically my voice is not as good as usual, but mentally I totally forget that I am sick.”

My question had had to do with becoming female; his answer, it seemed, with performance in and of itself. He was, after all, a professional; and the essential difference between him and Yukiko’s clients who “just want to look into the mirror” was that after looking in the mirror he showed himself to others. Grace, as we keep seeing, is performance; and Zeami advises that instead of merely looking ahead of himself at the audience, a Noh master must “grasp the logic of the fact that the eyes cannot see themselves,” which means to “make still another effort in order to grasp his own internalized outer image… Once he obtains this, the actor and the spectator can share the same image.” The novice cross-dresser sees himself (one hopes) as he would like to be. The onnagata or Noh actor sees himself as he has made himself, remembers this after leaving the mirror, and deploys his grace accordingly.

Even I, the most gullible ape in the entire cage, sometimes suffer fits of skepticism about the profundity of Zeami’s secrets. How does the Noh actor’s envisioning of his internalized outer image differ from the way that a faded street prostitute on entering a bar will often gaze into the nearest mirror, so that without frightening anybody with her weird old hard-sell eyes she can discover who is staring at her shape? — Perhaps the answer is simply that if she and her audience do share the same image of her, it is not necessarily the image she would want to project.

“Born in an ordinary family,” Mr. Ichikawa had loved Kabuki ever since he was three years old. — I wonder if what first seduced him was the brilliant two-dimensionality of it all, especially the trees and walls, with checkered-robed samurai and geishas in their spectacularly crested kimonos somehow resembling animated playing cards? Was it the falling trapdoors, rushing curtains and folding walls? Was it all the murders and suicides happily observed by old ladies in the audience who sat sucking on molasses candies? Or did he already yearn to become as graceful as a marble-faced onnagata? — When he was five he saw his first live performance. Since he was an indifferent student, his parents would not permit him to train for Kabuki until had he proved himself by being accepted into a prestigious high school. He passed the entrance examination, quit school after a month, and immediately took the entrance examination to study Kabuki. He was then fifteen years old.

“Since beauty is performance, what do you do to stay beautiful?”

“My everyday life affects my performance, not the other way around. Because I am physically a man, I normally wear pants. It’s natural to sit this way, with my legs apart, or to hold a glass this way, but by doing that in everyday life I could harm my life on stage without knowing it. So to the extent I can, I sit with my legs closed. I try not to hold my fingers apart, in order to make my hands more womanly. Kabuki actors in the past used to wear women’s costume in everyday life. They were so lovely. Clothes have changed, of course. If I wore Western women’s clothes during the daytime, that would not affect my stance. But I always try to restrain myself.”

The book he had written for Japanese women advised them to wear kimonos so that they could be more feminine afterward, merely by remembering how they had been restrained. “By wearing kimonos, many movements you cannot make; your posture will be upright, and you will not be able to open your legs or recline or raise your arm very high.” — And I remembered the way that Japanese women so often sit in a kneeling-like fashion, with their feet tucked beneath their buttocks, while Japanese men may cross their legs, with each foot beneath the opposite thigh.

Tightening the obi thrusts out breasts and hips, and thereby enhances the performance of nubile femininity. Fetishistic tight-lacers are said to enjoy any or all of the following sensations: bodily support, muscle surrender, transmission of the sense of touch over a wider area (“any movement in the hips passes at once to their breast and vice versa”), pleasurable numbness, erotic heat. I have never presumed to ask a geisha, onnagata or Noh actor about such sensations; but one kimono-wearing Japanese woman whom I knew well enough to discuss such things with smiled, blushed a trifle, and allowed that perhaps she was not entirely unfamiliar with the joys of constriction.

Gesturing fluidly with the sides of his smooth small hands, parting his pale lips as he spoke, sipping from a straw, Mr. Ichikawa said: “For Japanese women, beauty is in the kimono.”

He agreed with Yukiko that one must be very careful about one’s skin…

Katy Transforms

Katy considered herself a gay man, and performed femininity primarily for purposes of attracting men; all the same, she preferred to be addressed and described with female pronouns. She worked in a restaurant in Los Angeles, wearing male clothes and her male birthname.

I met her in a certain bar not too far from Sunset Boulevard where the beautiful late night girls were laughing and kissing each other’s cheeks. I remember their long hair and smooth skin and smell of powder. Katy was the least shy and most patient of them. That night she wore silver bracelets and long silver earrings with her long long eyebrows.

After a couple of hours a blonde came in. — “Look!” said Katy. “She’s so beautiful. Looks just like a woman.”

Did Katy resemble a woman? Yes and no. She performed femininity with the rocklike gentleness of an ancient Kannon statue.

“Why do you wear a dress?”

“For me, there are some men who would like to see me that way. For some men it’s their fantasy, to be with a woman but also with a man. Some travesti cannot be beautiful like woman, and because they know the woman looks better, they hate the woman. I have one friend who likes the dress, but hate the woman. I have another friend who wear the dress and never go out, just wear the dress. Some men tell me, why do you do this? But I like it. People wanna wear a dress, then wear a dress. I talking, looking like a woman, everyone tell me.”

She believed that the souls of man and woman were the same. And here she interjected: “Some people tell me God doesn’t hear me, because I’m gay. But I pray, and I think God hears me.”

The next night was Halloween, so I went over to her apartment.

She was sitting at the illuminated triple mirror in her black and red dressing gown, deploying stick foundation on her tired male face. She had hoped to sell me some of her clothes, but they didn’t fit me.

“Why are some women more beautiful than others?”

“Because when you put some makeup on, it’s a different face. And how you like it, it’s a different face. There’s no ugly lady face, only ugly makeup.”

Then she bowed over the mirror again.

First came foundation, then powder, then blush, then more white pancake to fill in the cracks of her man’s face.

Her housemate Jennifer wore smooth young skin, soft cleavage, a bared navel, a smooth face, young tight hair and perhaps a faint moustache as she sat on the sofa in bra and jeans and sandals, her toenails painted a dark red. I believe she had recently begun to take hormones.

And Katy, who once upon a time had been a cowboy in Guatemala, sat squat and wide in her dark black bathrobe with the red cuffs.