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

After all, even a Noh actor does not seek to pass, only to perform feminine grace. That seems difficult enough. — How did Mr. Kanze do it? — Edwin Denby on Nijinsky’s dance poses: “One might say that the grace of them is not derived from avoiding strain, as a layman might think, but from the heightened intelligibility of the plastic relationships.”

Regarding these relationships, Zeami (who believes that almost nobody expresses them all at the highest level) offers for our consideration three basic elements: bone , or inborn strength (which is to say heart; breathing technique); flesh , or the effect of chant and dance (sound; melodic interest; this will make an actor’s art seem inexhaustible even when frequently seen, and so I think of a beautiful woman, or a lovely Noh mask, whom one loves to look at); finally, skin , “a manner of ease and beauty in performance” as a result of appropriate flesh and bone (sight; beauty of a voice).

Meanwhile, in an ancient Egyptian tale, King Snefru commands: “Let there be brought to me twenty women, the most beautiful in form, with firm breasts, with hair well braided, not yet having opened up to give birth.” Their task will be to row naked for his entertainment. This list of beautiful attributes is brief; were it not for the nakedness part, any number of onnagatas could appear to satisfy it to some degree. If they could, and if any number of geishas could dance “Black Hair” without a flaw, what would we say? One famous geisha’s instructor informed her: “All I am able to do is teach you the form. The dance you dance on stage is yours alone.”

Yes, some forms of grace can be taught. For instance, “a fan must be carried,” one handbook explains. “It should be of gold or silver with bones of black lacquer or ivory.” And any gender-actress can paint her toenails to coordinate with her lipstick; this look I happen to prefer to the appearance of geishas’ tabi socks, but of course it would be harder to dance barefoot. Then what? Kanze Kiyokazu’s father used to say of a certain seventeenth-century waka-onna : “This is a higher-level mask with strength, but it is rather difficult to use. Depending on where you see it from, it can appear as if it is slightly smiling, or as it is commonly called ‘lonely young woman,’ 2it can easily be made to show a sad look, with changing expressions.” How many toenail-painters can do that? And the way a model’s long nude leg, which one often sees frozen in motion, matches her collarbone, can depilation and estrogen reliably duplicate that ? In the ferry terminal at Niigata, a young woman in a yellow kimono with copper-red bangs and plump lips painted to match wears a yellow paper chrysanthemum in the side of her hair, probably for her twentieth-year ceremony. How much of her success derives from bone or skin or flesh , how much from the false flower which I accept as true? — Another model wears a long black spangly gown that outlines hip, buttock and breast while introducing nudity from below the collarbone upward and then in tiny peekaboo triangles between the breasts; the yellow dress whose creases radiate crisply down and out from the bust bares nearly the same area. How much does the gown help her pull it off? — In the Genji Picture-Scrolls, beautiful women are not much more than their clothes. Unfortunately, I read that “many, if not most women are the wrong shape for most women’s clothes.” — Well, then, by all means remove clothes from consideration! The oval-faced kore from the Acropolis with braided marble hair, how much of her could be copied into a male representation with no gender-sniffer the wiser?

The American magazines inform me that the ideal woman is X-shaped; wide bust and hips, narrow waist; one can wear clothes to approach that impression — or a corset to enforce it. Puffed-up hair and satin blue ballet slippers, how analogous are such props to a ko-omote mask and wig? The model’s expression in today’s magazines (who knows about tomorrow’s?) is neutral, not unlike a Noh actor’s, the eyes wide open, but in concentration, lips parted or not, but rarely smiling. Turning the page, I find the actress Katie Holmes with a rather schoolgirlish look, serious yet saucy, in a short skirt, and hair in thick dark waves down to her chin. In her linen designer dress she could almost be a girl out of a photo from the 1940s. Her eyes are underlined, her brows painted down the sides of the nose to a point level with the lowest part of her upper eyelid. How much of the allure is her makeup and dress, how much is diet and discipline, how much the young, lovely female body she was given? The French psychoanalyst just quoted is sure that “sexual difference, which owes much to symbolic dualisms, belongs to the register of the real. It constitutes an insuperable barrier…” But perhaps all it takes to overcome this barrier and resemble Katie Holmes is the latest trick: eyeshadow like bruise, “a smoldering smoky eye.”

Understatement and Concealment

You use nice color,” the mask carver Mr. Otsuka had said, “and then on top of it you put something else to make it look more subdued, so it doesn’t look too shallow. After fifty or a hundred years, if you’ve used something unsubtle, it’s really going to show; it’ll start looking worse and worse.” Thus again the ancient aesthetic of Chun’e with his “autumn hills half-concealed by a curtain of mist” — not to mention the secret teachings of Zeami, which are in and of themselves, so some have said, no more important than the fact that they are secret. — What if I simply can’t understand them? I remember Mr. Umewaka telling me that he prohibited his apprentices from perusing those treatises during their first years of study, since “unless you master Noh to some extent, you interpret the instructions incorrectly.” Moreover, I confess that whenever I decline to track the numbers and paths of telltale hair-strands, a waka-onna, fushikizo and manbi seen all together can scarcely be distinguished from each other; perhaps their mouth-darknesses vary a trifle, but it could also be the angle at which I view each one. And on a certain afternoon of shining black rivers in Snow Country, when the train rushed me through a blizzard, I lost track of the various watercourses, and occasionally even wondered what I was seeing — an experience also offered by the dreamy, blurry translucency of Renoir nudes, in which everything reveals itself only through a very thin membrane, the light puddling and gently oozing, the pastel flesh modeled, not reticulated as a gum bichromate print would be, but simply melded, blurred. — Why shouldn’t it be? Don’t makeup artists so often blend powder eyeshadow with blush? — In this spirit, Zeami alludes to snow in a silver bowl.

And in self-defense, the reliably sour Eric C. Rath refers to the unfathomableness of “Okina” and of those secret manuscripts as “empowering interpreters with expertise while facilitating the disenfranchisement of those who could not claim to possess such intimate knowledge.” — I accordingly wonder: Is disenfranchisement necessarily a bad thing? The wall which disenfranchises me from a full view of the garden behind it, the lingerie (or ballroom gown) which prohibits much, but by no means all, of my gaze’s access to the woman who performs femininity within it, these two cases produce respectively, as we know, the beauty of miekakure and likewise of iki : allure softened and hidden, like the metonymic gestures of a multiply wrapped dancing geisha. The fact that I will never fully understand “Okina” makes it all the more haunting to me. — “Okina is not a pine tree spirit,” replied a Noh expert to my first attempt at definition. “Just what Okina represents is as much a theological problem as a literary one. Some people claim he is the Sun, and there are Buddhist connections as well. I’d stay away from this one if I were you.”