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

Beneath an ukiyo-e painting’s many-crooked cherry tree we find her, melon-faced and teeny-tiny-mouthed (her presumably blackened teeth hidden), as with her white arms and long white curving fingers she immerses the Imperial Anthology in a black bowl which is decorated with golden flowers. Thus she disproves an accusation of plagiarism, made by the villainous Otomo no Kuronushi, who listened at her door, heard her declaim her poem, and rushed to inscribe it in the old manuscript. New ink dissolves first; thus she cleared her name. The water has gone grey; the pages are a blank pale reddish-orangish-gold. A single comb crowns her hair.

Five more legends about her have been told to me. One is that she became the lover of Narihira, he who wrote the Tales of Ise . The second and most famous details her cruelty to Fukakusa no Shoso (or Shii no Shoso), whom she refused to embrace unless he stationed himself outside the palace for a full hundred nights, sleeping on the bench which held up the shafts of her carriage. Some say that he died in the ninety-ninth night; others, that his father did, so that he had to give over the ordeal.

This story haunted people from her near contemporary Sei Shonagon right up to the twentieth-century star geisha Iwasaki Mineko, who mentioned Komachi’s name when she told the tale of a certain snow-faced colleague who threw down the gauntlet to a customer, daring him to visit her each night for three years if he truly loved her.

And so it appears that Komachi could do whatever she wanted to her suitors. In the Noh play “Sotoba Komachi” we hear that Komachi “had in her day the blue brows of Katsura” and her eyes were once “like the color on distant mountains.” I imagine that she often associated herself with the items which Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book lists under the category of “Elegant Things” — for instance, “a young girl’s trailing white robe, worn over a lavender chemise.”

Many of her tankas express passion and desire for her unnamed lovers, but several are in this vein:

Surrender to you,

is it that you’re saying?

As ripples

surrender to idle wind?

And then her mask-face began to win its stains and scratches. — Makuzu Tadano, 1818: “It is good for a woman to realize that once she grows old, she becomes useless to the world.” Her third and fourth legends approached. She continued gliding across this floating stage; so years rippled about her in just the same way as the slender black calligraphy of the Tokugawa Museum’s Genji Picture-Scroll snakes down across an irregularly granulated background of pigments which shade subtly into one another, or get interrupted by mid-tones applied sometimes in wriggling creeks and other times in clouds like the high eyebrows of Noh masks; here and there the scroll has been showered with small squares or smaller irregular polygons of gleaming gold, upon which the black ink-strokes lie flat as if on the surface of some shimmery pond which reflects the hues of earth and autumn leaves; in certain parts of the scroll, the background takes on a jadelike tint, while mid-tone creeks resemble cracks; at times it grows more orange; resembling the bruiselike shadows which can sometimes appear around the cheekbones and under the eyes of ageing Japanese women, the scroll may adopt mauves or blues; it is always muted but never dull. Sometimes it reminds me of one of the ochayas in Kyoto or Kanazawa where I have had the great privilege of seeing the geishas dance: a mat-floored, paper-walled room of various warm beiges and creams, sometimes centered around paper tatami-squares; soon the dancers will come.

By then she must have begun to resemble first (in the fashion of Helga Testorf) a fukai mask, then an uba or a rojo . In her fukai state, so I have learned, one fan appropriate to her would have been the Hosho School’s tessenmon-kazura-ouni , with yellow-centered flowers white and blue on a brownish-grey background.

(It does no good to retreat into virginity; Zeami knows as well as the rest of us that the flower must be shown or it will be lost. Come to think of it, it will be lost in any event.)

I suppose that the first few grey hairs shocked her, as mine did me. Just as when a Noh chorus, having sat silent in the firelight for half an hour, suddenly howls in unison, then sits silent again, so this or that touch of Death’s paintbrush offended the undying youth of the mask I thought I wore, then stopped offending it; I was accustomed to my newest age-spot; I promised to bear it quite cheerfully if only I never got another one!

She is now, if you like, a toshima , a woman who emanates “mature charm.” When she danced for me, Kofumi-san certainly emanated such beauty. Unfortunately for Komachi, the inmates of the palace prefer the beauty represented by ko-omote s and maikos.

Bunya Yasuhide invites her to accompany him into the countryside — but she sniffs out the taint of condescending jocularity, and in her return poem she writes that she would eagerly cut her roots to become a drifting water-plant, if the inviting creek could but be trusted. I can almost see her irises going gold and the corners of her eyes squinting in the almost imperceptible resentment of the loveliest deigan mask.

Perhaps she continues her attendance at moon-viewing excursions. To me the full moon resembles a Mycenaean mirror whose verdigrised streaks and patches cause the whole to glow all the more brightly against the void. To her it now perhaps resembles her own face.

Shall we look at her now? Here is a rojo carved by Himi, the man who used the corpse of a starved woman as his model for a yase-onna : “With the rojo, simply being beautiful is not enough. It must deliver very deep thoughts. It must create fear along with elegance. Despite… the red lips, the dreadful drama of a woman is carved in this masterpiece… This piece is also called Onorojo, since it describes Ono no Komachi… Umewaka Rokuro writes that when his grandfather Umewaka Minoru wore this mask in ‘Sotoba Komachi,’ he could see Komachi’s ribs, and when his father Rokuro wore it in ‘Obasute,’ it expressed the longing to be absorbed in the moon, and in ‘Higaki,’ when the Hikimawashi was pulled down and the Nochijite appeared, he was so shocked by the mask and costume that he shuddered from the thought of the horrific ending of the woman’s life.”

The rojokomachi mask just described looks as follows: a face bleached like stripped wood, a crack in the arch of the upper left eyelid; the ridge of the nose, which splits off into the elegantly rounded brows, as sharp as anything in an aerial view of the Trans-Antarctic Range. The corners of the faded lips curve down; the eyes stare in fear and misery, unable to see anything but the end. Noh remembers Komachi as the ruins of allure — or, to distant Zeami, the bone and breath of it without the flesh. What remains? What is grace hollowed out? For answer, turn your gaze upon a rojokomachi .

And by now, as you might imagine, nobody is inviting her to come away on excursions anymore.

Her next legend inspired the Noh play “Sekidera Komachi,” in which the ancient beggar, being invited to the Festival of Stars, tries to dance. Representing her in this is of course a great challenge for the shite actor, who must gracefully convey her gracelessness. In the instant when she seems to embody her lost youthful elegance, the chorus chants: “How sad! My heart breaks! A flowering branch on a withered tree.” And yet this approaches Zeami’s definition of the true flower. My thoughts return, as in this context they so often do, to the aesthetic category called sabi (literally, rust), which gives to decrepitude the qualities of tranquility and austerity.