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

In the Noh play “Aoi-no-ue,” Princess Rokujo, transformed into a demon by jealousy, laments that “I lack form; therefore I lack anyone to ask after me.” Komachi does not yet lack form, but her form has decayed, and the shite of “Sekidera Komachi” informs us:

The century-old woman to whom you’ve spoken

is all that’s left of renowned Komachi,

is all that remains of Ono no Komachi.

Certainly she knows the next chapter. She has left us a tanka imagining herself as her own cremated smoke.

Even if she had never loved, but only dallied, her addiction to love-attachment must resemble ours to life.

In the final legend, wind blows through her skull’s eyesocket, imitating the moans of sadness she uttered while she was still alive. And so she has achieved parity with Rokujo’s formlessness. Doubtless a delicate Noh representation of even this could exude the fragrance of sabi .

In short, she came, like all of us, to a bad end; and some tales imply her to be blameable for it; the way she treated Fukakusa no Shoso has been particularly disliked, but at least it shows a sort of discrimination, perhaps even devotion to appropriate hierarchical values, for what if he had been beneath her? A certain poem in the Tales of Ise admonishes the exalted and the base not to fall in love, because the disparity will be bitter . The yase otoko mask through which the Kanze School sometimes portrays Fukakusa is “the face of a man in hell.” “This mask, its expression dignified rather than grim, is one of the best-suited of all for the nobility of this thwarted suitor.” But to me it seems like an exoskeleton of a face fashioned from almost translucent yellow cartilage, washed in the black water of death, his mouth limply gaping, his moustache somehow resembling a catfish’s whiskers; they say that this mask is sometimes used to play the ghost of a fisherman who after betraying a shallow passage to the enemy was stabbed and left to drown; now he swims and swims; the waters of blackness pass through his mouth. Black water shines deep behind his eyes. He bears the mottled complexion despised by Sei Shonagon. His cheek-hollows could have been transplanted from a crab’s carapace. He is so far lost, so far down even below Komachi, that he no longer knows who he is. Komachi, his murderer and only friend, draws him toward her head-planet; he comes slowly, a dead yellow comet, drawn on by an erotic gravity which is all that defines him now.

Yes, she refused him. Certainly her behavior differed from that of the heroine of Saikaku Ihara’s seventeenth-century cautionary tale about a nymphomaniac who goes mad, runs naked into the street, and sings the words of “a Komachi Dance.” What did posterity want of Komachi? How could she be bad in two opposing ways? Perhaps we simply wished to claim her, to embellish our own agonies by comparing them to hers. Here is how Lady Nijo memorializes her: “Yet could she have been as miserable as I was?”

THE MESSENGER RISES

I said that I knew five legends about Komachi, and you have now read four, including the last, which is to those who still keep flesh in our eyeholes the saddest. The penultimate one takes us near the end of her living decrepitude: By messenger the Emperor sends her a poem. Such is her cleverness that when the crone presents the messenger with a return poem, it is the original with one syllable altered. In Osaka I have seen the late Mr. Kanze play her in this rarely performed Noh play, which is called simply “Ono no Komachi.” When she comes creeping out from behind the rainbow curtain, she nearly stumbles; her knees shake. The chorus is singing, more slowly and softly than before: “Yo-o-o-o-oh… ooh!”

Komachi wears the mushroomlike greyish cap of travel, leaning on her stick. Then a single chorister’s voice soughs like the wind.

When they sing all together, their winter basses remind me of Zeami’s vision of the true flower as an old tree with blossoms on it. All the same, how dismal they sound!

I find dozers better represented in this audience than at any other time in my experience: the lady beside me, the lady next to her ; even my poor interpreter can hardly keep her eyes open.

Komachi halts by the first pine, gazing sadly out at us from the bridge. I have never seen that before.

She begins to sing in her trembling voice, while the men of the chorus chant a background curtain of sound, their voices like the wind. Once upon a time her lips were as red as the fallen autumn maple leaves at the Shoren-in. But colors do change, and one of her tankas reads as follows:

What do you now tell me,

I who age

in this tear-rain?

Your words, like these leaves,

have turned color.

Someday soon, windblown pampas grass will whip across Komachi’s skull in much the same way that a maiko’s headdress sometimes dangles its fruiting bodies of pearl and tortoise-shell down past her eyes. And like the grassblades, Mr. Kanze’s voice is vibrating and wobbling in a strangely lovely almost monotonous melodic portrait of decrepitude.

It has been said that the intensity of her poetic expressions of passion is such that they transfigure the subjective into the seemingly objective; and in Noh’s equally poetic envisioning of her elder days, Komachi appears on the verge of blooming again; her dance, like those words and leaves, has turned color; but which color? What is a woman? What animates the stiffness of a golden fan?

In her singing in “Sotoba Komachi” she alludes to her poem of reply to Bunya Yasuhide: Now she would cut her roots and float down any inviting stream, no matter how untrustworthy its waters; but no stream invites her anymore. Now what does she sing to the Emperor’s envoy?

When the others chant (they are Shingon priests), she halts, lowers her head and seems to sense the chorus, bringing alive Zeami’s maxim that for a skilled actor “movement will grow from the chant” because word and thought are superior to since causative of action; “functions grow out of substance and not the other way around.” And so it feels as if at the end of her wearily triumphant disputation with the two priests, followed by a paroxysm of her now chronic madness (brought about by Fukakusa no Shoso’s vengefully lovelorn ghost), and succeeded at last by her prayer, outcome unknown, for salvation, it were the chant that impels her into that slow creep offstage in her long yellow kimono while they sing for her as for a departed spirit.

But at the end of “Ono no Komachi” she simply halts. Slowly she turns back, reaches out toward the chorus, one wrist crossed over the other, and irresolutely creeps back onto the stage.

In one of her poems she describes her misery at perceiving herself cowering away from malicious eyes even in her dreams; but this seems to have been composed back in the days of her love intrigues. I can well imagine what so sensitive a person now feels, to be regarded quite simply as a disgusting object. She cannot yet escape the stage of this floating world; and so she comes to us, performing withered femininity with perfect grace. Holding an invisible branch of flowers, she dances out her weary agony.

I cannot tell you why I so clearly remember the long interval during which Komachi faces the messenger, he gazing at her, she staring down at the ground. Then an assistant comes, carries her hat off the ground and vanishes through the low corner door, adding to my sense that the characters are only half alive and must continually be cared for. The messenger departs to sit amidst the double row of kneelers at stage right.

When Komachi, still seated, bends down to gaze into her cupped hands, we can see the black band of hair on the crown of the mask. She creeps upward, struggling to rise. While one man drums, a second chants and a third plays the flute, three assistants gather around her right there next to the bridge, transforming her so that instead of being in yellow she now wears a burgundy kimono with rich gold splotches resembling leaves. Presently she is on the bridge by the closest pine, gazing out of her yellow skull-like mask. She faces almost to the rainbow curtain, raises her fan, her sleeve hanging open almost all the way to her waist; she creeps a trifle toward the rainbow curtain, then back again, stands on the stage gazing down into the woodgrain, raises her fan slowly; leaning on her stick, she beggar-creeps to the very edge of the stage, her golden fan extending, slowly sweeping up, gold on one side, red on the other. Most of the play has to do with her painfully standing and crouching, coming and partly going, staring down under the stage.