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

How to describe that mask? Golden-yellow with metallic hair, sunken-eyed, with a dark slit for a mouth, shadow-cheeked and aquiline — an uba , perhaps. I am too far away to see it clearly. The weight of it seems to bow her backward.

In some Kanze School performances of “Sotoba Komachi,” she incarnates herself in a higaki-no-onna mask, which may also be used to portray “a once-beautiful courtesan brought low by haughty arrogance who looks back from the secluded hut in which she lives out her old age, surrounded by a fence of cypress-wood, upon the golden days long ago when she was the toast of Kyoto.” The higaki-no-onna is perfect for jonomai , the slowest Noh dance. In a pair of reproductions, that mask looks at me, straight on in despairing dullness, the skin still smooth but greyed and whited down, and turned to the left, which causes Komachi to lose herself in herself, like the dreamy concentration one sees on the faces of corpses who died peacefully; harvest moon of femininity, this face of Komachi swims alone in outer space, sickly conscious of her disembodiment: She will never again feel a man in her arms — unless an actor ties her onto his face, and then… and then she will merely get carried about in a creep. As for “Ono no Komachi,” that play is so rarely performed that I have no information respecting permissible masks. And Mr. Kanze is dead. Laurel of the moon, human shadow, Komachi, our dying other self, what am I to do with you, you whom I see but cannot touch? Slowly Komachi orbits away from me. Soon she will be back in her box.

The messenger finally rises. Komachi straightens toward him. He stands and waits; then she glides past him and he past her. As it habitually does, the rainbow curtain rises by itself, and the messenger glides into its undershadow. Komachi stands onstage alone, chanting, then a sharp drum-click impels her to depart in silence, limping along the bridge.

BEAUTIFUL TOMBS

And it was Noh; it was beautiful, like a marble kore broken away from the Parthenon. Lacking arms, legs and even her head, this young woman first appears to us as an age- and pigment-stained boulder. Her young breasts are as worn as sea-glass. The incisions of her tunic-folds provide most of her surviving definition, aside from her right thigh, which, says the museum catalogue, “is revealed as she pulls the peplos to one side with her now-missing right hand.” Her belt is tight and her waist is narrow. Here stands, on sturdy modern pins, a chipped stone garment with someone inside it who is living yet incomplete. Before Lord Elgin conveyed her away, before his predecessors mutilated her, and the centuries abraded her paint into something less than a suggestion, who was she? Beneath the blue brows of Katsura, Komachi’s gaze once looked out. If we peer into her eyesockets, can’t we find it? Can’t we believe in the Elgin Kore’s right hand? If we can see old age and ruin as understatement in their own right, masked performances of a beauty in which we never could have imagined we would believe, then actor and audience together have won a victory.

In “Sekidera Komachi,” even as we are led to pity the vanity of worldly attachment, of Komachi’s longing to remain young and beautiful, we are simultaneously advised that poetry remains immortal and green like pine trees, that words of poetry will never fail.

To what extent could this possibly be true? During successful performances, Noh’s insistent disjunction between the lovely or at least artful mask and the actor’s flabby throat permits the former to triumph over the latter or at least to make it irrelevant: the adam’s apple moves without shame. And in the Komachi plays, the pathos of the heroine’s lost past (her present sad, her future worse) is beautified by her memories of her youth:

My rooms shone with tortoise shell,

Golden flowers grew from the walls,

And in the door bloomed crystal bead strings.

More clear-eyed than Murasame and Matsukaze (after all, she is not yet a ghost), Komachi admits to herself that the past is past. But grace dwells yet in her bones. As Zeami remarks, “white jade, even in the mud, will retain its real appearance.”

As for those artifacts of yellow jade called skulls, why, don’t those also remain as they are?

One summer dusk on the bamboo-shaded hillside above Choraku-ji Temple I am surprised to discover myself a guest of death. The narrow tomb-pillars, as pleasingly proportioned as packaged sweets, the trembling ferns, air and light shimmering through the tall bamboo, the loveliness of this world, which has put on a costume of shade, the bright white backdrop of sky through, beyond and behind like a theatrical backdrop of radical simplicity, my own joy, and the workings of my mentality (I have just realized that in this place, near the conclusion of the Tale of the Heike , a certain sad Empress took the tonsure) protect me from the reality: Someday, unless I get turned into smoke, wind or ants will pass through the eyeholes of my skull. Crows croak. Sitting on the ground, I cannot see Kyoto below me.

A Few Thoughts About Time

The grace of a woman is indeed a snow image. A snow-faced onnagata gazes sadly out at this floating world from the corners of her eyes, whose over-and-underlining thickens as it departs the nose, so that their inward edges are points and the outward ones rounded like raindrops; her crimson heartshaped little mouth takes on all the more beauty above her sky-blue collar and below her purple-black wig and eyebrows; with long white fingers she holds her striped robe just open or just closed at the breast, showing off the milky river-patterns on her slate-blue obi. Within a few hours at most she will be washing off her paint.

Katy might fall asleep with her makeup on, but tomorrow she too must slough off her female skin.

A Noh actor plays Komachi. Then in the mirror room an uba mask goes back into its box, and an old man goes home.

Once upon a time, Urashima of Mizunoé married the Sea-God’s daughter and lived immortally with her amidst the octopi until he foolishly decided to visit his parents, who of course had long since risen up in funeral-smoke; so, standing alone on the shore, he opened the casket she’d warned him never to open, and out came a white cloud that returned to the Sea-God’s palace without him; he immediately died of old age.

The grace of Noh is one more snow image, and likewise Kabuki, in which the faded block prints and paper screens of the past are reborn into stunning brightness. How easy it is to live delusionally beyond time, until the performance ends, the beautiful face returns to its box, and I swirl out of mine, joining the effervescence of salarymen in dark suits who march along with me all the way to Shinagawa Station, their heads high, only a few of them yawning, most of them resolute even when they bear dark hollows under their eyes, almost all proceeding in one direction, which is the same taken by the shoals of miniskirted high heeled schoolgirls in uniforms which vary the sailor suit theme; these people are concentrating sometimes on some intermediate point ahead of them in the night, sometimes on something within their skulls, or on the screen of an illuminated cellphone held at arm’s length, but hardly ever on each other; they resemble a school of fish, wide-eyed and together forward, passing solitary from womb to grave. As it gets later, the clothing grows more varied, the faces less resolute; one even spies grubby people. But every now and then a lovely face streaks across my horizon, always rightward, and, like all the others, rounds the corner and passes through the ticket gate. I reach my coffin hotel. It is time to hang up my wilted suit. The crowd continues on toward the Sea-God’s palace. I brush my teeth and say goodnight to my ageing face. 1