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

That ageing isn’t all bad I know from the time-scarred buttocks of various marble Aphrodites, not to mention those lovingly used Noh masks. Besides, as my late grandfather always used to say, in evident disagreement with Komachi, “well, Bill, it’s better than the alternative.” One such alternative is conveyed by this letter from Oda Nobunaga to Murai Sadakatsu, 1575, with vermilion seal: “The town of Fuchu is nothing but corpses… I’d like to show it to you! Today I shall search every mountain and every valley, and I shall kill them all.” Accordingly, just for today I will permit myself to get a trifle older, being not quite ready to choose death, as Mishima did. And next time I go to Kyoto and ask Kofumi-san to dance for me, the lines at the corners of her mouth will have lengthened. She will be no less beautiful to me for that, and perhaps more so: Sabi not merely enriches but defines the open fields painted by Andrew Wyeth, who called their implied loneliness “natural for me.” In Snow Country , that master of aware , Kawabata, takes note of a certain woman as follows: “It was such a beautiful voice that it struck one as sad.” This may well be the most characteristic sentence in his oeuvre. (Did this man not write a book called Beauty and Sadness ?) The sadness, for him at least, comes from transience. Whenever his artistic gaze met schoolgirls in blue uniforms, green lanterns, red walls, necklaces of wisteria spilling down the tree-trellis, it was as if he remembered rather than perceived them. Mishima’s consciousness for its part would have sniffed them all anxiously for indications of decomposition. Urashima preferred to avoid them, and dwell — at least until his guilt or yearning prevented him — in a changeless place which I only imagine that I can imagine because it must be very old, and even if the gems remain in their sockets, the black calligraphy still frozen in rainstrings superimposed on the greyish cloud-shapes and grass-shapes of the palace screens, all the same, black must have flecked out of the courtiers’ hair, their faces decayed and flaked half away, their sea-flowers long since scattered and devoured by snails — unless, of course, Zeami is incorrect, and the true flower can in fact endure forever, like some precious mineral concretion in an E. T. A. Hoffmann fairytale.

The Sea-God’s daughter must have been perfect; her mouth must have been as cool as a mosquitoey afternoon exhaling from a moss garden in Kyoto. Beneath the cold waves on edge of which the saltmakers of Suma gathered seaweed to burn, the palace might have presented, like so many of Kyoto’s old temples, a curving roof of wavelike tiles, beneath which white panel walls and fragile wooden pillars stood multiply open to reveal a grid of paneled walls and tatami floors. Perhaps black snails kept them clean. And I imagine an open vermilion structure with silver-white rails from which Urashima and his wife could gaze down from the crest of a hill of tea-green shrubs — really more seaweed, but after his first thousand years of residence he might have forgotten the appearance of terrestrial plants, whose flowerings false and true would have been as lost to him as the changes of the moon.

Now that I think of it, the palace could just as well have resembled Mishima’s house, whose courtyard’s tile path winds among statues and urns. Mishima smiles widely in the old photos, drifting in or hiding from the shoals of guests who were allured by his talent, family, money, power, celebrity, physical appeal. He poses Napoleonlike on the stairs, with a painting of a three-masted sailing ship behind him. The house is a museum now. His Parisian clock, which in its swirling rococo intricacy resembles a hunk of tropical coral reef, no longer tells the time.

Mishima sometimes liked to pose amidst his statuary, which emanated masculinity. Well, and what is a statue to you? I myself prefer to meet imperishable femininity. From 350 B.C. or thereabouts, a winged nude goddess stares stolidly ahead, her dark and mottled skin its own armor, her breasts and nipples their own breastplates, her V-shaped pubis one more facet or plane which might perhaps open from within, like the air vent of a tank, her pupil-less eyes equally impenetrable surfaces flecked with greenish-gold. She is, apparently, Lasa, an approximate Etruscan equivalent of Venus. The alabastron she holds in her left hand is a perfume vessel. Her right hand visors her gaze. Her hair resembles swirling sun-rays. She is hard and slender. Call her a true flower incarnated forever. She allures me, but I can scarcely pretend to know her as an Etruscan would. Devoting the remainder of my life to learning to love her through her context might bring me joy, but I would be decaying ever farther from her with every instant; moreover, who would she be, if anyone? At least the mask sometimes has a living being inside it. If my feelings for her fulfilled me, how would they differ from autogynephilia? Wouldn’t it be more appropriate simply to set her beside another statue?

I remember two figures together on a Noh stage, the demon whirling, the goddess still and composed. Isn’t this how the marriage of a human with an immortal would go?

The Tokugawa Museum displays a scroll depicting Ono no Komachi: The eyebrow-lines painted high on her forehead, the arrowhead face, narrow eyes, and long, black hair could almost have represented any lady in a Genji Picture-Scroll — not quite, for her cheeks were not as chubby as theirs, but she had been analogously understated into feminine elegance; she dwelled with the Sea-God’s daughter in that realm where each eye is one stroke of the brush and all women have wide cheeks and small mouths, regardless of age and sex, and where, furthermore, they are depicted always in profile or half-profile, never with any expression, in the late Heian style of “female picture” called yamato-e . Why shouldn’t such entities endure for eternity? Komachi’s kimono opened at the neck in a series of nested outward-curving V’s like waterfalls or rainbows springing apart from the same root, revealing the zigzag dark-on-green of the inner kimono, and then a faint arc of snow-white inner kimono where multitudes of desperate lovers must have directed eyes, caresses and poems.

Was it this realm that Fukakusa no Shoso, he who failed to win Komachi on the verge of achieving his hundred faithful nights, truly wanted to enter? Would he have been content to live eternally in expressionless profile? Perhaps his soul was disordered from the beginning. In “Sotoba Komachi,” he possesses his enfeebled antagonist in order to announce through her lips: “She sent no answer, not the merest trifling word; accordingly for punishment she has grown old. She has lived a hundred years. I love her; how I love her!” — Thus Noh insists once again on the insanity of attachment.

That attachment is insane is, of course, no strike against it. (Andrew Wyeth again: “The only thing that I want to search for is the growth and depth of my emotion toward a given object.”) And for me the point of Komachi’s story is not that she was cruel, if indeed she was, but that she was thoughtless, as most living beings are and might as well be. She got old, then regretted the days when she had been thoughtless. In “Sotoba Komachi” the priests sorrowed for her. Why not for you and me?

If Kawabata had written about her, I think he would have concentrated in the days just before her mask began to get scratched. Mishima did take her up. He rewrote “Sotoba Komachi.”

Were this a more “literary” book I would have spent much of it on Kawabata, who was not, as Mishima is, the bitter victim of beauty, but its mourning celebrant. If you want to see what he saw, look at the youngest faces in the girlie magazines. Or go to the hot springs of the Snow Country. Or visit the Hiragiya Ryokan in Kyoto. This inn offers the paying guest a certain lovely tatami room with walled garden all around: stone lanterns, ferns and moss. The blinds are a trifle down and there is a lacquered table. So much of this inner world is soothing and beige. I remember the latticed sliding screens with snow-viewing windows at the right height for seeing when sitting. Kawabata used to stay here with his wife — although it is said that he rented another place to write in.