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

As a matter of fact, Fukakusa’s character is hardly otherwise in the traditional Noh plays. In “Kayoi Komachi” the waki comes to the grass to pray for the release of her moaning skull. Fukakusa no Shoso’s spirit also exists here; but he at first refuses to accept the Law of Buddha and be enlightened. Clinging to his love and resentment, he goes so far as to menace the priest. Presently, however, he finds himself, in the accustomed pathetic fashion of ghosts, reenacting the hundredth night, on the verge of winning of Komachi’s favors, and this somehow enables him to reach the better consummation of enlightenment.

I see Komachi young and alone in a certain snowy landscape, at the bottom of a narrow vertical ukiyo-e painting, one branch of a leafless tree poised over her head, then far above her the scribbly rain of calligraphy. With her pale, stylized face she could have been anyone. I feel a trace of boredom; trapped in the Sea-God’s palace, I find myself preferring Mishima’s Komachi — but only for an instant, because what ruined Urashima was that his attachment became a trap, and Mishima’s tale ends no better; his attachment merely happened to be to death itself.

When I compared him to Poe, I was thinking precisely of the horror which stained their separate but not dissimilar thanatophilia. In Mishima’s fantasies, seppuku may come voluptuously, and the man’s corpse may allure other men, but there is no branch of flowers . In any good Noh performance of “Aoi-no-Ue” the goldenfaced horned monster of hatred and jealously lowers its mask-face, glowering and grinning, horrible, advancing upon the exorcist, yellow-eyed and almost cheerful but also dead and rotting, the reincarnation of the lovely woman who did not know how envious she was; whenever it lowers its head, it seems to be snarling and cowering like a dog; when it raises it, it embodies evil on the verge of triumph; and still it is beautiful with the severe beauty of a marble Artemis who has scarcely aged.

Meanwhile, Mishima’s Komachi scrounges cigarette butts. This act of vandalism refreshes me; it brings me out of the Sea-God’s palace; but then the decay I see in her brings me only grief. I feel in Mishima’s Noh plays the violence of a man who attacked his tradition because he hated himself.

The black cracks and wrinkles in even a Kamakura Buddha’s goldskinned face can certainly inspire any number of unhappy sensations, but there do remain to us three strategies for overcoming such feelings. The first is to make decay into something piquant, as I have done when making love with extremely aged women. The second is to obscure those signs of deficiency, as the Urashimas among us strive insistently to do (or, as Mishima does, to insist on them, which is almost the same thing). The third is to project and animate the material shell in such a way that its beautiful essence claims our immediate perception. Naturally this requires distance and deception. Or perhaps it simply requires understatement. We need not state the wrinkles to state the Buddha. In any event, it requires transient life to animate the mask.

What Kawabata says in opposition to Mishima, and many Noh texts also imply this, is that a recollected attachment can outlive the decay of the lovers, like the violet blossoms blooming reclusively on the ancient maple tree at the beginning of Kawabata’s novel The Old Capital . “As time passed,” he writes in Beauty and Sadness , “the memory of their embrace was gradually becoming purified within Otoko, changing from physical to spiritual… When she recalled what he had taught her, and imitated it in making love to Keiko,” her lesbian protégée, “she feared that the sacred vision might be stained,” as it always is in Mishima’s pages. “But it remained inviolate.”

The white pillar lists and rots; white ants attack it; they are as snowskinned as an image of a dancing courtesan on gilded paper. Mishima feels no sabi , or at least denies that he does. But neither does Komachi herself. Like him, she is less a teller than a protagonist of the tragedy. It is not that his art is any less “true” than Zeami’s. It is merely less neutral, “unattached” and self-observed. The Heian court poets might have best understood it in relation to ushin , conviction of feeling.

In the photographs of him he always appears “sensitive,” sometimes clearly on purpose, sometimes, as in the body building portraits, in spite of him. His lower lip frequently protrudes a trifle, like that of a ko-omote . His pale face is narrow, his handsome mouth occasionally a trifle twisted. Who is this person?

Mishima fears the white ants, and fears to fear (also fearing boredom), and so he offers himself to them. The result is a combination of bravery and cynicism: “To wash oneself clean of one sin that was permeated with sacrilege, one must commit another. In the end, the two would cancel each other out…” This is what I love Mishima for most of all. If he can only screw up his courage in this childish and twisted way, still, he dares; he strives to be “realistic.” Attachment without grace! How the Heians would have blanched! — And yet, Noh’s spiritual emphasis may be summed up by none other than the following sentence in Runaway Horses : “He was always thinking of death, and this had so refined him that the physical seemed to fall away, freeing him from the pull of earth and enabling him to walk about some distance above its surface.” Rereading this sentence, I seem to see Mr. Kanze gliding in beautiful agony across the bridge toward the rainbow curtain.

The Unknown

In Silla at the dead of night, the sun shines brightly.” Thus Zeami describes the highest of his nine levels of beauty. This is the flower of peerless charm. “The meaning of the phrase Peerless Charm surpasses any explanation in words and lies beyond the workings of consciousness… the Grace of the greatest performers in our art… gives rise to the moment of Feeling that Transcends Cognition, and to an art that lies beyond any level that the artist may have consciously attained.”

What Silla “means,” therefore, even Zeami could not say. Sillan sunshine, which I imagine to be as still and white as a geisha’s face powder, may in fact be less visible than snow in a silver bowl, or even pine trees ornamented with balls of snow. In the words of the eighteenth-century aphorist Lichtenberg: “The metaphor is much more subtle than its inventor, and so are many things. Everything has its depths. He who has eyes sees all in everything.” — And so I propose that Silla, that far away monarchy whose dominion over Korea’s Three Kingdoms collapsed more than four centuries before Zeami was born, is the place where the objects of our attachment live, and therefore the place where we can never go.

The Romantic poet Novalis wrote a novel whose protagonist wondered: “Do I not feel as I did in that dream when I saw the blue flower? What strange connection is there between Mathilda and that flower?” We know what Mishima would have replied: “That’s easy. They both equal death!” But how that connection would have played out we will never know, for Novalis died two years after Lichtenberg, with Henry von Ofterdingen unfinished. Meanwhile, Rodin’s “Psyche” waits for nothing, veiled by her own half-formlessness in the marble, the vagueness of her stone features haunting, almost shocking because what we can in fact see of her is perfect. The subtlety of that matter might have been likewise saved by the death of the inventor. I myself could hardly hope to rescue Psyche with a chisel, nor to definitively diagram Mathilda’s relation to flowerhood.