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 “Hagoromo” a man goes in quest of his vanished celestial wife. In such a situation, how high should be my expectations of success? 1Wandering between Kyoto’s tall and narrow severally-decked pagodas, I encounter merely one more industrial sunset whose concrete-walled stage becomes blue in the fading light.

In the Tokyo National Museum, Kannon prays for me, her plump face all gold, her slender, tapering fingers pressed together at her chest, ever so many smaller jointed arms at her sides; she is the lobster or crab of mercy, holding many small bottles and other objects in her hands, perhaps charms or medicines. Can even she help me find the gold at the end of the rainbow, the place to which the metaphor points? The rainbow curtain goes up by itself; the bridge faintly creaks beneath a kyogen actor’s unusually rapid step.

But perhaps Silla awaits even in tonight’s dead of night! From the fifteenth century, in his “Errant Cloud Collection,” Ikkyu Sojun reports upon the arhat , or Buddhist saint who has expunged himself of the passions:

In this polluted world an arhat dwells far from Buddhaland;

A single visit to a brothel, however, will arouse his great wisdom.

Then again, an evening at the Noh theater might do just as well. A flame flickers at Yasukuni Shrine and the chanting goes on, each chorister’s mouth a square when he chants; and Yoroboshi, who is Mr. Umewaka, comes slowly, slowly creeping, his stick ahead of him at the perfect angle, because he’s blind; he’s chosen yellow-beige to wear and his mask is paler than anything which has ever existed. He sings, his long, long hair spilling down in two thin waves upon his breast. Slowly he turns, his voice so resonant and tuneful; and a cold mist of rain comes down on us and the drum begins to tap as the blind figure extends itself. The waki puts the golden fan over his head. Silla is the stately immobility of Mr. Umewaka, and the ethereal way in which he turns, his blind man’s cane never varying in angle, his hair tapering precisely down his back, cherry blossoms glinting in the torchlight and chorus-voices swelling into dreams.

I remember an eyeless Noh mask like a pupil-less marble Aphrodite; and the snowy-faced concentration of the ukiyo-e lady who with tilted head scissors away the stalk of a flower in just the right place to fit it into a formal blossom arrangement. I recall the overwhemingly beautiful curtains at the Kabuki-za glowing from behind like lantern slides; I especially remember one of that theater’s stage: Mount Fuji peaks above the clouds, accompanied by a blood-red sun; the light simmered behind it as if the sky were going overcast. These inspire me with visions of the Sillan sun, which, granted, I can discover only indirectly, as when I realize that in Wyeth’s paintings Helga is so often looking at something that I can never see, sometimes something between trees but more frequently something in the darkness.

In the British Museum I have seen many-grooved silvergolden bracelets from Silla. Who wore them I lack the education to imagine. Did those long-dead princesses shine in the dead of night as sun-brightly as Valkyries? — Since I cannot quite envision such a shining, please permit me to call it peerless charm.

Floating in a cracked and mottled heaven of gold, a certain Roman Muse touches her wreathed head while raising up the oversized and gaping mask of Tragedy, whose eyesockets are as melting craters. If I got too close to those (not to mention the mouth), I would fall into nothingness. I cannot believe in this fresco’s verisimilitude; but if it were true, I’d be better off keeping my distance. Anyhow, I can’t go there; I’m here in the noodle shop which is so narrow that when the sliding glass door closes there barely remains room to sit on the three little stools between it and the counter where the hoarse-voiced woman in black and her mother and husband make udon whose noodles are as thick as fingers with broth beautiful yellow from raw egg yolk. (They laughed with white teeth and clapped their hands when I said it was the best eel in Osaka.)

What is grace? — Two geishas view plum blossoms in the snow. Everything is pinkish, as in the sunset-infused winterscapes of Kawabata’s Snow Country — and against this “everything,” the snowy branches and the geishas’ skins stand out. How otherworldly, how Noh-like the way the ladies turn away from each other, each admiring her own chosen blossom! Their long, brocaded robes almost touch the snow. — This ukiyo-e print by Torii Kiyonaga (1752–1815) exemplifies the true flower. Those geishas, if they ever actually existed, departed beyond the rainbow curtain centuries ago. And yet here they continue their shining, like the sun from the night of Silla. — Needless to say, for me at my long remove of ignorance, the Edo era itself, from which ukiyo-e was meant to be a semi-fantastic escape, has become a province of Silla; for I can see it only as the prints show it to me: as a time and place when everybody was melonfaced and wore robes of yellow and of lead-vermilion faded almost to yellow, and everyone was rushing, bearing burdens, buying and selling, seducing, sitting folded-kneed on bamboo porches, flirting in doorways, paying mouth obeisance to the samurai while dreaming of Kabuki evenings, new silk kimonos, visits to the pleasure quarter. Which sun do you suppose shines there at night? Here is an early-eighteenth-century black-and-white ukiyo-e print of a plump courtesan with a maple leaf hairpin who is raising up her many-crested surcoat with her little hand in order to step toward the righthand edge; we can see one miniature foot, and we can tell that she is gazing at something through her sleepy little eyes, but to find out just what, we will have to board a discreet boat to Yoshiwara. And since all such boats have rotted, burned or sunk, what shall I do but listen to snow in a silver bowl, or, if I lack the wit to do that, watch a Noh performance?

Isuien Garden in Nara is a rolling Arctic moss-scape whose pools tease the gaze, going in and out of view. I remember an islet made of a single rock whose shape resembles a tortoise shell; its moss-spots, which possess the brilliant pallor of green tea, shine against the darker green of that rock-ringed pool whose reflections of sculpted pines seem to grow downward like roots; really there is no down; each reflection lies across the surface, which can be crossed by an irregular array of stone cylinders whose tops are almost level with the water; what does it mean to go from here to there across the water? What could be more simple? On that mossy islet-rock is a single feather. What does that mean? The stone steps are still; the water moves ceaselessly, so gently that ripples but rarely mar its representation of the green, green world of upside trees; but a water-strider, having rested, suddenly kicks its back left leg and sends concentric circles across the jade-tinted reflection of a cloud. Beyond that insect, the trembling reflections of the many leaves comprise a complexity whose magnitude, like that of a Noh kimono’s brocade design, overwhelms perception-all-at-once, and thereby achieves at least one order of infinity. By “perception-all-at-once” I mean the opposite of consciousness’s systematic trolling: the data banks of a corporation, or the memories of a lifetime, may add up to any number of items; this leaf, that leaf and any number of others may be brought back into consideration; an artist may carefully represent each leaf in the reflection, but when all’s said and done, the result is more than we can take in all at once. Meanwhile, thanks to the breeze on the water, that totality alters at every instant, which increases infinity by another order. And all this is but a semblance acted out upon the skin of the water: the relationship between the reflected and the so-called “real” add another order of infinity, what goes on beneath the surface of the water, what stories the ancient carp enact, there’s another order; and beyond this vaguely heart-shaped pool, whose shape can almost be recorded by perception-all-at-once, lies “the world.” Never mind all that. Cross the stepping-stones from here to there and perhaps you are in the other world. In that case, what does the island signify?