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

The silhouette of a carp slides by and vanishes behind or under the green-gold reflection of that pine tree. Just then the wind blows, and the reflection breaks up into myriad prismatic ovals of light green and white, pine needles duplicated, replicated, distorted.

Grace is under the water, or reflected on the water. I can see it; why can’t I touch it?

“Takasago,” “Izutsu” and “Matsukaze”

In an anonymous fan created sometime during the middle Tokugawa period (1742–91), pine trees express their peerless charm as ovoid needle-clouds in a sky of pure gold, rent along the fan-curve by two crimson irregularities studded with gold leaves and insects, and also by a very stylized blue shard of water with green lilypads. The pines offer Japanese asymmetry in all its grace. Their needle-clusters have been embellished into fans of rays within each cloud-lobe, and eyelashes-like constructions along the edges. The Noh actor who employs this fan represents a shrine priest. What could be more appropriate to his station? After all, the pine remains evergreen . In defiance of my epoch’s botanists, Zeami asserts that pine blossoms appear every thousand years, ten times in all — a span which for humans practically equals eternity. “So, awaiting this occasion, the branches of the pine / Bear leaves of poetry, shining with dewdrop gems.” — This marriage of the eternal with the transient expresses much of lies within Noh’s mysterious heart. The old man transforming himself into the young female, the stillness that frames passion and delusion and violence, the constant endeavor to neutralize opposites, all these can be expressed in the trope of the flowering pine. No wonder Zeami writes that the Noh actor who successfully impersonates an old man becomes “like blossoms on an ancient tree!”

It would not be going too far to ascribe divinity to the pine. When I asked the Noh actor Mr. Mikata Shizuka what it signifies on the Noh stage, he began with the surprising information that “before the Edo period, we didn’t have that pine tree,” I suppose because in the past the plays were usually performed outside; 1then he said: “The god has to come to something, and it is to a pine tree where the god comes. Toward the tree we dedicate our art.”

TAKASAGO

One of the best known Noh plays is called “Takasago,” and indeed the fan just described was fashioned for use in this very drama, which portrays two pine trees. Zeami informs us that they “grew up together,” although their residences, Sumiyoshi and eponymous Takasago, lie three days’ journeying apart. The enigma solves itself when we learn (as the play’s original audience knew quite well) that they are god and goddess.

Hokusai offers us a simple line-image of this old couple, the man with a rake over his shoulder, the woman with a broom below and behind her. This is how we first see them in the play, in the typical Noh mode of unassuming mortal disguise. It is, after all, as exemplars for humans that they are best known. The song beginning “O Takasago!” is still sung at most Japanese weddings, which would please Zeami the populist entertainer. And apparently this song or a similar one once opened the year’s Noh repertory. Fenollosa’s notes inform us: “And while the cup of the Shogun is poured out three times, Kanze sings the ‘Shikai-nami’ passage from the play of Takasago, still bowing.” The play is a lovely evocation of conjugal fidelity, 2and its last lines are especially beautiful: “The pines that grew together dance in the wind, / resounding with the rustling voice of joy.”

I myself, a product of skeptical individualism, have never been impressed by “Takasago’s” pieties, which must have been cliché’d before Zeami was born. In the late tenth century, we find the author of The Gossamer Journal penning such poems as

The pine-clad mountain

will never be inconstant

and I wonder how many times I have read this before. The Gossamer Lady’s husband, who ultimately will prove quite inconstant indeed, has already written her father a promise-poem comparing the length of his fidelity to the long-lived pines at Sue-no-Matsuyama. She wryly supposes him incapable of sleeping alone “even if you were dwelling near the peak at Takasago.” Even then, it would seem, the allusion had become sufficiently well worn to permit irony without impiety.

But although I cannot feel, much less believe in, the mystical dimension of this play, I admit that others can and do. After seeing a sequence of his plays I asked Mr. Umewaka what his most challenging role had been, and he replied: “Today’s ‘Takasago,’ because it portrays a god.”

ETERNAL GREEN, VAIN THOUGHTS

What is inconstancy, really, but time itself? I quote from A Tale of Flowering Fortunes : “On the Day of the Rat, the pines at Funaoka impressed everyone with their eternal green…” That happened almost a thousand years ago now. Even if Zeami is correct, and those pine trees have up to nine thousand years more of life, someday they will be gone. As we read in an eighth-century poem from the Manyoshu , “the maiden’s crimson face is gone forever with the woman’s three duties to obey, and young white flesh is destroyed forever with the wife’s four virtues.” To whom, then, is her husband being faithful?

In Nara a five-tiered pagoda stands almost obscured by a pine tree, and as dusk comes on, its greenish-grey tiled roofs increasingly come to resemble the pine needles in hue; its wooden walls resemble the tree; only the white panels, subdivided into hexagram-like patterns by the wooden railings, stand out. Someday this too will be gone.

Through March’s bare branches, a pine tree’s swaying can be seen. When spring comes, new leaves of other trees will hide this view; the pine will be lost.

In the Nara period, a noncommissioned officer of the frontier guards likens rows of pines to “my own people! / They stood just so / As they came out / To bid me farewell.” — Then what? The farewells end; isolation begins.

A woman loves a man and marries him. They promise to keep faith with one another. Someday death will end their faith even if they lie together in the same grave — or is this not so? Why not insist that it is not so? Once both parties have reverted to soot and dust, how can it do any harm to call their fidelity eternal? (Even Komachi was eternally faithful — to herself.) In the spectacular “Izutsu,” the shite , ghost of a dead man’s multiply betrayed woman, grieves for the love she cannot forget. Her lover was Arihira no Narihira, who composed the poetic core of The Tales of Ise . “His name alone lives on,” sings the chorus in “Izutsu.” And we hear that the temple named after him has long since collapsed into the mold. “An ancient pine is rooted in the mound.” Hare sees the pine as ironic, given that Narihira’s bone-dust lies beneath it; I am not so sure.

In Kawabata’s typically understated novel The Old Capital (1962), twin sisters separated almost at birth discover each other when they have become women. Chieko has been raised by foster-parents in the refined culture of Kyoto; Naeko is a peasant girl in the mountains. A young man in love with Chieko mistakes Naeko for her. After recognizing his mistake he nonetheless proposes to Naeko, who remarks (and it is precisely this that Mishima’s Noh plays react against): “Even when I’m an old woman of sixty, won’t the Chieko of his illusions still be as young as you are now?… The time never comes when a beautiful illusion turns ugly.”

Of course by symbolizing attachment the pine tree necessarily represents imprisonment also. The shite ’s situation, which is to say ours, is grounded in yearning for an inconstant illusion. Hence the fundamental contradiction of life itself. About her ex-lover a geisha writes: “I couldn’t break the bonds of my insane attachment to him… I was writhing and squirming like a snake left for dead but alive.” How does this differ from the anguished constancy of a widow? How is it inferior to the loyalty of Takasago?