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 museum in Kanazawa I see a vermilion-and-pale-green checkerboard undergarment from the Edo period, the vermilion squares enclosing cloud and treasure-ring patterns, the green ones containing cranes in diamonds. This robe was worn by the shite in the second act of “Takasago.” The farewells ended centuries ago. The men who wove and acted in this garment are all dead. Surely even Takasago must feel bereft in time. Why wouldn’t she writhe like a snake? Malraux writes that “all art is a revolt against man’s fate,” and even when Noh advises submission to fate, revolt being attachment, all the same, Takasago stands firm, and Mr. Umewaka worries that today’s kimonos will remain usable for the merest hundred and fifty years! Is that or is it not insane attachment? If not, what is it?

The pines that grew together dance in the wind — and one of them falls, then the other. Why? Every literary critic has his theory as to what brings actors and spectators together in the Noh theater. As Pinguet says in his essay on Japanese suicide, “love is a madness, but therein it is pure, like flame, empty and transparent… the most touching truth is the supreme innocence of gratuitous suffering and gratuitous love, which takes fire and burns away unexplained…”

The instability of human love is fundamental to the Tale of Genji , and to Komachi’s verse, not to mention “Matsukaze” and “Izutsu.” The abyss between us can be bridged only provisionally. The feminine grace that I long for and, if I am lucky, consume may not suffice to maintain my decency and responsibility to the woman I love. Such was the case with Genji ’s eponymous hero, whose myriad women could count on his support but not always on his attentive presence in their lives. And so a twentieth-century scholar concludes, perhaps a trifle glibly, that “there are fundamental barriers created by society and the marital system” of Heian times “which even the most devoted, sensitive, and well-intentioned lovers cannot cross.” Accordingly, “it is the women” in the novel, not Genji, “who come to a deeper, albeit bleaker, vision of love and marriage.” It is certainly true that in the period when the Genji and the various Noh plays under consideration were written, women enjoyed far less power than men. All the same, the women to whom I am drawn seem no less likely to break my heart than I to shatter theirs; and even Genji grew sad at the end.

As a man and a woman chant together in the Noh play “Nishikigi,” “Perhaps with love it is always so: vain days, vain thoughts unnumbered, and no way to forget.”

Another Noh play (“Aya no Tsuzumi”): “The anger of lust denied covers me like darkness.”

But attachment, in its epiphanies, at least, can approach the oblivion of Nirvana. In “Izutsu” we hear this about the lovely and loving shite : “At nineteen I first pledged love with him, she said, and vanished in the shadows of the well curb…” Of course her fate is to haunt her lover’s tomb, which sometimes becomes the well into which he and she once gazed; now she is immortal because her loneliness cannot die. But must this be the human situation? In the Greek myth of Baucis and Philomen, a poor but contented old couple ask the gods for nothing but to die at the same time. When their moment comes, they turn into a pair of trees. If death is, as I hope it to be, oblivion, they will certainly be spared the vain thoughts unnumbered; if there is postmortem consciousness, then hopefully their proximity will be a comfort.

What about the rest of us? Our story tells itself in the drama I find most affecting of any: “Matsukaze.”

SALTMAKERS’ TEARS

Although the play was performed even earlier, as a dengaku , much or most seems to have been written by Zeami, with one sequence near the beginning credited to his father. In that epoch, “Izutsu” was considered to express the highest artistic level, that of “peerless charm,” while “Matsukaze” achieved merely the “flower of profundity.” I disagree.

The plot has already been summarized: A travelling priest comes to Suma, and finds a pine tree bearing a wooden memorial tablet and a poem. — Suma is, like any other spot on this Noh stage that we call the world, rich in ghosts. It especially epitomizes loneliness. In the Genji Picture-Scrolls we see the Shining Prince himself seated with two male companions in a thatched-roof pavillion, watching the black moon rising through a hole in the dark-flecked goldness above the pines of Suma. When, if ever, will he be permitted to return to the capital? And so he writes poems and seduces a young lady in nearby Akashi. — But this memorial tablet discovered by the waki relates more overtly to other ghosts; for a villager now informs him that here is the grave of the sisters Matsukaze, “Pining Wind,” 3and Murasame, “Autumn Rain.” Night is falling. The priest sees a salt shed, and asks for shelter there. It belongs, of course, to the two ghosts, who finally overcome their shame and let him stay. They tell him the story of how the exiled courtier Yukihira 4chose them for his own. (Genji himself makes allusion to Yukihira. Hokusai has left us a sketch of his own imagined Yukihira, who huddles over his outdoor writing table, his eyebrows high painted dots in Noh mask style, and in the background, no doubt in reference to the sisters, we find a steep hill of pine trees and rain.) “He changed our saltmakers’ vestments for damask robes, scented subtly with fragrance.” Three years later, he was recalled to grace, and died, “so young!.. Now the message we both pined for would never come.”

He had condescended to cross the abyss to them; they had gratefully crossed the void to him; now he was not merely beyond them but gone , right out of this crazy-edged world, which is tipped and tilted, above all, broken, with the long twisted snow-flesh, clouds and lichened blocks of it spilling down like milk from a shattered pitcher. Where did he go? Perhaps he now dwells with Yokihi, better known as Lady Yang.

The two tokens he left them, his cloak and hunting hat, increase the torment. Matsukaze drops the cloak, picks it up, as unable to forget as that lovelorn geisha who squirmed like a snake. And so the play’s sadness grows as lush as snow on the roofs in the zone that Kawabata called Snow Country. Presently Matsukaze’s insanity makes her mistake a pine tree for Yukihira. In the end, the two sprites beseech the priest to pray for their rest. Then they fade away.

The site of Yukihira’s exile, and Genji’s, also encompasses Atsumori’s stupa, where the nighttime sea shows itself across railroad tracks as a row of yellow lights underlined by their funneling reflections. Atsumori’s eponymous Noh play informs us that the defeated Heike warriors took on the lives of saltmakers for a time, awaiting the last battle. Meanwhile, Atsumori’s spirit masquerades as a grasscutter during the first act. In the second, the Honsho School sometimes employs a juuroku mask; I have seen one from the sixteenth century that is very white-skinned and infantile, the expression of the mouth similar to a ko-omote ’s, the eyes perhaps a trifle more open and the lower lip definitely fuller, like a true girl’s, but in place of long womanly locks wrapping around his forehead and cheeks, his bangs go ruler-straight across his forehead. His thin eyebrows slope up and out.

The yellowish clatter of a local train rushes behind Atsumori’s stupa, almost bisecting it. Crickets and leaves gild this diminished thing with whatever sabi can be obtained in its courtyard with cars before it and the train behind it. It stands still and sad, a forgotten giant in five stone parts.

The walk is short from there to Suma-dera Station, which can feel lonely with its late night electric humming, cigarettes, beer and coffee glowing in the vending machines; crickets; a man’s singing voice, recorded or not, coming from the Pony Coffee Shop, no sea smell at all, but a plenitude of asphalt, concrete, lights and gratings; and from there it is an even briefer walk to Matsukaze-do, the memorial for Matsukaze and Murasame.