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

Here a sculpted pine whose leaves are as clouds inclines itself before three cages, before the middle of which hangs a thick braided rope ending in a bamboo knocker. Behind the latticework, twin bouquets in twin vases may perhaps represent the two sisters; my interpreter does not know. Behind them stands another latticework window whose darkness occasionally blooms with reflected headlights. As for the righthand cage, bulbous rock objects and one feminine-seeming doll stand arrayed in bibs behind another more slender rope. In front of the cage is a teapot, which may for all I know be a dipper of purifying water. And in the lefthand cage, behind the sculpted pine that I first mentioned, remains an impressive stump, supposed to be the remains of the pine tree on which Yukihira hung his clothes. The sculpted pine is the one he planted. Here he supposedly lived and met the two sisters. Then they moved away to die, somewhere up the hill. I could not find their tombs, but I did go to Suma-dera Park, where from a pavilion on a black pond streaked with ovoid pillars of pale light I watched a hotel’s orange window-lights and especially the consecutive lobby or restaurant brightnesses of its first level bleeding greenish-orange onto the black ripples of the pond; to the north I could see the silhouette of hills, and somebody thought that the two sisters might be buried there.

MASKS OF FEMININITY

Donald Keene insists: “It makes no sense whatsoever to imagine Matsukaze’s height or coloring, or even to ask if Yukihira was equally in love with both sisters or favored Matsukaze over Murasame. Such matters are not mentioned in the play and therefore, almost by definition, they are irrelevant.” All the same, being an ape in a cage, I will imagine what I choose. For the most enduring incarnation of the true flower is that of the image, or the ghost. If I were a Norseman, my vision would give them both white arms. Were I Japanese, they would have black hair; and had I lived in old Egypt I would have likened their hair to lapis lazuli. — Now that we have gotten all that out of the way, why not imagine Matsukaze in a waka-onna mask? So the Kanze School portrays her. The mask carver Ms. Nakamura imagined that a waka-onna would be more appropriate for Matsukaze than the younger ko-omote , because she must still be beautiful but had already begun to suffer. Indeed, this is the mask now commonly used for performances of the play. But until sometime in the seventeenth century, Matsukaze was considered sufficiently careworn to be expressed by the fukai instead.

The rarer fushikizo mask, which closely resembles a waka-onna and is sometimes considered to be one, can also be employed. I have seen a photograph of a fushikizo used for this role. It partakes of the narrow oval of an ukiyo-e beauty’s face, although the latter’s lips are much tinier, her nose more angular and pronounced, her willow brows more elongated. Its carver describes it thus: “ Yuki style with the nose tilted to the right. The cheekbone on the right is lifted sharply like a yase-onna ’s, while the left cheek is full and round. Therefore, the lips are round like a ko-omote ’s and with a smile on the left, but are noble like a zo-onna ’s on the right. Left and right should not be made the same.”

This amalgamation makes me envision Matsukaze rather differently than I would have otherwise. You may recall that the yase-onna , skinny woman, portrays the pathetic aspects of vengeful female ghosts; and the pathos of Matsukaze’s situation is all too evident, I resist considering her as vindictive; she seems too gentle and literally unworldly for that. But this only goes to prove yet again the correctness of Mr. Umewaka’s dictum that “the mask is most important always.” What is grace? What is a woman? Why should the tilt of a fukai mask’s nose determine what that mask best performs? 5And so what signifies the lift of a cheekbone? Since the old Native American lady with high cheekbones whom I once met on a Greyhound bus was not, insofar as I could tell, a sadly vindictive ghost; since, in short, the predictive and diagnostic virtues of physiognomy have been discredited, recognizing the hint implied by a specific choice of Noh mask, and allowing our interpretation, and resulting aesthetic pleasure in it, to be guided accordingly, will always unsettle me a trifle. But just as Claudio Arrau’s performance of Chopin’s “Nocturnes” and fugues is so profoundly warmer and more hushed than Daniel Barenboim’s that we could almost be listening to two different compositions, so a Matsukaze whose madness has literally split her face, like the ghost of Yokihi dancing out the everlasting pain of “Rainbow Skirts” in a moon-style ko-omote , is alien to a Matsukaze who incarnates the perfect coherence of sweet sadness. 6

In any event, narrower than a ko-omote ’s face, the fushikizo ’s offers its audience dark red lips parted in a smile of knowing submission to pain. Turned to the left, the face expresses a readiness to smile even as the lower lip seems on the verge of trembling. Angled right, it seems more resigned. (Doubtless other viewers would see it differently.) Knowing as I do that this fushikizo can represent madness, I find myself elongating the eyes and mouth-slit in my memory, haunted by, and yes, I confess it, allured by that smile, that smile of pain.

When I asked Mr. Mikata which masks he might consider using to play each of the two sisters, he replied: “Procedurally both are ko-omote , but it can be up to the actor; one could use any woman mask.”

“Would you consider a fukai or must each woman always be very young?”

“In the case of ‘Matsukaze,’ the hardship is not really related to the age. Time is not conspicuous in this matter. Our information says thirty years. In “Izutsu” it is also eternal, since in childhood they got married. Both have others and got separated and still they are in love.”

“Which gestures would you use to differentiate Matsukaze from Murasame?”

“Basically when you show a distant scene, both are lined up like this” — and his hands went out. “When you want to put focus on the shite , the other players stand still and do this, while only the shite moves. What is interesting is, there is a scene where you scoop seawater. In the Kanze School, just the shite and the chorus does it, because the focus is on the elder sister, the shite . Even if you are looking at distant scenery, focus is on shite. In the Kita School both sisters sing together, and focus will be on both. That is in first half, but in second half, their feelings are in conflict, and the procedure alters.”

Who then is Matsukaze? How does this ape imagine her?

A poem in the Manyoshu remarks that the fisher-girls of Shika, who could not have been too dissimilar to those of Suma, almost never find time to comb their hair, so busily must they drudge at seaweed-gathering and salt-burning. I imagine that they often stank of smoke and sweat. Much later, Hokusai illustrates a thirteenth-century poem about burning seaweed on the beach of Matsuo, which faces Suma. Two men are stacking bundles of kelp; a man blows on the fire and a woman feeds it; meanwhile, two other women depart with their double buckets of salty ashes on poles across their shoulders. One leans forward, her feet splayed, and the other throws her shoulders back, gazing upward. How then could Matsukaze and Murasame not have had red, callused hands, sooty faces and unloosed, matted tresses? The translator Tyler insists, however, that some fisher-girls were entertainers and prostitutes. Lady Nijo mentions meeting on the isle of Taika some nuns who had once been such: “They would perfume their gowns in hopes of alluring men, and comb their dark hair, wondering on whose pillows it would become disheveled. When night fell they would await lovers, and when day broke, grieve over the separation.”