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

These were very real women, to be sure, with real boxwood combs, and my book-acquaintanceship with them encourages me to imagine Matsukaze’s height and coloring, thus:

One hot sad night I lay tormented by the indifference and evasiveness of the woman I loved, who had once cleaved to me with wild passion. She now communicated with me at rarer intervals and more superficially; when I asked her what was the reason for this change in her she irritably closed the subject. On various occasions she told me that she was tired, that she hardly knew whether we were lovers or friends, that she reserved the right to refrain from saying I love you whenever she liked. She had gone away, found a perfectly practical reason not to see me on her return, then gone away again. I telephoned her and she did not answer; once she would have answered immediately. It seemed only too clear that our attachment must soon end. And so that night, having stayed up late in hopes that she would call, I slept very little, mostly trying to find a comfortable way to dispose my body, wondering how to endure the aching of my heart. And then into the room there drifted someone in a pale nightgown, someone tall, with long hair; and I realized that she had come to me. In a single graceful motion she slowly pulled the nightgown over her head and was naked. Then she lay down beside me. All this had happened before, especially in recent months when we had frequently grown silent and bitter with one another, so that I went to bed alone; waiting rigidly on my back in the darkness with a child’s hurt pride until she finally came silently in to me. And so this new visitation was not exactly surprising. All the same, there had been an instant when she first came in when I had not known who she was; and then there was the silence of her silence, the luminous pallor of her nightgown, and the way she approached me without seeming to move her feet, just as a Noh actor could have done. And when she got into bed with me, that, too, was all in one motion. Now she had come to me, and the grief in my chest was instantaneously relieved. Then in the next instant I awoke, with her far away, of course, and at once my heart ached as if a sledgemallet had struck it. Until dawn I lay in misery, but also in gratitude at the loveliness of the visitation, during which I had not even seen her face as more than a pale blur in the darkness. Her phantom caused me pain, as Matsukaze’s vision of her absent lover did for her; yet how glorious it had been to see it, like watching the Noh play itself…

Zeami has said that the flower does not exist in and of itself; and perhaps another of attachment’s errors is to feel that it does, in which case, even though “the mask is most important always,” it remains nothing without the actor to animate it. She had been my flower. Now what was she?

After our final quarrel, which I desperately precipitated and angrily concluded because I wanted a resolution (she told me that I could keep her even now if I would only stop making demands; but the way I saw it, I was already losing her, and what I asked was merely for her to become again to me what she had once freely and passionately been), I exchanged the desperation of losing her for the anguish of having lost her, and that was as reliable as a friend. When I was younger I would have done almost anything to ameliorate this feeling, but now that I was older like a ghost, I realized that anguish is constancy.

But what was it I was longing for? I still think I did right, when she began to turn away from me and many efforts could not win her back; to leave her of my own accord before she glided entirely off the stage. Glide away she did, to a better place where she need not think of me; and all I could do was wait on my side of the rainbow curtain, imagining the joy she felt on ascending into this resplendence; nearly her last words to me were that she had no time to open the conversation.

As the days without her passed, my anguish naturally deepened. So did my constancy. But I remained merely human.

The constancy of Matsukaze and Murasame is as white as cherry-blossoms; their agonies give off the fresh smell of the wind in Nara.

Only a mask can be utterly constant. The mask possesses the true flower — as also, I suppose, does a ghost.

“Now the message we both pined for would never come.” But love itself remains, in much the same way as a Noh mask floats in the darkness like a Tanizaki heroine’s face, while a living woman has a neck — and, by the way, “as a last step,” advises Marie Claire magazine, “always blend around the jawline and down the neck — just blurring the line between fact and fiction.” In the ko-omote mask called “Flower,” carved, so they say, by Tatsuemon, and one of his Three Treasures, that pallid face, ever so dreamily smiling, gazes through me, the face of a red-lipped, black-toothed, high-eyebrowed girl who has just climaxed, I see darkness in the pupils of her half-closed eyes. Flower’s face widens toward the chin, like a firm pear from the moon’s best tree; her pinkish-pale cheeks are shining at me, and the parting of her hair is very white. On the other side of her face the lips seem a darker scarlet against the dark wood; the eye-holes are simple goggling roundnesses, above which, in characters of gold, the following has been written: “Received from Lord Hideyoshi, the ko omote ‘Flower’… among the three best masks in the world, an original.”

“Semimaru” and the Plays of Separation

And so constancy is attachment, which condemns us shite s to mistake perishable manifestations of this floating world for our already perished fellow ghosts with whose beautiful heart-flowers we remain enthralled, anguished — but in some Noh plays, as in life, constancy to a principle requires us to detach ourselves from people we love. Unfortunately, even then, unless we withdraw from the world as monks and nuns, our principled constancy merely resolves into another form of attachment. For instance, bushido , the way of the warrior, which requires the utmost loyalty, self-discipline, uprightness, courage, endurance of pain, will still, as Mr. Umewaka has told us, 1consign a man to hell for having taken life. All the same, the plays assert that steadfast defense of the lord, or of honor itself, remains equivalent to faithful love; and they honor it accordingly. Noh’s critique of attachment is far more ambiguous than it pretends. And how could matters be otherwise? A seventeenth-century treatise explains that “the Way of Heaven has no love for” the fighting man, “yet has to make use of him.”

Once in Nara when I saw the play “Ebira,” which means quiver , Kofuku-ji’s white-clothed priests came clicking onstage in their wooden clogs; one bore a sword in a red lacquered scabbard; and presently the shite was extending his fan of many metallic colors as the musicians played faster; his kimono consisted of filigreed golden diamonds upon blackness; his soul was a bearded, moustached mask which wore a white headband and an immense black axehead of hair, the rest of its locks spilling almost to the navel and down the middle of the back. With its immensely wide golden legs and arms it sometimes seemed inhuman, especially when it flashed fan and sword so fiercely. What I felt resembled my sensations on seeing my own era’s soldiers on the rubble-stage of this half-ruined world; they patrol from one burnt pine tree to the next, wearing wide-flaring helmets, swollen-shouldered uniforms, cartridge belts and heavy guns. — Who are they? What have they done? — “Mission accomplished!” crows the President.

In his eponymous play, the exiled, senescent warrior Kagekiyo rejects his daughter’s care: “The end is near: go to your home; pray for my gone soul.” We are informed that love of woman scarcely ever prevented the Japanese warrior from doing his duty as he saw it; and even though he calls her “candle to my darkness, bridge to salvation,” this man, like other warriors defiled by blood and death, can hardly expect his daughter to save him from hell. Perhaps he is truly better off alone. Did the affections of Matsukaze and Murasame do them any good? Their pine tree fidelity reminds me of the old poem by Ariie about being in one’s rainy garden, one’s sleeves wet from pine tree wind so that one almost wonders whether tears from some secret grief have dampened them — or, still more to the point, the nightmare image in an equally ancient Shunzei poem of a dead wife lying eternally under the moss, listening to the pine-winds of midnight.