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

But what about what would have been best for Kagekiyo’s daughter? Well, never mind her.

“What should he have done?” I once asked Mr. Mikata, who replied: “The pride of a Japanese man at that time was this: When you were a strong warrior you should not think about any woman or girl. But this Kagekiyo has humane sentiment, and when the Heike declined, he did not want to see the Genji’s prosperity, so he damaged his own eyes, became a beggar and relied on local people, living in a shabby hut. There at this time, his daughter visited him. Of course he wanted to see her. But his pride that remained in his bone said that this is not my daughter.” 2

In the play itself, the chorus sings that this once great man who hosted multitudes now feels shame at exposing to her his wretchedness; moreover, he wishes to spare his “flower so delicately tended,” his girl in a box, the humiliation of being known as a beggar’s daughter. And so poor Hitomaru, who voyaged all the way from Kyoto, only to be dismissed, literally pushed toward the bridge and the rainbow curtain, departs with “no remembrance other” between them than his “I stay” and her “I go.”

No matter how attachment incarnates itself, says Noh, the finite will continue hatefully toward infinitude; the soul will be unable to die. Like erotic attachment, the love between parent and child must also be dissected by death or separation, and then what? Every human bond is a trap.

In the Noh play “Michimori,” we watch the eponymous Heike hero (played by Mr. Mikata) drinking with his wife for the last time, and then the Genji attack increases; so he must leave for war, all the while thinking of his wife, but fighting hopelessly until the end. We see the actor slowly, darkly gliding in a middle distance between the lamps and the void where the audience sits, his golden fan a subdued flash in the darkness. He seems to rise up to an immense height, then to shrink down to the level of the chorus, folding away his fan. Later I will remember how the yellow cylindrical torch-lamps, two open flames, made the stage a soft golden beige. Then came silence, all still except for the flickering of the two flames… and suddenly sang the flute, followed by the first beat of the hollow drum.

What could Michimori have expected? — Nothing but death. — Did he put his wife out of his mind, then? — I hope not; in fact, I hope that he loved her as he died, leaving her with understanding.

Accordingly, Michimori, like the Inoue geisha, had better “prepare a mind of mirrorlike emptiness.” Indeed, it has been said that “the hieratic calm and simplicity” of Noh is “in absolute harmony with the bushi ethos, the life of a samurai swinging like a pendulum between sudden and violent action and quiet, contemplative repose.”

DEAD WHITE LIGHT

Noh’s violence has most often to do with severance of ties.

The typically loss-centered Noh play “Semimaru” portrays two cast-off Emperor’s children, the sister having been expelled because she is mad, the brother because he is blind. A functionary shaves the brother’s head and makes him a priest. He consoles himself that his life in either a palace or a hut would be short-lived in any case. He tries to believe that in abandoning him to this wilderness, his father is helping him to atone for whichever sin from his former life made him blind. His sister Sakagami meets him accidentally, hearing the Imperial beauty of his lute-playing. It is never explained why it is that she must leave again, but she does, and both weep at their parting.

Semimaru may never have existed, but if he did, his hut would have overlooked Lake Biwa, in the borderpoint called Otsu, which receives two mentions in The Taiheiki . Meanwhile, on the south shore of Lake Biwa, Choan-ji is the site of “Seki-dera Komachi.” Otsu is not called Otsu anymore, but if you go there you will find a Semimaru Shrine proclaiming itself by means of a grimy torus on the far side of the railroad tracks, followed by a curtain of worn and flaking moss, the remnants of a fence with roof-tiles on them all in an ugly heap, a rusty shed, stone lanterns, a small platform, probably for dancing, the central room or honden with its pallid bell-pull and its latticed windows, to which written wishes are attached (help my son pass his exams; help my aunt recover from her illness), written on the shingle-like pieces of wood called ema (literally, picture-tablets). Around all four sides of the honden runs a roofed walkway. It is dank and dark. Within the honden stands another platform with “paper hair” hanging for purification and a curious table which in shape and position resembles an altar.

In a Hokusai drawing, which was never colored and printed as a woodcut, we see the blind man as strong and youthful, with long black hair and a black moustache and beard. His biwa projects from behind his back as if he were carrying a living turtle. Travellers come and go on the road before him that he cannot see. He leans backward, resting on his stick, dreaming and perhaps even smiling, with his hut lushly thatched behind him and a tree in leaf as a doorpost.

But in the Noh play, Semimaru wears such a glossy white dead masked face! 3He stands in a pale yellow robe and a longer blue-crested underrobe, gazing down through the audience’s feet into blindness. Two attendants follow behind, holding a slanted framework box over his face, a red square in the middle of it. It must represent a palanquin.

What is there to say about his mask? It is dead white light itself. But I think this only because I know it represents a blind man. If it were a ko-omote I would enthuse about its milk-white beauty. It is beautiful, and delicate.

The two men vanish with the litter-frame. No one will convey him anymore.

The green-clad old messenger in the tall hat kneels before Semimaru, who stands still, listening.

Two members of the chorus strip off his whitish-yellow cloak, revealing the greyish undercloak. Then they place a poor man’s pointed hood on his head, while the messenger stares sadly into space.

Semimaru stares straight ahead, while the chorus gazes at his hands. Now comes the melodiously sorrowful, slightly wobbling male singing of Semimaru in dialogue with the equally sad and deeper bass of the messenger, who presently advances to bestow upon him the wide conical hat of priesthood. Semimaru feels this object, then sets it gently onto the stage; and the messenger brings him a slender staff of blindness, at which the hip drummer begins to chant “ Whooh! ” and taps his drum. Presently the chorus begins to sing together, magnificently grieving, while the hip drummer chants, “ Whooh! Whooh! ” and the two protagonists face each other.

And so his messenger and attendants leave him alone forever at Otsu.

We see the white flash of Semimaru’s skullish mask from within the bamboo skeleton that his well-wisher Hakuga no Sammi has built for him. We see Semimaru in his cage as the rainbow curtain rises and the rainbow-lovely sister glides gorgeously forth, bearing a branch of madness in just the same way as any expresser of Zeami must carry a branch of flowers. Her name means “upside-down hair.” The gleam of the electric stage-light rests upon her white forehead and upon the darkness of her human throat. The chanting man in the female mask (a zo-onna or masugami) is the lovely girl in the shining robe, gliding on her white- tabi ’d feet. Her costume is peach-golden and metallic.

The Kanze family owns a certain fifteenth-century masukami 4 mask by Yasha; it is “the face of a woman possessed by a god.” We are informed of its appropriateness for the role of Sakagami among others. The face, which is of a pale terracotta color, cannot be called beautiful; to me it even seems a trifle coarse. Two diagonal creases roof off each side of the nose-bridge; dimples “convey the faith of this character in the gods.” Thin and crooked strands of hair twist down the cheeks. Simultaneously smiling and grimacing, gazing right through this floating world, perhaps even seeing beyond the rainbow curtain, this rather squat-nosed face seems perpetually on the verge of laughter or tears.