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

We see a young willow, a rope, a wrapped heap of volcanic rocks before the triple-storey freeway on whose lowest level the blue-tarped houses of the homeless focus the eye; then runs the Sumida unseen, above which the roofs of the far side call out.

Stepping away from the stele, one discovers a lovely spot in the blacktop, with the noise of children playing baseball unseen beneath the trees which rise partway up the height of the apartment monoliths, steel bridges and the milky-grey Sumida.

And so the merchant, the ferryman and the madwoman disembark. The chorus asks the crowd to disinter the corpse, so that the mother can see her son one last time.

All of them call upon Amida Buddha for his sake; even the madwoman summons the strength to do it.

Then they hear the child’s voice.

Zeami, ever favoring rarefication, opined that the play would have been still more effective without a child actor in the mound, but his son Motomasa, who wrote or completed the text, thought this would needlessly increase its difficulty. It seems to me that Motomasa was correct. When I saw this performance I did not know the story at all, but the instant the child began to sing, my eyes grew damp and my throat choked up without my knowing why. As I looked around the theater, I saw tears in the eyes of many others.

The effect now closely resembles the final exchange between father and daughter in “Kagekiyo,” for mother and son each ask: “Is it you?” She tries to embrace him; he goes away. The chorus chants: “What appeared to be a dear child is wild grasses thick on the tomb… Oh, sorrow! Nothing else remains. Oh, sorrow! Nothing else remains.”

Going Home Beneath the Skin

Once a man met, courted and won a woman who lived in Yamato. After a time, he had to return to the capital…

THE TALES OF ISE

In that archetypal Japanese romance, Taketori Monogatari, a lovely moon maiden, sent down to our unworthy realm to atone for some unnamed sin (and simultaneously to help her adoptive father, the meritorious old bamboo cutter), gets recalled at last to the place where she belongs. The Emperor himself cannot prevent her departure. Upon the arrival of the radiant moon entities, his two thousand guardsmen lose all will to shoot their arrows. Her foster parents grow pitiable with grief, but the moon entities disdain their uncleanliness. Against her will, Kaguyahime must take leave of them. And so one of the lunar attendants dresses her in a celestial robe of feathers. “No longer did the maiden consider the old man pitiful or pathetic, for one who dons such a robe is emancipated from sorrow. She entered the carriage and soared into the heavens, escorted by one hundred heavenly beings.”

She might as well have put on a Noh robe.

In “Hanjo,” the prostitute Hanago, crazed by attachment to her absent lover, quotes the old proverb that “a jewel is stitched in our robes,” meaning that enlightenment lies nearer to us than we imagine, “but the sting of love makes us forget.” Kaguyahime pulled the stinger out. She donned better garments. Then she remembered who she was.

Once upon a time a certain woman loved me, and my faith in our mutual attachment resembled my belief in the immortality of that ecstatic moment when the actor in the Noh mask glides out of nothingness, moving more slowly than a geisha although more rapidly than his colleague Mr. Umewaka. When Kofumi-san dances for me in that teahouse in Gion, she gazes into my eyes, so that I feel, in part deludedly, that she sees me; and this woman who loved me said that she saw me, truly; her face used to descend by sweet degrees onto mine as we lay together in the darkness. One morning she arose and went away. Once I comprehended that she was emancipating herself from me I entreated her to open her heart, but she had become enlightened, which must be why it is that my memory of her face has now become like my vision of that Noh actor’s mask turning slowly like a hanged man in the wind, shite of a ghost, lovely mask of a woman offering herself to be looked at, naked in the same sense as Kofumi-san is when she dances, yet singing with a man’s voice. What do I possess now but my memory of the last slow angling of Kaguyahime’s face? She has returned to her native place. And Kofumi-san and Konomi-san have both gone home; they’ve washed away their white paint, which is called shironuri . As for that Noh mask turning almost imperceptibly through various jewel-degrees, hasn’t that gone back to bed in its dark box?

But I remember when the mask was still vital. It was during Mr. Mikata’s chamber production of “Michimori,” performed in a certain temple in Kyoto. The doomed Heike warrior enters slowly, bearing the white skeleton of a boat about his waist; he sets it down on the floor within the glimmer of firelight, and the righthand torch flickers over the chorus. The woman with the man’s voice is his wife, with whom of course he must soon exchange the last cup of parting, for the Genji are pressing the attack, which is to say that this is our life: Some of us die; others, stung by love, mourn them, then soon or late must follow them. The warrior now stands beside his wife within the boat. Everything is wan in the torchlight; the face of the lady in the audience beside me has grown as ivory as a Noh mask. The man stands frozen; the fan swoops; all goes grim; then the woman slowly begins to rotate and diminish. The man also kneels. He wears a gorgeous checked costume the tail of whose white sash hangs down; and in the dimness there appear to be four chrysanthemums on it. His long queue is very dark and glossy. They sit together in profile, he and she, utterly still, bloodless but for the low, trembling chants which recapitulate the sound of wind blowing across wide-mouthed earthen jars; these wind-songs are issuing from the two masks.

In time they rise. She raises her hand and he his, at the same place and rhythm. 1What is she now, but a pale mothlike figure? What is he, but her morbid memory? They both pivot and freeze, with their elbows extended at the same angle. They draw apart, each one isolated in the light of a single flame.

A chilly night-exhalation has crept in, pushing out the sickening smell of ginkgo trees. The flames twist up brighter, the long silences between chants punctuated by the flickering of flamelight. Soon Michimori will enter on his fate more rapidly, and the bamboo quality of the drums will grow somehow more pronounced. The darkness will deepen behind him as he slowly pivots to face his wife from far away. The music will increase in pitch, volume and rhythm.

A mask gazes sideways at me, narrower than the head and wig it parasitizes, the flame behind it imparting the flicker of life to its hard flesh. The warrior mask gazes down, very pale against its crest of dark hair; and from the side its mouth is almost sad and almost cunning. Then it advances toward wife and flame, the closed fan thrust before it like a lance. According to Mr. Mikata, a fan conveys no directional meaning whatsoever. It can be a whip; open and extended it can become a sake cup, and there exists a stylized gesture for pouring the sake, but the figure that a fan-gesture makes defies deconstruction into any element but beauty itself. What then is Michimori doing with his fan? Shall we just say that he is reaching toward the one he loves while sternly pushing her away?

When the tempo increases, he must gaze away from her. She gazes after him from her flame, and then he has departed. He has set out for the capital.

The chants swell almost into shouts; the flute is now frenzied, the drumbeats as rapid as battle itself; soon it will be time to sink into Michimori’s death when the chant slows and the flute blows. Then they will all go to a place I do not know. This place, like the face of a geisha, of a ko-omote , or of the woman who used to love me, excites my desire in part because I cannot attain it.