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

A DEVIL ISLAND TRAVELOGUE

Akashi and Tsukushi are dreary enough. But other points of exile are even worse than these.

“And Lord Suketomo they banished to the land of Sado, making his death sentence one degree easier.” Thus The Taiheiki . As it happens, it was to Sado that Zeami also went. In 1424 he composed Kakyo , that just quoted treatise which defines “matching the feelings to the moment.” Some people say that it was his refusal to divulge these secret writings of his to the Shogun that caused his punishment; others speak of rivalries and vanities; no one knows anymore. In 1429 he was prohibited entry to the Sento Imperial Palace. And in 1434 they dispatched him on what must have been an exceedingly long, wearisome, perilous and sorrowful journey by land and sea, crossing the abyss. Again I think of the Noh play “Yokihi,” of the Emperor’s sorcerer crossing space to find the isle where Lady Yang’s ghost grieves endlessly over her attachment. No doubt Zeami has played many female roles in his time; who knows whether he played Lady Yang in some lost play? Now he must play her for life.

Yes, he crosses the abyss, in keeping with Basho’s haiku:

The rough sea —

Extending toward Sado Isle,

The Milky Way.

so that, like the infant Kaguyahime at the beginning of her parable, he has departed the true world to which he belongs, the realm of such complete perfection that the very rustling of a plebeian woman’s gowns will be detected as loud and coarse; so he gets rowed through outer space, until Sado appears beneath the clouds like a long sea-mountain, an icy leaden amethyst with white snow-grooves.

Will his kindred moon beings ever descend to Sado bearing a celestial robe of feathers for him? Sado has become his mirror room. He sits enshrouded in bitterness and old age, waiting to be masked so that his performance can begin. But onstage it’s only one kyogen after the other. Perhaps he will never again be called past the rainbow curtain.

The shite of the eponymous Noh play “Shunkan,” left alone on Devil Island 2when his two companions in exile have been recalled to the capital, chants out his situation: “ ‘Wait awhile and you’ll come home to Kyoto,’ say the voices coming faint from far away, and faint his hope…” He will die alone there, of course. I see a seventeenth-century Shunkan mask, carver unknown: The mask bares its teeth, in the tranquilly resigned manner of its kind; its sculpted bony prominences of cheek and chiseled forehead-wrinkles render it something between a burlwood contortion and a skull. The narrow eyes are almost flat at their lids. The mask remains caught between this world and the other; wait awhile, wait awhile. But why not hope? At very rare intervals an envoy in gorgeous robes may indeed come to us from behind the rainbow curtain, which follows its own celestial laws of permeability. Once upon a time, a lady-in-waiting of the Nijo Empress finally agreed to receive her suitor, but with curtains between them. The poem he uttered in reply contains these lines:

Please put aside

the River of Heaven,

that barrier between us.

“Struck with admiration,” the Tales of Ise reports, “she accepted him as her lover.” And so he was permitted behind the rainbow curtain, although for how long no one knows. So why should not Shunkan, if he were patiently loyal, have been carried home across the River of Heaven?

I waited for my lover as long as I could. Unable to bear the alternative, I kept faith that she would come for me. How ordinary! The longing of the wife for the absent husband in the play “Kinuta,” the yearning which the geisha song “Sekare sekarete” expresses for more than rare secret nights together, the temple bell ringing out another separation at dawn, what are any of these but drip-drops in the water-clocks of Akashi? “Wait awhile and you’ll come home to Kyoto.”

From The Taiheiki ’s description, Zeami’s punishment nearly recapitulates Shunkan’s, Sado being likewise “a dreadful island, unfrequented by human beings.” Here Lord Suketomo’s death sentence will presently be carried out after all. “The cutting is like a gust of wind. And indeed the wind of Sado is like an executioner’s blade.”

Standing on Sado’s snow-striped sand, watching a column of snow approaching over the brownish-grey water, I find that the mountains are now nearly charcoal-dark. A cormorant flies furtively overhead. Wind chills my back; snow-devils devour ever more of the sky.

All the same, Sado’s winters are no worse than Kyoto’s; moreover, Zeami encountered any number of human beings there. 3In the courtyard of Ho Sho Ji, the second temple where he reputedly lived, a haiku concerning him has been cut into a rounded boulder; and on the cemetery’s edge a bamboo fence encloses a rounded stone on which he is supposed to have sat. Here, in deference to the laws of iki and miekakure , white gravel discreetly betrays itself beneath the white snow. Somewhere on the grounds (due to the shrinekeeper’s absence I could not see it) resides the many-wrinkled wooden mask which they say he brought from the capital, on one occasion successfully employing it in a dance for rain.

From the gable’s downspout, melted snow runs down a chain of bell-like metal cups and into the snow. Slide aside the wooden panels and you will smell incense. Gold-lettered dark pillars frame an altar-centered darkness.

In Sado there is an ancient agricultural shrine, which Lord Suketomo’s executioner later dedicated to his victim. And here one also finds an outdoor Noh theater, one of thirty-three on the island, so I am told; this one is at least as old as the Edo period; of course Zeami never lived to see it. In fact even Sado’s one indoor Noh theater postdates him. — Perhaps Zeami wandered to this very place, in order to visit the shrine. I imagine the refrain of his bitter blood: “To die at Akashi! What a hideous thought!” — But I, a good Westerner, believe in Progress. Now that we have thirty-four Noh theaters in Sado, I refuse to say that we’re in Akashi anymore.

The pine tree, repainted in 1978, appears not on the bridge but on the rear wall of the main stage, and for some reason it is accompanied by a red sun. Leaving my shoes in the snow beneath the first step, I stand upon those grey pine boards in an ocean of white. I tread the bridge, which lacks that rainbow curtain of the thick pastel stripes, and come into the mirror room. Here the wickerwork bell of “Dojoji” awaits its next performance. Then through the door that the musicians and koken use I reemerge onto the stage, and gaze out from my pine island, with the painted pine at my back. Here the world begins. A white rope hangs in the dark entryway of the shrine, whose name is Dai Zen Jin Ja. Behind two snow-shouldered stone lanterns the red paint is busily flaking off a torus. Then come snowy trees. This silent silver-grey stage reminds me of snow in a silver bowl. After all, exile does not lack its own charms, categorized by the entity called wabi , or “desolate beauty.” After awhile I begin to hear the dripping of the eaves; then when a crow caws I see and hear farther, although not yet far enough to reach the wet snow in the shade of the bamboo groves, the shining white grass-dyked rectangles of rice fields, the high northern mountains, which are lightly glazed with white; the milk-glow of waves beneath the white sky, white rain dripping from the pines; the roughly conical “Married Rocks” at the sea’s edge; one of them is grooved; in this area the rock-lilies bloom in May; they die if they are taken away.

No one is sure if Zeami died on Sado. There is a tomb for him next to Kanami’s, in the old capital; it may be a mere cenotaph.