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

Voltaire insisted that “an allegory carried too far or too low is like a beautiful woman who wears always a mask.” But when I kiss a woman I love, I am kissing her skull. 4The tiniest distance separates me from her blood-bathed brain. If her skin and flesh became transparent, would I still love and desire her? What kind of lover would I be if I did not? As I said, familiarity is indeed a gain. Shouldn’t true love engage itself with the entire beloved, including even her excretory system? For what indeed lies at the heart of beauty? We are all coelomates, meaning that like worms, our predecessors and inheritors, we are built around hollow gut-tubes lined with epithelial cells and filled with matter in various stages of digestion. When the woman I love dies, shouldn’t I love the gases of her decomposition? If it could, if I could, I would receive admittance to the capital at last. I’d sleep forever in perfection’s arms.

Behind the rainbow curtain reigns death, to whose peace the shite now returns. Like Mr. Umewaka in the mirror room brooding over his mask, like the carvers chiseling dull wooden crystals which someday, if their hands do not slip, will become ko-omote heads, like a transvestite fitting his breasts on, a woman painting her mouth, a dancer preparing to incarnate the idealized Heian soul, coelomates wait to mask themselves in loveliness. (That Takigi-Noh lady-face so vivid white — how can it be so smoothly white and still alive? Isn’t it a mask as hard as a skull? But then once again the firelight warms it back to flesh — but it is more perfect than flesh…) As for what lies beneath the skin, to admire that we might need, as Zeami surely did on Sado Isle, the peculiar Japanese solaces of lonely beauty and rusty beauty, wabi and sabi .

SMEARS OF HAIR OIL

Pursuing this subject, I sometimes regret that in this book about feminine stateliness I have forgotten the vibrant vulgarity of biology, the “real” world of the floating world we float through, as exemplified by the hilarious pompous grotesqueries of kyogen masks, like fungi and potatoes, the rapid movements of the actors within them, the brighter atmosphere of kyogen nights, the players proverbially more easygoing, the audience readier to laugh, the craft of maskmaking perhaps more open to newcomers (one old lady in a kyogen audience in Kyoto told me that this deceased mask maker whose creations, animated by actors, we were now watching, was once her chemistry teacher; he started learning mask making, and so did his friends); this is far from Noh and nearly as far from the Inoue School, but it approaches the coarser, jollier, more grasping and desperate world of the geishas in Kafu’s novels. (The geisha Kikuyo: “Her face, ordinarily covered with thick make-up, was now mottled with spots where the liquid powder had cracked and crumbled. This, together with the grayish smears of hair oil on the back of her neck, made it look as though she hadn’t even taken a bath…”) These skits about arguments, drunkenness, thievery, the parodies of hierarchy are in this world; but every now and then a kyogen actor stops to declaim, almost as a waki would. And in this world I argue, get drunk, steal, fornicate and declaim just as much as anyone. I am a lady from Akashi. I am an exiled courtier from the capital. I, seeker of beauty and pleasure, have written for you these things that I have seen in the floating world; because it is my will to preserve the evanescent and because it is my duty to send you a remembrance; 5I am the ghost called Attachment-to-Nothingness; here where I live out my death it is so cold and dark that I am dazzled by the shining of snowballs cupped in pine branches; but it is my pride that once and more than once I have been to Kyoto to see the geishas dancing; and with equal pride I now impart to you the secret and expensive knowledge (never mind; I’ll make you a gift of it) of exactly how beneath unpainted globular paper lanterns and before folding gilded screens the geishas of Kanazawa dance on tatami mats in those square rooms with glowing latticework paper doors. Behind the dancing-rooms of the very old ochayas there may be territories of the country beyond the rainbow curtain, which is to say narrow rush-floored corridors screened with reed blinds; more modern geisha houses allow the night’s streetglow to shine in; in either case proprietress and the guest will fill each other’s sake cups and drink to one another. The ivory-tan hue of tatamis will resemble the cheeks of old Noh masks in torchlight. A shamisen will always lie ready, and often in the corner they will keep the long harp called the biwa ; once you have seen its shape you will know how Lake Biwa got its name. Occasionally there might even be a big tsuzumi drum, as in the song which invites crop-eating insects to visit the fire in the next village, then the village after that, and so on until they have been lured into the fatal sea. The geisha wraps her sleeve to show that she is a working peasant girl, and begins banging happily on the tsuzumi (which, so she tells me, was in the old days actually used to scare insects away with vibrations). Her wrists flash. Sometimes her singing resembles the cries of a Noh shoulder-drummer. And her drumbeats fly into the cold night, perishing long before they could ever cross the snowy moat of dark-stoned Kanazawa Castle.

Higashi, formed in 1818–30, is the most prestigious of the three pleasure districts, so I will bring you back there, returning to the ochaya where I watched Suzuka-san change from a young woman into a snow goddess. I’ll never forget her snow-white lips before the red went on; I can never get enough of being wounded by the painful whiteness of snow. Upstairs, Masami-san’s sky-blue sleeves rush in toward one another as she beats the drum, her pale twin hairpicks upright, her eyes lowered, her expression less concentrated or smiling than meditative, her kimono perfectly outstretched on the red mat all around her. Nothing she does ever betrays effort, much less strain. The musician Fukutaro-san is smiling sweetly at the geisha while she sings, her young throat erect, her dark brown hair a discrete mass as if carved, the shamisen at a forty-five-degree angle to her body, the long slender wooden handle between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, the body of the instrument on her right thigh, the plectrum widening like a scoop as it comes out of her right hand. I have read that geishas sometimes use their own fingernails in place of plectrums in order to set a more intimate tone. But I have never witnessed this, perhaps because I am a woman from Akashi, an ape in a cage.

Now it is ended, but I remember that when Masami-san danced, the asymmetric folds and zones comprising her reminded me of the lobes of one of those fantastic rocks in a Japanese garden: shoulder, elbow and wrist, the latter bent in front of her throat in parallel to her tilted face; then the several folds of her wide sleeves, her knees, and the various ripple-like swirls of her hem; and at each instant, that boulder of her flowed into something else: a girl-figurine; then into a pond with leaves and flowers floating on its surface. 6

In Kyoto they dance Inoue style, mai style. Here they follow the less austere fashions of odori . Their faces and bodies move more; their kimono-patterns are more realistic, partaking of the mode called kaga .

When Masami-san tilted her head and raised the half-opened fingers of her right hand before her chin, her left hand hid within the long fold of her right sleeve. She curved at the left hip, then again at the right knee, her form then arcing back again down to her left heel, and her hem encircling her on the floor like a statue’s base.