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

127: Place of Kannon in Esoteric Buddhism — De Bary et al., p. 176.

10: CROSSING THE ABYSS

128: Footnote: List of things that are near though distant — Shonagon, p. 181.

130: Hilary Nichols — Interviewed in Sacramento, July 2005.

131: Footnote: The young boy in Berlin who likes dusting — Von Mahlsdorf, p. 22.

133: How the harlot’s embrace changed the wild man — Gilgamesh , pp. 63, 65.

136: “Sachiko” — Interviewed by phone (she was in Tokyo), August 2005.

136: The Japanese-American lady — Mrs. Keiko Golden, interviewed by phone (she was in San Francisco), July 2007.

138: Marina Vulicévic — Interviewed in Beograd, October 2007.

11: WHAT IS GRACE?

141: “Some Japanese women have fair skin glowing with femininity…” — Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness , p. 142.

141: Descriptions of Komako — Kawabata, Snow Country , pp. 18, 32, 73, 101, 168. Typically, Kawabata mentions Noh only in passing (p. 149). By the way, it is not as if the grace of Kawabata’s heroines is necessarily fulfilling or even wholesome. In Beauty and Sadness , the woman’s allure is mere bait for a pathological revenge. In The Izu Dancer , the heroine is discovered in her nudity to be still a child, and no consummation occurs. In Snow Country , the anti-hero, Shimamura, is certainly incapable of loving the geisha Komako except with his eyes and penis. Nor is it clear, in spite of the attachment to him that she most certainly demonstrates, that she, prisoner of drunken anguish and reticent participant in another murky love triangle, could love anybody wholeheartedly.

142: “From the hollow / Of her throat…” — Chrétien de Troyes, p. 28 (lines 839–42), “retranslated” by WTV.

143: Footnote: Sordamour’s hair and thread — Ibid., p. 38 (lines 1158–62), “retranslated” by WTV.

143: Yeats’s poem to Anne Gregory — Op. cit., p. 263 (“For Anne Gregory”).

143: Collarbone as “arguably one of the most feminine parts of the body” — InStyle magazine, vol. 15, no. 1, January 2008, p. 89 (“Style File: Figure Flattery”).

143: Desirability of high cheekbones — New Beauty magazine, winter-spring 2008, p. 135 (“Face” section).

143: “Talons dyed with the blood of lovers…” — Saadi, p. 184 (VII.19).

143: Pontano’s enumeration of feminine charms — Op. cit., pp. 13, 69 (I.4, I.23); pp. 21, 103, 109, 121, 125, 129, 131 (I.8, II.4, II.7, II.12, II.14, II.16, II.17); pp. 105, 179 (II.5, II.34); pp. 115, 119, 135, 177 (II.10, II.11, II.19, II.33).

144: Body proportions in female vs . male — Morris, p. 177 (belly), 224 (back), 225 (buttocks), 248 (feet). Waist and hip information from Morris is cited separately below.

144: Replacement of onnagata’s acomplishment by actress’s anatomy in Meiji era and after — Kano, esp. pp. 7–8.

144: Feminine character of the mirror in ancient Greece — Geoffrey-Schneiter, p. 22.

144: Female impersonation in Niger — Hanna, p. 54.

145: “She is sumptuously arrayed in ornaments…” — Jayadeva, p. 99 (VII, stanza 13, “retranslated” by WTV).

145: Footnote: Jennifer Finney Boylan.

145: Recollections of Sharon Morgan — Transgender Tapestry magazine, issue no. 112, summer 2007, p. 21 (Sharon Morgan, “The Confession of a Crossdresser”).

145: The boy who put on his sister’s clothes — Kane, pp. 4–7.

145: Krafft-Ebing case study — Ames, p. 12 (name of patient withheld). In 2008, the neurologist V. S. Ramachandran reported that when the penis was lost, either to surgery or accident, fewer male-to-female transsexuals than straight men reported the sensation of a phantom phallus. Far more straight women than female-to-male transsexuals reported phantom breast sensations after mastectomy (The San Francisco Chronicle , Sunday, April 13, 2008, “Insight” section, p. 9; Sandra Blakeslee, “Human Sexuality: Gender Identity and Phantom Genitalia”).

146: “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies…” — Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire (1979), quoted in Rudacille, p. 169.

146: “Gender varies over time and place.” — After Stryker, p. 11.

146: Gender- and demon-specific shapes of Noh mask eyeholes — Takeda and Bethe, p. 255 (checklist of the exhibition).

146: “They are not mystical processes…” — Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Differences: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain (2003), quoted in Rudacille, p. 273.

146: “A pretty face and dresses of brocade…” — Saadi, p. 162 (VI.2).

146: The transsexual who wondered what made a face female — Kane, p. 95.

147: “The transsexual does not exist without the surgeon and the endocrinologist.” — Millot, p. 142.

147: Footnote on the four gender identity categories — Simplified (and hopefully not distorted) from Serano, pp. 77–93, 105–13, 164–65, 190–92. This otherwise thoughtful author demands, by the way, that people who are not transsexuals “put their pens down, open up their minds and simply listen to what we have to say about our lives.” Artists and academics are not to “appropriate intersex and transsexual identities and experiences” (p. 212). But I have never seen why anyone else on earth can tell me what not to write. For another interesting conceptualization of gender identity, see Millot, pp. 55–60, summarizing Stoller’s tripartite model.

147: Use of embellished collar to hide an imperfect figure — InStyle , same issue, p. 88.

147: Femininity coach’s advice to hide mannish hands — Danae Doyle Productions, vol. 1.

147: “With a man, preferably one whom you do not tower over…” — Rose, p. 35.

148: “Anything around the eye that can make it look brighter…” + “You have to treat your hair like it’s a baby” (“your hair” in brackets in original) — Sophisticate’s Black Hair magazine, May 2008, p. 48 (“Telisha Shaw, Hot Hollywood Actress You Need to Know, Now!”).

148: Failure if a woman “connives” to beautify herself — Zeami, pp. 143, 142 (Shugyoku tokka”).

148: “Beautiful nails are a constant reminder of the feminine you.” — Veronica Vera, p. 21.

148: Footnote: “Even the gentlest, most modest and best of girls…” — Lichtenberg, p. 219 (notebook L, no. 41).

148: Kanze Hisao: “It is highly detrimental to a mask…” — Nakanishi and Komma, p. 99.

149: “The interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same” — Proust, vol. 1, p. 172 (“Combray” section of Swann’s Way ). Only the reader can decide whether the following offering of grace for sale does or does not bear Proust out: “Sophisticated neat wives’ secret time. The serious play of the amateur wives starting from kisses. D-kisses. Fellatio. Second round… We promise for beautiful figure and deep service that you will never get disappointed” (small porn pamphlet, pp. 17–18. Trans. for WTV by Keiko Golden).

149: Love-tropes of the ancient Egyptian poet — Simpson, p. 309 (“The Love Songs of Papyrus Harris 500,” no. 3).

149: “Just as the golden hairpicks of bygone Japanese courtesans occasionally resemble the haloes of Byzantine saints” — In, for instance, the following: Ota Memorial Museum of Art, 1988, plates 26–27 (Utagawa Toyoharu, “A courtesan and her attendants parading under cherry blossoms,” “A courtesan and her maid under cherry blossoms”).

149: A cherry blossom seems “appropriate to a highly cultivated audience.” — Zeami, p. 131 (“Shugyoku tokka”).

151: “Expressed his joy at being able to openly take up female verses…” — Munakata, p. 75 (no. 49, “Nyonin Kanzeon Hangakan”); trans. for WTV by Sumino Junko, English slightly rev. by WTV.