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

NOTES OTHERS

¹ Moreover, it’s not precisely about Noh drama, either. Whatever mistakes of fact I make, few people will catch them, even should my ignorance someday be exposed by translation into Japanese. A taxi driver in Kyoto said: “My opinion is that Noh is the art form which eliminates and simplifies to the maximum. I am not interested myself, but I know what Noh is. If it enters your intuition, so that you don’t even need to think, then you will instantly understand it.” — Oh, he knew, all right! — In Tokyo, the old proprietor of the sushi restaurant (established by his family in 1910) where my interpreter and I occasionally ate dinner proudly informed us that one of his customers was an Intangible Cultural Treasure; he advised us that torchlit Noh performances occurred in the park across the way; he himself preferred karaoke. — And at so many Noh performances the theater was almost empty. Often my fellow spectators would nod off; I’d see the head drop, the shoulders seeming to expand even as the ghost onstage was stamping, all emerald and tan and gilded! So perhaps it was always that way. A seventeenth- or eighteenth-century snatch of light verse about illicit visits to the pleasure quarter runs: “His book of Noh lessons: a prop for lies to tell his father.”

¹ A Noh expert comments here: “Rokuro is the direct descendant of Minoru I, who was his great-grandfather (and the teacher of Fenollosa). Minoru I was of merchant stock, and married into the Umewaka family. So while the Umewaka tradition does go back a thousand years, long before Noh was thought of, it was by no means a direct patrilineal transmission. The situation since Meiji, in which the Umewakas have had a master actor every generation, is probably extremely unusual.”

² In Japanese usage the word “kimono” is in fact applied only to one of many kimono-like garments. Details may be found in the end note to this page. Rather than stiffen the text with more foreign words whose explication might distract, I have used “kimono” almost invariably throughout.

³ For such dates, see Chronology.

⁴ The Noh expert Jeff Clark amplifies: “Shura is one of the six realms of… cyclic experience in Buddhism. It’s a psychological state in which one returns to battle again and again, something like Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. The battle is horrible, but also is the most intense experience in the warrior’s life. It is what everything else in the warrior’s life is directed toward. I think this is what Rokuro meant by speaking of ‘under shura.’ In Buddhism, hell is returning to the same experience again and again.”

⁵ Other sources say 1603 to 1867.

⁶ I have been told that to the extent which one’s vision is limited by the mask, one’s hearing and concentration will proportionately increase.

⁷ I am informed that this name means “cockscomb,” a double entendre which functions in both languages.

⁸ How would I do it? When I engrave a line into a block of wood, I know that the tool will cut precisely as I expect it to; I have damped down my own self-assertion in order to tune myself to what the tool best does, watching the groove it forms, as if I were its spectator, although of course it’s I who’s making it. Still, I am more or less asserting myself; no one artistic school has shaped me. Mr. Umewaka, on the other hand, has undergone a lifelong stringent training in the Kanze aesthetic, tuning himself accordingly to so many, many tools: a chorus whose members, most of whom must be familiar to him, nevertheless comprise ever new combinations; the peculiar geometry of the Noh stage, the masks and kimonos, the drums. Were I to set out to play a modern female part after such an education, I’d wear high heels, to be sure, but perhaps instead of today’s machinegun clitterclacks of heels on concrete I might strive for something in harmony with the Noh drums, whose sounds are wooden, hollow, ancient, melodious; sometimes the drumbeats are almost like raindrops.

⁹ I am taking Noh’s historiographers at their word, and predicating Noh upon the ritual of “Okina.” An expert comments here: “Until the Edo period, Noh was a popular art form patronized by the wealthy and powerful. Almost all the plays in the present repertoire were written during this period, and few of them can be described as quasi-religious rites, although they were often performed at temples or shrines… I believe that Noh has always required study; only an extraordinarily literate person could understand all the word play and classical allusions.”

¹⁰ Indeed, there are not so many distinctions now, at least not in Tokyo. On the stage outside the window of the coffee shop, men pass by in dark suits, some with clenched fists at their sides, most with a briefcase, most with their heads erect; and instead of seeing them either as individuals or as part of a swarm, I attempt to consider them as exemplars of a type to be stylized on stage, a type doomed to pass into the void as do all other types; all of us are the last few cherry blossoms falling in the drizzly wind at Yasukuni Shrine, each of us caught in the electric stage-lights like a mote of fire; if any of these salarymen would kindly freeze, with the black-sleeved knife-edge of his arm pointing ahead and down, then I would have the luxury of really looking at him; instead, it’s incumbent on me as artist, journalist, idler, to generalize. (What would Zeami make of such a project? “As for the portrayal of high ranking officers and noblemen, or of natural things, such as flowers, birds, wind and moon, one must do it as realistically as possible. On the other hand, one must not copy the vulgar manners of common people.” Let’s hope that these office workers are sufficiently high ranking for me to model myself after.) And how do the women distinguish themselves from the men? Yamamura Yoko insisted that “there is not that much difference on the street that you can see, because mostly they wear Western clothes. If they wear kimonos, their steps are much shorter. Men wear hakama, so they can walk normally.” — What about gestures? I asked. “Now men and women are the same in that regard; but, again, in kimonos, women’s movements are more restricted.” Looking out my coffee shop window, I see very few kimonos. The women do frequently constrain themselves into mincingness by wearing high heels, but they seem to keep pace with the men nonetheless; their miniskirts and bluejeans allow them to put one foot before the other as heartily as any male; fewer than ever carry their purses in that traditionally vulnerable feminine way, the strap dangling from the crook of the left elbow, the wrist accordingly compelled upward into soft vague blindness; no, they let their shoulderbags hang free now, so that their arms can fall naturally like men’s; if they have purses, they tend to grip the handles in the left hand, just as would a man his briefcase.

¹¹ “What’s your opinion of Japanese ladies of ancient times?” I asked her. — “They are beautiful, but I wouldn’t want to be like them.”

¹² So it used to be. “In the past,” said Mr. Umewaka, “they only used masks for ghosts or dead characters. Black Jo for an old man, that’s it. In Yoroboshi, that blind man Shuntoku-maru, they didn’t use a mask. They just closed their eyes.”

¹³ This play is discussed below, p. 357.

¹⁴ In the olden days, the blackening was done with a lead-based pigment; for mask-teeth, sumi ink suffices.

¹⁵ I own a book of photographs of the “last days of the Tokugawa Era,” and these brownish or bluish images, whose originals seem to be decaying usually from the edges inward, do portray people whose heads appear wider than those of today; to some extent this derives from photography’s standard trick of adding corpulence by forcing every visible feature of a head into one plane; flat maps of our round world suffer from kindred distortions. The flowing, cheek-hugging hairstyles of 1860 widen these faces somewhat further. Yet ladies’ hair is equally often pulled back from forehead and temples. High foreheads must have been as valued under the Shogunate as in the Heian period. Indeed, as I browse through this volume, I seem to find more and more the Japanese face of today, whose photographed expression, to be sure, is more somber and dull than now, on account of the need to hold still for those long exposures. This stillness, and the high foreheads, yes, perhaps these faces are a trifle Heian, but it’s mainly the faces of the children which widen toward the chin. From the side, one adolescent girl of 1860 resembles the Heian stereotype: little black eyes in a white face, a tiny rosebud of a mouth (well, mask-lips part more widely than that, but what can you do?), puffy, delicious cheeks; her hair is tucked up behind her, and her kimono sports an elegantly striped sash.

¹⁶ Kiso lies in what used to be the domain of the Tokugawa Shogun. Many of the cypresses were thought to be inaccessible because they grew on steep hillsides, but during the “bubble economy” of the 1980s a considerable number got carried away by helicopter. Their use is now more or less restricted to maintaining the shrine at Ise and making Noh masks.

¹⁷ Still another of my oversimplifications, as you’ll see.

¹⁸ Distinguished below, p. 63.

¹⁹ Eyebrow depilation was more typical of Heike than of Genji aristocrats. For this reason, Genji roles require more masculine-looking masks. Why were high eyebrows considered beautiful then? Perhaps for the same reason that they are today. One zoologist who has turned his attention to women’s bodies believes that raised eyebrows remind us of a surprised child’s, and may thereby connote just-ripe nubility.

²⁰ “Mr. Umewaka, how far away do you think that someone in your audiences can sit and still appreciate the differences between masks?” — “In my theater,” he replied, “you can be at the very rear. I think that’s the limit. In the past, however, the place where the seating began was as far as it is from the stage to the very back of my theater! As you know, the stage was part of a shrine, and the audience had to sit some distance from it. In such a situation, over-acting is appropriate.” — It seemed to me that he might have given our collective discernment too much credit here. Whenever I attended his performances I used my binoculars and I still longed to be closer.

²¹ In The Tale of Genji, from which so many Noh plays derive, the exact age when Genji deflowers his ward Murasaki is not stated, but she seems to have been quite young: “ ‘How tall you have grown since last I saw you!’ he said and pulled up her little curtain of honor… she had indeed grown up into as handsome a girl as you could wish to see; nor was she any longer at an age when it was impossible for him to become her lover. He constantly hinted at this, but she did not seem to understand what he meant.” After he forces himself on her, “he understood that her distress was due merely to extreme youth and inexperience, and was not at all put out.”

²² The Noh expert Jeff Clark adds here: “Their hos and yas indicate where they are in the score, but the main function seems to be to intensify emotion and atmosphere.”

²³ “He knew Mishima personally,” inserts Jeff Clark, “but not closely, as he was only 23 when Mishima committed suicide, but he has referred to him as Mishima-sensei, sensei meaning… ‘teacher.’ ”

²⁴ In a brief essay entitled “On the Forty-Fifth Anniversary of My Stage Career,” he lovingly recalls his “indoctrination” at the hands of his grandfather: “For example, in the cherry blossom-viewing scene of Kurama Tengu, which was my first stage performance, he painted the glories of spring in vivid imagery, telling me, ‘Look how beautifully the cherry trees are blooming, my boy,’ and thus drew me into the scene with his eloquence.”

²⁵ One recent head of the Kongo School (he died in 1951) reported that in a certain village where he performed this role, people said, “If Okina does not come, the rice will not grow.”

¹ “Monkey music.” So called because the monkeys on Mount Hiei spied on the deity Kuni no Tokotachi no Mikoto, who performed Noh dances for his own entertainment. The monkeys imitated; humans saw the monkeys and learned from them.

² Another Westerner expresses this phenomenon with different feelings: “Originally it was considerably more natural than it is now. The years have widened the gulf between it and its origin, and have intensified its artificiality and its museum-like mustiness.” In the consistently jaundiced account of Eric C. Rath, who emphasizes how over time authority became centralized in the Noh Schools, thereby rigidifying the medium and disempowering variant voices, this slowing down and ritualization of Noh occurred in large part at the end of the nineteenth century, as an expression of elitism, and ultimately of militarism, “a timeless image of imperial rule with an idealized and ordered vision of a disciplined public.” Rath asserts that these alterations in Noh were, in effect, lies in the cloak of history.

³ In “Sumidagawa,” discussed below, p. 362.

⁴ From a certain train journey in Japan I recollect sleepwalled valleys; reddish-brown foliage mixes with the green vertical streamers of fog; and there comes a cool silent rain under whose blows the gunmetal river twitches as if trout-stirred. My window occludes the shoulders of rust-leaved mountains. For an instant, the fog offers me a single leafless branch.

⁵ In The Tale of the Heike he starves himself out of regret at not being able to reward the loyalty of a retainer who has visited him. This alternate ending is scarcely happier. When I think of Shunkan, I remember Hokusai’s simple, vivid sketch: Long and skinny, his rags resembling leaves or scales, he has become a part of his tiny rock-island. Crosslegged, he leans back with closed eyes, waiting for eternity to finish.

⁶ Mishima wrote a typically gloomy modernization of this last.

⁷ Noh music probably entered its present incarnation around the beginning of the sixteenth century.

⁸ Meanwhile, one Noh critic asserts that “it is… possible for an actor to deliver a line perfectly without understanding it.”

⁹ The sad life of Ono no Komachi figures in chapters 26 and 28.

¹⁰ This must be the only place in the book when I use “ancient” in so extremely relative a sense. The most gorgeous costumes tend to date no earlier than the Edo period, when fabric-dyeing was perfected.

¹¹ Also transliterated “Konparu.”

¹² “Our school is the most refined,” Mr. Umewaka once said to me, “so maybe it doesn’t have as many attributes as the others. We employ more subtle, more delicate expressions.” (The Noh expert Jeff Clark remarks that this “comment expresses the connection of refinement with simplicity. The greater the artist, the less he needs in his bag of tricks.”) Dr. Yokoyama Taro distinguishes the Umewaka School thus: “Umewaka belongs to Kanze-Ryu, the largest of Noh schools. Kanze’s players have a reputation of enacting embellished stages, though not as much as the flashy Kita-Ryu people. In comparison, the schools Komparu and Kongo are both of them more restrained, preferring delicacy in their expressions. Within the Kanze School, the Umewaka Family and Tessen-kai (or Tetsunojo Family) have contrasted themselves with [the] Kanze Family (the head house) by introducing the minute vocal nuances originated in Hosho Ryu (another of the main five schools…), thereby taking the direction of more aesthetic delicacy. [The] Umewaka Family and Tessen-Kai are… stylistically close together, but while the latter has a comparatively democratic, rivalry-free system, Umewaka sticks to the ‘Iemoto’ (head family) tradition…”

¹ The evolution of masks may have proceeded as follows: Greek tragedy masks carried on the Silk Road as trade goods helped inspire the huge Chinese gigaku masks, which arrived in Japan in the seventh century. These soon gave way to smaller bugaku masks for court dances; next came the still smaller gyodo masks for Buddhist processions. Finally, smallest of all, Noh masks arrived, beginning in the tenth century with Okina’s wooden face.

² The charming Japanese tendency to subcategorize is further seen in Utamaro’s listing of the three best types of vulva: takobobo, todatebobo and kinchakubobo (octopus, which sucks; trapdoor, which grips; purse, which is tight).

³ Other sources say simply that the ko-omote represents a girl of fifteen, the waka-onna and magu-jiro a woman of about twenty-five.

⁴ Even slighter is the difference between a waka-onna and a fushikizo. In this book the latter will be discussed only briefly, in regard to the great play “Matsukaze.”

⁵ This story enthralled Mishima Yukio, one of whose reasons for cutting his belly open was that his body was losing its youthful perfection. In his own version of the Noh, as we shall see, the old woman is a kind of vampire who murders youth with an illusion of her beauty.

⁶ This jealous woman-snake is customarily represented by either a ja or hannya mask. She may also incarnate herself in the omi-onna mask, as in the first act of “Dojoji.”

⁷ As for male masks, in the interest of gender equality I condescend to give them a footnote. Boys’ masks are the doji and the kashiki, “a young male role that has both secular and religious aspects.” Chujo and imawaka are for young noblemen and warriors. Chujo means “deputy,” and is fairly frequently seen — for instance in “Michimori.” Heita represents a warrior of middle age. An old man is shown by the akobujo, a category which may or may not include the san-ko-jo, which once again appeared in Mr. Mikata’s production of “Michimori.” The ayakashi, yase otoko and kawazu represent angry male ghosts. There are also masks specific to, and named for, the roles of Kagekiyo, Semimaru, Shojo, Shunkan, Yorimasa, Yoroboshi. (When I asked how many of his fifty masks would be available to choose from for “Kagekiyo,” Mr. Mikata accordingly replied: “Basically two, one with a beard, and one without. But that was not a good question.”) The Okina mask has already been introduced. Hakushikijo and kokushikijo are for gods, tobide and beshimi for demons.

¹ The very sequence of plays performed on a given day ought to conform to this scheme. Thus the plays may be considered acts of an ephemeral meta-play. This conception dates at least back to the Heian period, when tankas of Japanese court poetry were sometimes organized into great narratives whose elements had been composed by many poets in diverse centuries.

² Renoir: “For a battle piece to be good, it must look like a flower piece.”

³ A brilliant case in point is the character of Princess Rokujo in “Aoi-no-Ue.” Envy of Prince Genji’s other lovers, and in particular of his first wife, has transformed her into a hideous demon represented by a hannya mask. One observer speaks of the play’s demand that the shite “temper the compelling sharpness of aggression with the elegance befitting Princess Rokujo… jealousy was transformed into an experience of beauty.”

⁴ However, when many pictures on the same paper stock, processed identically, are viewed together, the image color loses relevance. This is so even in the case of cyanotypes, whose blue seems peculiar or even (a favorite adjective in the literature) “objectionable” when seen alongside their platinum or silver gelatin cousins; a portfolio of a hundred cyanotypes, however, restores the composition itself to primacy.

⁵ To accomplish it, the performer is more essential than the text; for Noh can sometimes succeed through a half-definable quality called heart. When this occurs, an actor is so outstanding that even a banal play will move the audience.

¹ Played by Kongo Hisanori, circa 2005.

² Since this book has to do particularly with feminine beauty, my textual analysis of Noh need not attempt profundity to such an extent as would embarrass my mediocrity. All the same, just as to know the beauty of a woman is not only and sometimes not ever to know her nude, but yet to know her pretty clothes and charming artifices, her ways of speaking and of thought, the virtues of her heart, her tastes and whims, and not least her relatives, so when kissing the Noh mask it is all the more delicious to have a sense of its allusions and antecedents.

³ He stars briefly in another classic, The Taiheiki, which ascribes to his virtue the power to see his enemy, a twelve-headed sky giant borne by eight dragons. And so the mansion of Noh has opened unto us one more textual room.

⁴ Meanwhile, Fenollosa writes: “In the fifteenth century after Christ, the Japanese drama arose out of religious rites practised in the festivals of the Shinto gods, chiefly the Shinto god of the Kasuga temple at Nara.”

⁵ In the previous chapter, I quoted another translator’s phrase, “flower of tranquility,” in order to remind myself of the folly of grasping for exact equivalents.

⁶ One English-language compilation presumes that the bowl must be oxidized, since then its hue would bear “the mysterious beauty of stillness.”

⁷ Who gets her own chapter below, p. 166.

⁸ One commentator opines that “the nostalgia for the life of the Court” of the Heian period, when Genji was written, “was the real keynote of the renaissance in the Muromachi period. But because this past splendor could no longer be recaptured in the world of reality, the memory was transmuted into a longing for things eternal and imperishable, with profound metaphysical results in the world of ideas.”

⁹ Most Noh plays contain such a honzetsu or “seed.” For instance, the sad love story “Izutsu” is based on three chapters from The Tales of Ise.

¹⁰ Thus my barbarian’s approach to the concept of hon’i, the decorum appropriate to the expression of a given subject — very relevant to Noh, obviously, or to a geisha’s multi-step procedure for opening a sliding door. On the subject of cherry blossoms, poets had to “express impatience in waiting for their blooming, delight in their beauty, and distress in their falling.” This goes far to explain why it is in Mr. Umewaka’s words “very controversial” if a theater paints a young instead of an old pine tree on the mirror-board.

¹ Noh was influenced by Tendai Buddhism, some of which can be traced back to Ch’an in China. Among the treasures of Ch’an teachings we find The Blue Cliff Record, whose preface is dated 1128. I quote that book’s Thirteenth Case in full: “A monk asked Pa Ling, ‘What is the school of Kanadevi?’ Pa Ling said: ‘Piling up snow in a silver bowl.’ ” The pointer to the case reads in part: “When snow covers the white flowers, it’s hard to distinguish the outlines. Its coldness is as cold as snow and ice; its fineness is as fine as rice powder. Its depths are hard for even a Buddha’s eye to peer into…”

¹ The Heian aesthetic both derives and diverges from Chinese sources. Among the latter we find the eighth-century joy girl Chao Luan-Luan writing encomia of scarlet-nailed fingers as narrow as new-peeled onions; of teeth like white melon seeds and lips like pomegranate blossoms; of willow-leaf eyebrows, of cool, creamy soft breasts whose nipples resemble “the pegs of a jade inlaid harp.” “Her poems were a common type,” remarks the translator, “a sort of advertising copy in praise of the parts of a woman’s body, written for courtesans and prostitutes.” Hence she ought to be an authority on feminine beauty; her clients put their money where her mouth was. Among the items on her list, only the willow-leaf eyebrows insist on being noticed in the Japanese Manyoshu’s court poetry. The white teeth of Chinese pulchritude certainly do not find their match in the Manyoshu. If I can visualize more attributes of the Chinese than the Japanese ideal, perhaps both Chinese and Japanese would have wanted it that way.

² For just this reason, in the pornographic shunga woodcuts of the period, the color of a woman’s teeth provides a cue as to whether or not her depicted liaison is adulterous.

³ The scrolls employ the so-called hikime kagibana technique of drawing faces. First and foremost, features are rendered obliquely rather than frontally. The outline of a female face is urizane-gata (winter melon shaped), plumpening from eyes to cheeks. The forehead is lofty, the long hair parted in front and layered on the shoulder. A few strands pass across the edge of an eye. Eyebrows are drawn straight and long in many lines, with the ends shaded off. Eyebrows and eyes are considerably separated and straight and slanted. “The nose is drawn only as a little ‘ku’ (resembles a “<”), with no more detail than that. The mouth is a small red dot with a slight black ink line. This is accordingly called the (small mouth). The chin is also small. If the face is drawn from the side, we see only an eye brow and an edge of the eye.” We are informed that the hikime kagibana face is calm, emotionless. “It seems to be understood that showing big emotions are ugly. Elegance and silence comprise the beauty of the Tale of Genji.”

⁴ I have read, but do not believe, that “the transsexual’s position consists of wanting to be All, all woman, more woman than all women, and representing them all.” Transgender women each have their own look. In any event, it is interesting that both Catherine Millot, the psychoanalyst who wrote the quoted words, and Mr. Kanze insist that femininity’s general representaion is impossible or fallacious. Based on how I experience prehistoric Venus figurines (see below, p. 260), I cautiously assert that a general beauty can indeed be expressed.

⁵ Small eyes remain emblematically Japanese outside Japan. (Many Vietnamese women also like them; sometimes they submit to operations to narrow their eyes.) In Nan Ning, China, a woman told me: “Chinese girl beauty is large eye. Japanese girl beauty is in narrow eye.” Then she added: “Japanese ochobo-guchi woman is obey husband. Chinese woman, in old society they have something the same as Japanese woman, but now more independent.”

¹ I am informed that “the crease lines between the eyebrows on statues of male Shinto gods and the dimples on the cheeks of young male and female Shinto statues appear to have been incorporated into Noh masks…”

² One study of the effect of mask angle upon perceptions of its expressed emotion found that a certain magojiro’s mouth was much deeper than a human’s. This helped to facilitate the illusion. In laser scans of the masks at three different inclinations, we seem to see the top of the upper lip as a frown, a neutral horizontal which resembles the stylization of stretched bird’s wings, and a smile.

³ This is what I heard over and over, especially from Noh actors and geishas. First, in the years of apprenticeship, the expression of beauty consists of exercises done by rote; then it happens, as Zeami implies, beyond consciousness. Of all the inhabitants I met in this subculture, Mr. Umewaka was the only one who articulated for me in detail what conscious choices he made. When I watch a woman making up her face, her self-description resembles that of the geishas. She rarely says: “I chose today to apply foundation in this way because…”

¹ In her early eleventh-century list of things that are near though distant, Sei Shonagon included “relations between a man and a woman.”

² Obviously the content of femininity varies over time and space. For instance, a certain young boy in Berlin feels drawn not only to wearing women’s clothes, but also to dusting. His great-uncle lovingly remarks that he should have been a girl in 1900; then he would have been “a pearl of a servant.” How many women do I know who actually enjoy dusting? The boy, who becomes Charlotte, describes herself throughout her life as a Hausfrau.

¹ For her part, Sordamour sewed one of her hairs beside a golden thread in the white silk shirt she gave to her sweetheart, because (says the poet) she wished to know whether a man might see any difference between the two.

² The transsexual Jennifer Finney Boylan states that her boyhood certainty of being in the wrong body “had nothing to do with a desire to be feminine, but it had everything to do with being female.” When I first began writing this book, I attempted to distinguish between these two terms, but found that each means so many different things to different people that insisting that one was this and the other was that came to seem like an insult.

³ To which this book gives short shrift. The most plausible parsing that I have found of gender identity appears in an essay by the trans woman Julia Serano, who delineates (a) one’s “subconscious sex,” in other words one’s desire to be, for instance, female; (b) one’s “conscious sex” (being male-bodied and raised as a boy, she initially identified as male); (c) the gender to which one is attracted; and (d) the gender which other people tend to project upon a person. I feel ambivalent about the final quantity’s passive construction. The femininity of a great Noh actor is a triumph of active projection; and I would like to believe that every one of us can at least hope to control how he or she is seen. But it is certainly and sometimes sadly true that who we think we are may be irrelevant in the eyes of others. Some performances fail; others simply come to an end. I imagine a Jew who passes brilliantly as an Aryan, until a document reveals him to the Gestapo. Clearly a performance may be dangerous, exhausting or demeaning to the performer. In any event, Kissing the Mask deals less with any of Serano’s four categories than a “full treatment” would call for. My focus, being less moral than aesthetic, is limited to the strategies and effects of great performances. Serano for her part remarks: “When I eventually did transition” from male to female, “I chose not to put on a performance — I simply acted, spoke and dresed the way I always had…”

⁴ As Lichtenberg wrote in his notebooks, ca. 1798: “Even the gentlest, most modest and best of girls are always better, gentler and more modest if their mirrors have told them that they are looking more beautiful than ever.”

⁵ In his twentieth-century version of this same play, Mishima has Komachi say, no doubt with nasty irony: “I suppose a fool like you thinks every beautiful woman gets ugly as soon as she grows old… That’s a great mistake. A beautiful woman is always a beautiful woman. If I look ugly now, all it means is that I am an ugly beauty.”

⁶ She added: “In Noh the male actor does not sound like a female, unlike in Kabuki. When we play a woman, we use our natural voice. In my opinion, we use our own body as a resonator. Try to make the best sound according to your own body. In other words, don’t imitate the male voice.”

⁷ Here it is worth quoting the very convincing-sounding woman of the digital video disk called “Finding Your Female Voice.” “After you’ve hit puberty…” she says sadly, “that’s when your vocal cords thicken, and it’s irreversible.”

⁸ In this play’s source, the Tales of Ise, there is an episode (Dan XXIII, p. 64) in which two children of the opposite sex grow up together, marry, have troubles and get reconciled, all after having played together at the well.

⁹ This “yet” betrays my parochialism, for Aphrodite statuettes frequently identify themselves by means of their rolls of neck-flesh, which are accordingly known as “Venus rings.”

¹⁰ An essay on Greek hetairai calls them “‘superfeminine’… supersoft, structurally most opposed to the masculine of hard Ares/Mars.”

¹¹ At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Lady Nijo expresses the idea that specific beauty will be fitted for a specific use: “But she was without question a beautiful woman — her face delicate, her nose finely molded, her eyes vivid… She was a well-developed girl with a fair complexion and had the advantage of being both tall and plump; had she been a member of the court, in fact, she would have been perfect in the principal female role at a formal ceremony of state, carrying the sword, with her hair done up formally.”

¹² For instance, one renowned seventeenth-century habitué of pleasure quarters describes several sorts of walking-steps engaged in by courtesans: the “floating walk” entailed kicking; the “soft-footed walk” might be accompanied by a swaying of the hips, and “on reaching the house of assignation, she trips in nimbly.” None of these styles correspond to mai.

¹³ The carnally inclined reader will be glad of the following reassurance: “Almost without fail, the deep, wedge-shaped cleft dividing the legs is perforated between the calves…”

¹ She is said to have also possessed a fast dance in her repertoire: “When Yang Kui-fei did the Whirl, she addled the ruler’s heart.”

² For further discussion, see the “Sadism and Expediency” chapter of my Rising Up and Rising Down.

³ It was not, as might have been the case in some Occidental legend, her violent death itself that transformed her into the equivalent of a ghost; it was her unwillingness to die. But most actors are losers in the Noh cosmos and its derivatives. In the fourteenth-century war tale The Taiheiki there are numerous instances of warriors who are too cowardly to cut their bellies open and die for their lords, because they cannot overcome their attachment to this transient world. Of course, we know from Mr. Umewaka’s explication of “Kagekiyo” (above, p. 20) that such warriors will be condemned to hell. (The Taiheiki itself puts the dilemma in terms only one of which is eternal: “Those of the Heike who cherished honor and died quickly — they became wretched asuras, doomed to suffer for many ages. How regrettable it was! And those who subjected themselves to humiliation by remaining alive — they fell into destitution at once, and were mocked at by all men. How pitiful it was!”)

⁴ When Mr. Umewaka performed this role in a certain Takigi-Noh, he is said to have remained very still on the bridge for a long interval, with his arm folded and his gaze downward. One observer “experienced the beautiful illusion of watching feelings that could no longer be kept pent up inside welling forth as tears.”

¹ The information sheet assures me that “although some of the present buildings were rebuilt in 1893 after a fire, they kept their original foundations,” and that “the position of the stones” in the garden “were reconstructed by archaeological method about 30 years ago.”

² One especially strident person takes Kawabata to task for Snow Country. She objects to his staying in an expensive room (evidently this confirms his status as an implement of patriarchal objectification), to his creating a character based on a real geisha without telling her (he did change “Komako’s” name), and — here my blood boils — to his “aestheticization” of the geisha’s place in the political-social structure, thereby serving to “block the possibility of criticism.”

³ And how could it be otherwise? Kofumi-san, whom you will meet later in the above sentence, told me which hair accessory store she patronized. When I peeped in there, I saw translucent golden combs of pure tortoise shell, which to my ignorant gaze resembled plastic; and there were hairpicks of mother-of-pearl; for some of these one could pay three hundred and forty thousand or even seven hundred thousand yen. And it is proper for geishas to change these ornaments each month! No wonder that their nineteenth-century predecessors sometimes pawned their clothes to keep up. Speaking of clothes, geishas also require new kimonos quite often — every month in the case of a maiko. They can be two million yen each, or occasionally even seven. Obis and wigs, which also must be changed every month, cost as much as kimonos.

⁴ The reason might have been that my method of comparing various representations of femininity causes some people to bristle. Mr. Mikata was not atypical here. When I asked him how Noh and Inoue dance might be similar and different, he replied: “Because that dance originated from Noh, it has an essence of Noh movements, which have been altered and refined. If you superficially compare Noh and Inoue dance, yes, there are similarities. But Noh has more than six hundred years, and Inoue is later. I don’t think that there is any meaning in comparing the two.”

⁵ In Kanazawa, the geisha Masami-san said: “This is very basic. In the tea ceremony, opening a door is quite involved. Our procedure is less formalized. In the tea ceremony there must be a certain number of steps. But we go to rooms of different dimensions, and we must calculate such that we do not step on the seam between two tatami mats. Of course all tatami mats are the same size.”

⁶ Masami-san said that an obi expresses nothing in particular and is “just decoration”; hence a geisha can wear whichever obi she likes. For all I know, the severer requirements of Kyoto may assert otherwise.

⁷ “What would happen if you tried to make a mask with ukiyo-e proportions?” I inquired, and she said: “I think it’s possible, but probably it’s harder to wear. It’s easier if the eyes are lower.”

⁸ The words of this song and of “Black Hair” are translated in the endnotes.

⁹ In her geisha autobiography, a sorrowful woman tells how “I hacked off at the roots the waist-length hair that’d been so dear to me for so many years, and offered it up to who-knows-which-god at a small shrine…”

¹⁰ The purpose of the red is to increase the perceived depth of the eyes and lightness of the iris.

¹¹ The mask carver Nakamura-san thought the fan movements in this geisha dance similar to Noh, “but something about the movement is different.”

¹ Tadano Makuzu, 1818: “Women exist for the sake of men; men do not exist for the sake of women… Even if she is the more intelligent, how can a woman who thinks that she is lacking something” — i.e.; a penis — “triumph over a man who always thinks of himself as having a surplus?”

¹ This encounter with a geisha was the only one whose mercantile character, or impersonality, was palpable. I sometimes wonder whether I should feel sorry, or guilty, whether I was in fact intrusive. Having myself occasionally “felt violated” by certain journalists or other outside observers, I strive to behave on such occasions with a resigned professionalism. Perhaps that is how it was for her. I hope that I behaved with respect, and that she was simply in a rush. Indeed, five minutes after she had finished the ochaya-san summoned her urgently to depart for her first appointment of the evening.

² She could remove it by herself. I asked how many kimonos she had, and she said that she had never counted them; since they did not go out of style she sometimes used her grandmother’s.

³ Average female hip width is supposedly three centimeters greater than for the male.

⁴ How long did it all take? The other geisha at this ochaya (for there were only two) had danced for me a night or two before. You have met her, her name was Masami-san. She was older than Suzuka, more experienced. She told me that she took ten or fifteen minutes to accomplish all her making-up; but someone still had to help with her kimono. All included, the procedure took an hour and a half. Suzuka might have taken a trifle longer, but perhaps that was the result of my presence and questions.

¹ It is not my normal practice to include brand names in my books. However, since the makeup procedures of geishas and onnagatas are described in some detail, I thought to achieve a comparable level of specificity. Moreover, since my interpreter rarely deployed makeup herself, it is possible that some unguental functions have been misunderstood in this chapter; if so, the brand names may reveal whichever errors I have made.

² Morris claims that blonde hair indicates the juvenile stage for many Caucasians; hence it is desirable for many women.

¹ So one customarily hears about this particular manifestation of femininity. For instance, Mishima writes that “an onnagata is the child born of the illicit union between dream and reality.” Furthermore, an onnagata must not strive to act like a woman or he will fail in his effect; he must simply live as a woman when he is not on stage. Mishima says again: The onnagata cannot achieve anything “by a mere slavish imitation of real women.”

² The only vendor of Kabuki makeup in that district, he said, was a certain kimono accessory shop in the Ginza. When I went there to buy what they recommended, a Kabuki actor who happened to be a customer right then gave me the following directions:

1. Apply cleansing cream; do not wipe off.

2. Apply half a fingertip’s worth of oil, the hard kind in summer, soft in winter.

3. Mix powder with water in a dish to make paste. Apply with a hake brush, which should be washed afterward.

4. Sponge away any extra water from the face.

5. Apply face powder with a puff.

6. Use separate brushes to apply the red and black.

³ See above, p. 110.

¹ Genetic girl. A woman who was born with a vagina.

² Transgender girls.

¹ Or possibly Hisa.

² You may recall that waka-onna means “young woman.”

¹ As Kenneth Clark wrote on the subject of Titian’s “Danaë”: “The extruding animal breast has been brought into conformity with human expectations.”

² Tadano Makuzu, 1818: “It is usually said that a woman should keep everything in her heart, say little, and be modest.”

¹ To discern beauty, why not also consider its opposite? The Lay of Rig describes the thrall wife, epitome of ugliness: crook-legged, drooping-nosed, dirty-footed, with sunburned arms. Her daughters bear such names as Shorty, Stout-Leg, Stumpy, Dumpy and Cinder-Wench.

² For a detailed tabulation of Eddic beauty-descriptions, see Appendix B.

³ Mishima would have loved this. It is very characteristic that of his five modern Noh I have in translation, four of them have to do wholly or in part with cruel, controlling women. Naturally, he could not forgo to rework that tale of supernaturally lethal female jealousy, “Aoi-no-Ue.”

⁴ About her the saga writer tells us more than is the case with most ancient Norse heroines: “She had such long hair that it could cover her completely, and it was radiant as beaten gold.” (She was also, typically enough, the most beautiful woman ever in Iceland.) On the subject of Norsewomen’s hair, it is surprising how rarely its color is mentioned in the ancient sources. But I assume that it was usually blonde or golden as Helga’s was. The lovely captive in the early-fourteenth-century romance of Bosi and Herraud is another case in point: “… never had they seen such a beautiful woman! Her hair was tied to the chair-posts, and was as fair as polished straw or threads of gold.”

⁵ A number of Eddic heroines are Valkyries. They can be either “hateful and grim,” as is a certain Valkyrie in Odin’s hall, or white-armed and lovely in the fashion of Sigrún and Sigrdrífa. No matter what, they are proud, brave, meat-hungry. Davidson remarks that Valkyries may have gotten smoothed out into beautiful equestriennes, “but a different, cruder picture of supernatural women connected with blood and slaughter has also survived.” But they remain very feminine.

⁶ What is fetish, what is stylization, and what is simple specificity? Thomas Blenman Hare has diagrammed inflection patterns for male and female roles in the play “Hagoromo,” which he calls representative. The pitch of the male voice either prolongs itself at a high point much beyond the other three forms of utterance, or else falls slightly, abruptly rises to a peak, then falls off. As for the two female modes, the first is a long, gentle rise with a flattened peak and then the beginning of an equally gentle fall; the other rises more steeply than it falls, but remains smoother in slope than the male forms. Is this more or less meaningful (beside being certainly more abstruse) than the “glamor spot” as a defining characteristic of the back of the female neck? Is a Norse kenning for a lovely woman merely mechanistic, or have I myself failed if I cannot sense the living femaleness in every use of it, just as I can in every living woman? In this attempt to discover the beautiful feminine I sometimes feel as if I am grappling with tissue paper.

⁷ His saddest passage: “Not that the Esquiline girl represents an evolved notion of feminine beauty. She is short and square, with high pelvis and small breasts far apart, a stocky little peasant such as might be found still in any Mediterranean village.”

⁸ For a brief discussion of how beauty and doom in medieval Norway have been treated by a gifted modern Norwegian writer, see the postscript to Appendix B.

⁹ Sexual innuendo rarely grows explicit. An exception, from Kormak’s Saga: “So dear are you, sea-Freya, / to the sword of the love-hair’s island,” meaning the sword of the pudendum, namely the penis.

¹⁰ He was the ko-kata, young Minamoto Yoshitsune.

¹¹ Meanwhile, the king’s sister Ingibjorg “was the loveliest woman in Norway,” and with characteristic ellipticality we are informed of her intimacies with the hero Kjartan (who is Gudrun’s intended) by the comments of his foster-brother, which he unconvincingly repudiates, and by the fact that she falls silent when he announces his determination to return to Iceland. When she gives him a gold-embroidered headdress, which will later be destroyed by Gudrun, she remarks: “I want the women of Iceland to see that the woman whose company you have been keeping in Norway isn’t descended from slaves.” What could be a more elegantly understated way of conveying both her love and her stoic pride?

¹² Lady Murasaki’s diary: “To be pleasant, gentle, calm and self-possessed: this is the basis of good taste and charm in a woman.”

¹ Could the translator have meant the Kiso cypress?

¹ The plastic wrapper on the plastic bathroom mug reads: “DISINFECTED. Maybe I’ve been hoping too hard. But I’ve gone this far. And it’s more than I hoped for.”

¹ You may recall that Zeami believed that an actor was at his peak at about thirty-five. Mishima’s suicide occurred at forty-five, the age when in Zeami’s opinion a Noh actor’s “own natural beauty of carriage and the appeal of his performance (which is so attractive to the audience) will fade gradually away,” unavoidably, he insists. For this reason he advises most fifty-year-old Noh actors to retire, but then immediately offers the example of his father, the great Kanami, who continued to perform up to his death at fifty-two. Although the old man left more difficult roles to others, and eschewed ostentation, “his flower looked better than ever. As his was shin-no-hana it survived until he became old without leaving him, like an old leafless tree which still blossoms.”

² Most of the books are in Japanese, but here and there lurks a two-volume monograph on Dutch painting from the National Gallery, or Günter Grass in English, or Fiesta Brava, or La peinture manièriste.

³ Mishima might reply: “What grace?” or, more likely, “Isn’t grace the same as death?” — Who could deny the Heian snobbery of Komachi’s day, which Mishima skewers by having a lady explain: “There’s always something slightly crude about a dress made by a Japanese?”

⁴ Zeami writes in his treatise on “finding gems and gaining the flower” that an ideal performance can be accomplished when the actor somehow translates the musical atmosphere he has created into its visual expression; and Mr. Kanze’s Komachi was first of all a wobbling voice and then the tremulous physical representation of that voice; he trembled as gracefully as does shimmering water.

¹ It is this text to which Mishima’s Decay of the Angel is indebted for its title. In the original Noh play, which may predate Zeami, a man refuses to return an angel’s celestial cloak, and she accordingly displays the fivefold signs of corruption.

¹ The fourteenth-century stage lacked both back walls; and the bridge lay where the pine tree now presides.

² Hare reminds us that it likewise expresses allegiance to the sovereign. Here for instance is a couplet of Zeami’s: “I celebrate my lord in the aged pine, / expecting him to live ten thousand years.”

³ In “Hanjo” a similar pun on pining and pine trees is offered by the shite, the prostitute Hanago.

⁴ He was the elder brother of Narihira, the clever acrostic poet and situational acrobat of eros, whose verses about irises imparted to the Eight Bridges of Mikawa a poetic glow that lasted a thousand years; Narihira as we have just seen, lives on in Noh.

⁵ This is no exaggeration. The carver Hori Yasuemon writes: “Kanzesoke has the beautiful tsuki and yuki fukai. This mask,” an original by Echi, and literally soaked in Zeami’s sweat, “is a tsuki and has the nose tilted left. The expression on her eyes is very gentle and full of love. Ideal for expressing the loneliness of losing a child or beauty in sadness. The other fukai, ‘Snow,’ has the nose tilted to the right, and is highly effective in scenes like ‘Neya wo nozokunayo’ in ‘Adachigahara’… It must have been made for special effects and scenes.”

⁶ Some Japanese poets and essayists have argued that sabi’s implicit pleasure in the yearning for past beauty may be still deeper than the pleasure of seeing the beauty still incarnated; and it has always been in just this way that I prefer to experience “Matsukaze,” the grief (which in its raw form is for any empathetic observer ghastly to witness) at least partially purified into beauty, as in Kawabata’s most exemplary novels.

¹ See above, p. 20.

² I inquired as to which position or gesture was appropriate when Kagekiyo first saw his daughter, and the answer caught me off guard as usual: “There is no particular move.”

³ In the performance I saw at the National Noh Theater in Tokyo, Mr. Umewaka was in the chorus, being one of many kneelers in dark robes gazing past Semimaru’s hut while the blind man himself, led by an attendant, slowly came across the bridge. (The tsure Semimaru was played by Kanze Tetsunojo.)

⁴ The same as a masugami. What can we do in this floating world, but let the transliterations fall where they may?

⁵ As an American dance critic remarked: “You become really absorbed at a play when Romeo is not only distinct and spontaneous, but also makes you recognize the emotion of love, which has nothing to do with the actor personally or with acting in itself or with words in themselves.”

⁶ Sometimes transliterated Satagami.

¹ Later I asked Mr. Mikata about this gesturing in unison: “Does this symbolize unity between the couple or something different?” — “It means that both of them felt the same way,” he replied. “About this move to show the sadness, for instance, both of them were about to go into the water, so they were both sad. The two of them perform the same move, so that the same movement accumulates for the audience. It’s not that the timing has to be completely the same, but the fact that they do the same move which shows that both of them feel the same. So when I play a role, of course the timing is important, but rather than the superficial move, the emotion is most important; that has to come first, if you want to achieve expression. The superficial stage of Noh ends once the hands move or it looks beautiful or like that. We must go beyond that.”

² Which could have been any one of three prison islands in southeastern Japan.

³ So did Shunkan. The Tale of the Heike reports that “there were, of course, some natives, but their speech was incomprehensible.” And do you remember the two heroines of the Noh play “Matzukaze,” whom Yukihira played with during his exile from the capital? Five centuries after him, Lady Nijo writes: “when I learned that we were passing Suma, I thought of the courtier Yukihira,” who “had ‘lived alone with tears and dripping seaweed.’ ” Such is the snobbery of the capital.

⁴ In his modern version of the Noh play “Kantan,” Mishima has the hero say: “I feel as if a mask kissed me.” The beauty replies: “That’s what women’s kisses are like.” — “You really are pretty,” he says. “But if you strip away the skin, what have you got but a skull?”

⁵ In her eleventh-century Pillow Book, Sei Shonagon advises that a letter from the provinces should arrive accompanied by a souvenir. A letter from the capital, of course, needs nothing else, being its own souvenir.

⁶ The space between musician and geisha is still another abyss to cross. Those two create a world together, but the musician merely upholds it without existing in it; the geisha exists alone.

¹ Content leaves it ambiguous as to whether or not the poet considers this beautiful.

¹ Clark does not give this distance explicitly but seems to imply it, as does the image of the Gothic Eve he reproduces.

¹ Definitions and examples of aware, en, miyabi, okashi and yugen are indebted to De Bary et al., pp. 197–99, 365.

^* Both frontispieces were originally photographed with color film specially for this book. Unfortunately, reproducing them in such a way as to show you the resplendence of geisha attire would have been too expensive for the publisher.