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

Understatements About This String-Ball of Idle Thoughts

His colleagues gave their leisure to various pastimes: some read novels, others took up the chants and No plays of the Kanzé School, and still others gathered to write haiku and make sketches illustrating the poems. Most of these diversions, however, served as pretexts for getting together to do some drinking.

Mishima Yukio, Runaway Horses

Deaf, dumb and illiterate in Japanese, innocent of formal study in any discipline of art, a graceless dancer afflicted with bad eyesight, I may not be the perfect author for any essay on Noh drama. Fortunately, this is no essay, but a string-ball of idle thoughts.¹ Rarely able to compose a short sentence, let alone a short book, I admit that this attempt of mine to extol the beauties of understatement may well approach the ludicrous. All the same, can’t a man praise the woman he loves? Can’t he describe her? Without presuming to be her, or to know her as she knows herself, can’t he claim acquaintanceship with her moods and ways?

In brief, rather than a primer prepared by a Noh expert, this short book is an appreciation, sincere and blundering, resolutely ignorant, riddled with the prejudices and insights of an alien, a theatergoer, a man gazing at femininity. Sometimes the blankness of my understanding corresponds to the faded-tattoo blue of Hiroshige’s skies and marshes. In his prints, snowcovered boats ride in a pale blue harbor enthralled by snowy trees, and I find many a pale white moon in a pale blue sky. All is tea- and tattoo-ink. Ladies view plum blossoms or maple blossoms in the snow; often they stand in meditative pairs at the base of some snow-outlined tree whose arms are as graceful as their hair.

On the Ginza subway line, a longhaired woman is removing a tiny, tiny digital device from her purse, while a dollfaced girl stands in the doorway, peering into the screen of her cell phone. Not far above their heads, hints of scattered cherry-blossoms and horned women enrich the stylized movements of white hands, the rapid graces of diamond-crowned, scarlet-cloaked Kabuki princesses. In snowy Kanazawa the moment has come when the geisha and the musician are giggling downstairs and I hear the shamisen being tuned. And on the Noh stage in Kyoto, a man has just now become a woman whose elegance is precisely modulated, in keeping with the way that the edge of her horizontally held fan cleaves the air. I watch them all, then write down what I see.

What a long line at the Kabuki-za tonight! Will there be time for a beer and a grilled eel over rice? How much will the tickets cost? Three hundred dollars apiece? I ought to save two thousand for an hour with just one more geisha, and seven hundred for my female makeover with Yukiko; then it’s off to the porn shop. I can still afford my coffin hotel, if I eat potato chips for breakfast all week. Someday the dollar might tumble downstairs; then I’d have to declare victory and end this book! Someday I might even turn elderly. But why entertain such impossibilities? I’d rather count the orange stripes of the white carp I saw in the pond of that snowy garden. A few more dances from now, I’ll be able to tell you with confidence when and how each gender unmasks itself to the other? For you and only for you, I peer into ancient picture-scrolls until it’s time for another snack. I sure hope the geisha won’t see the wrinkles in my suit. (Of course she will, but she’ll pretend she doesn’t.)

Why does the neurotoxin in this blowfish sashimi make my tongue tingle? I like it. How much more would be fatal? Never mind that; Mr. Kanze’s performing tonight in half an hour; time to pay the check and find a taxi; I’m ignorant about this Noh; will he be a man or a woman tonight?

Meanwhile the geisha Masami-san is rushing and rustling down the stairs, her brocaded obi comprising a square of loveliness at her back. Soon she will dance for me: My heart will voyage through the interstellar darkness around a white mask. Fukutaro-san tunes the shamisen. The two performers sit together, tilting their heads toward each other. Their kimonos are the same sky-blue.

How I love my life in this floating world! If I go drinking with the go-between, tomorrow my eyes will be as red as the lamps at Gion Shrine; but for that there’s always green tea, powdered and whisked to a froth, accompanied by a perfect little pistachio sweet. I’m a glutton, a plump middle-aged man now beginning to understand the old lechers who clutch at beauty, not that I’ll do that; I’m proud, so I’ll watch grace in theaters, bars, teahouses; I’ll invent a book about representations of feminine beauty and write off every geisha dance on my taxes…