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

Chapter 25. Snow in a Silver Bowl

An Epitaph for Radha’s Grace

And because femininity has no one true face, because it is modish, living, and hence at every moment ageing, because my loving or lustful or worshipful gaze must itself die, because my male attraction to the female is attachment, which even if it could last would eventually (whether or not I believe it) become torment, it is good for me to think again and again on Zeami’s third highest level of beauty: “The art of the flower of tranquility. Piling up snow in a silver bowl.” The Sanskrit poet Jayadeva celebrates Radha’s liquidly moving doe eyes, her black braid, her red berry-lips and perfectly circular breasts; her earlobe is the bowstring of desire and fragrance comes from her lotus mouth. Where is Radha now? The grace of a woman is a snow image; and then the sun comes out from faraway Silla, and there is only water in the silver bowl.

Chapter 26. Beauty’s Ghost

Ono No Komachi in Traditional Noh Plays

In Hokusai’s sketch, high-eyebrowed Komachi stands in a regal bow-like arc of kimono and haughtiness. So many men seek her — unimaginable the future when she will be expelled from the palace! This artist also portrays her in old age, clutching a disk whose upper rim bursts into leaf. And in the ninth of his illustrations to the renowned Hundred Poets anthology, in the midst of late spring, an old crone in a pale blue kimono and a red obi grips a cane, her white fist wilting down from its sagging red sleeve; and there she leans, staring at a cherry tree’s cloud-white blossoms, which do indeed resemble two-dimensional, multi-lobed clouds clinging to the tree’s crooked red arms and fingers. We see her only from the rear. Facing her, and looking at her either not at all or else only out of the corner of his eye, one of Hokusai’s typical balding, wry-faced workers sweeps the white path; white blossoms cling to the red bristles of his broom. The poem accompanying this image may be her most famous, the one that puns on rain and senescence; it begins: Hana no iro wa / Utsuri ni keri na… — “The flower’s color / has already gone…”

We have looked in on Zeami writing almost obsessively about the various ages in a Noh actor’s life, always emphasizing what he should aspire to create. At the age of twenty-four or twenty-five, when both voice and carriage have matured even as the body continues to be youthful, “this is a very dangerous moment for him. This flower is not the true flower… Due to his inexperience, he does not realize that this premature flower will fade soon. He must ponder this fact over and over again.”

In his effort to explain the meaning of “elegance beyond maturity,” Zeami quotes this proverb:

The flower of a lover’s mind

Is one that may fade at any moment

Without his being aware,

Like cherry blossoms

Ready to fall.

Noh most assuredly conveys the flower’s readiness to fall, all the more so now than in Zeami’s time, when the art’s various stylizations were not yet bygone; indeed, Zeami asserted that even Noh itself is transient, decaying; its hana declines each century. (Proust: “Whether it is because the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers.”) And so the cherry blossoms come blowing down. — Are they the true or the false? The lovely girl has an old man’s feet. And Komachi’s poems about her bygone beauty are beautiful as she herself beneath poetry’s mask no longer is. “The flower’s color / has already gone…” Accordingly, what could be more suitable than a cycle of Noh plays about her?

Once upon a time, a transgender woman decided that her desire for other transgender women was most often stimulated by their eyes, in which she read “endless strength and inconsolable sadness; I see a woman who was made to feel shame for her desires and yet had the courage to pursue them anyway.”

And the magnetism of young Komachi, on stage one reenacts it by means of a courtier who chants out his longing to kiss the vermilion lips of a waka-onna with another man inside. This hidden man possesses the true flower, the ease in rigidity of which a geisha who has reached greatness, for instance Kofumi-san, expresses: how could she, living statue, even tire, much less age?

But another cherry petal falls. The solid inkiness of a certain seventeenth-century zo-onna’s hair has begun to flake off above the parting. Here and there, the forehead shows age spots. Within that melon-seed face, all is not roundness; the corners of the eyes narrow into the lance-point, and the dark red lips make almost a hexagonal crystal bifurcated by a slit of black teeth. The girl seems to be regarding me from the midst of her own breathless joy — or does she perhaps express the inward-turned wonder which I have seen from time to time on the faces of corpses? Who is she? Suddenly she seems to be the moon. Those flecks and abrasions and freckles which four hundred years have placed upon her brow, they could be the mottlings of the lunar face which are so lovely to me on full moon nights.

MASK SUBSTITUTIONS

A Japanese Emperor once said: “The most important accomplishment for a beautiful woman is to be able to write poetry.” Indeed, this beautiful woman (born in about 820 or 830) was one of the Six Immortals. The literary scholar Donald Keene considers her “possibly the sincerest poet of her epoch.” I know her only in translation, of course, but to me sincerity seems as peculiar an ascription for Komachi as it would be for the slow rotation through stage-darkness of an ivory Noh mask with diagonal eyebrows; for her poems are as multiply allusive as Noh texts. Trickster of the pivot-words called kakekotoba, whose functions and effects I cannot appropriately convey to you, voice of changeability, empress of paradoxes, she performs her femininity with the understated brevity of her time. In one verse, the darkness which prohibits her lover from finding her accordingly illuminates her breast with desperate fire. Is this indeed sincerity, or simply truth? Another poem, more bitter, refers to the way a man’s deceitful flower, in other words his heart, can change without fading; he represents himself as unaltered, and pretends fidelity, when in fact he no longer loves the woman. Perhaps these lines were composed in torment; or for all we know Komachi crafted them in utter coolness, under the exigencies of some extemporaneous palace competition. Either way, they express a sadly eternal aspect of this floating world.

Beneath an ukiyo-e painting’s many-crooked cherry tree we find her, melon-faced and teeny-tiny-mouthed (her presumably blackened teeth hidden), as with her white arms and long white curving fingers she immerses the Imperial Anthology in a black bowl which is decorated with golden flowers. Thus she disproves an accusation of plagiarism, made by the villainous Otomo no Kuronushi, who listened at her door, heard her declaim her poem, and rushed to inscribe it in the old manuscript. New ink dissolves first; thus she cleared her name. The water has gone grey; the pages are a blank pale reddish-orangish-gold. A single comb crowns her hair.

Five more legends about her have been told to me. One is that she became the lover of Narihira, he who wrote the Tales of Ise. The second and most famous details her cruelty to Fukakusa no Shoso (or Shii no Shoso), whom she refused to embrace unless he stationed himself outside the palace for a full hundred nights, sleeping on the bench which held up the shafts of her carriage. Some say that he died in the ninety-ninth night; others, that his father did, so that he had to give over the ordeal.

This story haunted people from her near contemporary Sei Shonagon right up to the twentieth-century star geisha Iwasaki Mineko, who mentioned Komachi’s name when she told the tale of a certain snow-faced colleague who threw down the gauntlet to a customer, daring him to visit her each night for three years if he truly loved her.

And so it appears that Komachi could do whatever she wanted to her suitors. In the Noh play “Sotoba Komachi” we hear that Komachi “had in her day the blue brows of Katsura” and her eyes were once “like the color on distant mountains.” I imagine that she often associated herself with the items which Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book lists under the category of “Elegant Things” — for instance, “a young girl’s trailing white robe, worn over a lavender chemise.”

Many of her tankas express passion and desire for her unnamed lovers, but several are in this vein:

Surrender to you,

is it that you’re saying?

As ripples

surrender to idle wind?

And then her mask-face began to win its stains and scratches. — Makuzu Tadano, 1818: “It is good for a woman to realize that once she grows old, she becomes useless to the world.” Her third and fourth legends approached. She continued gliding across this floating stage; so years rippled about her in just the same way as the slender black calligraphy of the Tokugawa Museum’s Genji Picture-Scroll snakes down across an irregularly granulated background of pigments which shade subtly into one another, or get interrupted by mid-tones applied sometimes in wriggling creeks and other times in clouds like the high eyebrows of Noh masks; here and there the scroll has been showered with small squares or smaller irregular polygons of gleaming gold, upon which the black ink-strokes lie flat as if on the surface of some shimmery pond which reflects the hues of earth and autumn leaves; in certain parts of the scroll, the background takes on a jadelike tint, while mid-tone creeks resemble cracks; at times it grows more orange; resembling the bruiselike shadows which can sometimes appear around the cheekbones and under the eyes of ageing Japanese women, the scroll may adopt mauves or blues; it is always muted but never dull. Sometimes it reminds me of one of the ochayas in Kyoto or Kanazawa where I have had the great privilege of seeing the geishas dance: a mat-floored, paper-walled room of various warm beiges and creams, sometimes centered around paper tatami-squares; soon the dancers will come.

By then she must have begun to resemble first (in the fashion of Helga Testorf) a fukai mask, then an uba or a rojo. In her fukai state, so I have learned, one fan appropriate to her would have been the Hosho School’s tessenmon-kazura-ouni, with yellow-centered flowers white and blue on a brownish-grey background.

(It does no good to retreat into virginity; Zeami knows as well as the rest of us that the flower must be shown or it will be lost. Come to think of it, it will be lost in any event.)

I suppose that the first few grey hairs shocked her, as mine did me. Just as when a Noh chorus, having sat silent in the firelight for half an hour, suddenly howls in unison, then sits silent again, so this or that touch of Death’s paintbrush offended the undying youth of the mask I thought I wore, then stopped offending it; I was accustomed to my newest age-spot; I promised to bear it quite cheerfully if only I never got another one!

She is now, if you like, a toshima, a woman who emanates “mature charm.” When she danced for me, Kofumi-san certainly emanated such beauty. Unfortunately for Komachi, the inmates of the palace prefer the beauty represented by ko-omotes and maikos.

Bunya Yasuhide invites her to accompany him into the countryside — but she sniffs out the taint of condescending jocularity, and in her return poem she writes that she would eagerly cut her roots to become a drifting water-plant, if the inviting creek could but be trusted. I can almost see her irises going gold and the corners of her eyes squinting in the almost imperceptible resentment of the loveliest deigan mask.

Perhaps she continues her attendance at moon-viewing excursions. To me the full moon resembles a Mycenaean mirror whose verdigrised streaks and patches cause the whole to glow all the more brightly against the void. To her it now perhaps resembles her own face.

Shall we look at her now? Here is a rojo carved by Himi, the man who used the corpse of a starved woman as his model for a yase-onna: “With the rojo, simply being beautiful is not enough. It must deliver very deep thoughts. It must create fear along with elegance. Despite… the red lips, the dreadful drama of a woman is carved in this masterpiece… This piece is also called Onorojo, since it describes Ono no Komachi… Umewaka Rokuro writes that when his grandfather Umewaka Minoru wore this mask in ‘Sotoba Komachi,’ he could see Komachi’s ribs, and when his father Rokuro wore it in ‘Obasute,’ it expressed the longing to be absorbed in the moon, and in ‘Higaki,’ when the Hikimawashi was pulled down and the Nochijite appeared, he was so shocked by the mask and costume that he shuddered from the thought of the horrific ending of the woman’s life.”

The rojokomachi mask just described looks as follows: a face bleached like stripped wood, a crack in the arch of the upper left eyelid; the ridge of the nose, which splits off into the elegantly rounded brows, as sharp as anything in an aerial view of the Trans-Antarctic Range. The corners of the faded lips curve down; the eyes stare in fear and misery, unable to see anything but the end. Noh remembers Komachi as the ruins of allure — or, to distant Zeami, the bone and breath of it without the flesh. What remains? What is grace hollowed out? For answer, turn your gaze upon a rojokomachi.

And by now, as you might imagine, nobody is inviting her to come away on excursions anymore.

Her next legend inspired the Noh play “Sekidera Komachi,” in which the ancient beggar, being invited to the Festival of Stars, tries to dance. Representing her in this is of course a great challenge for the shite actor, who must gracefully convey her gracelessness. In the instant when she seems to embody her lost youthful elegance, the chorus chants: “How sad! My heart breaks! A flowering branch on a withered tree.” And yet this approaches Zeami’s definition of the true flower. My thoughts return, as in this context they so often do, to the aesthetic category called sabi (literally, rust), which gives to decrepitude the qualities of tranquility and austerity.

In the Noh play “Aoi-no-ue,” Princess Rokujo, transformed into a demon by jealousy, laments that “I lack form; therefore I lack anyone to ask after me.” Komachi does not yet lack form, but her form has decayed, and the shite of “Sekidera Komachi” informs us:

The century-old woman to whom you’ve spoken

is all that’s left of renowned Komachi,

is all that remains of Ono no Komachi.

Certainly she knows the next chapter. She has left us a tanka imagining herself as her own cremated smoke.

Even if she had never loved, but only dallied, her addiction to love-attachment must resemble ours to life.

In the final legend, wind blows through her skull’s eyesocket, imitating the moans of sadness she uttered while she was still alive. And so she has achieved parity with Rokujo’s formlessness. Doubtless a delicate Noh representation of even this could exude the fragrance of sabi.

In short, she came, like all of us, to a bad end; and some tales imply her to be blameable for it; the way she treated Fukakusa no Shoso has been particularly disliked, but at least it shows a sort of discrimination, perhaps even devotion to appropriate hierarchical values, for what if he had been beneath her? A certain poem in the Tales of Ise admonishes the exalted and the base not to fall in love, because the disparity will be bitter. The yase otoko mask through which the Kanze School sometimes portrays Fukakusa is “the face of a man in hell.” “This mask, its expression dignified rather than grim, is one of the best-suited of all for the nobility of this thwarted suitor.” But to me it seems like an exoskeleton of a face fashioned from almost translucent yellow cartilage, washed in the black water of death, his mouth limply gaping, his moustache somehow resembling a catfish’s whiskers; they say that this mask is sometimes used to play the ghost of a fisherman who after betraying a shallow passage to the enemy was stabbed and left to drown; now he swims and swims; the waters of blackness pass through his mouth. Black water shines deep behind his eyes. He bears the mottled complexion despised by Sei Shonagon. His cheek-hollows could have been transplanted from a crab’s carapace. He is so far lost, so far down even below Komachi, that he no longer knows who he is. Komachi, his murderer and only friend, draws him toward her head-planet; he comes slowly, a dead yellow comet, drawn on by an erotic gravity which is all that defines him now.

Yes, she refused him. Certainly her behavior differed from that of the heroine of Saikaku Ihara’s seventeenth-century cautionary tale about a nymphomaniac who goes mad, runs naked into the street, and sings the words of “a Komachi Dance.” What did posterity want of Komachi? How could she be bad in two opposing ways? Perhaps we simply wished to claim her, to embellish our own agonies by comparing them to hers. Here is how Lady Nijo memorializes her: “Yet could she have been as miserable as I was?”

THE MESSENGER RISES

I said that I knew five legends about Komachi, and you have now read four, including the last, which is to those who still keep flesh in our eyeholes the saddest. The penultimate one takes us near the end of her living decrepitude: By messenger the Emperor sends her a poem. Such is her cleverness that when the crone presents the messenger with a return poem, it is the original with one syllable altered. In Osaka I have seen the late Mr. Kanze play her in this rarely performed Noh play, which is called simply “Ono no Komachi.” When she comes creeping out from behind the rainbow curtain, she nearly stumbles; her knees shake. The chorus is singing, more slowly and softly than before: “Yo-o-o-o-oh… ooh!”

Komachi wears the mushroomlike greyish cap of travel, leaning on her stick. Then a single chorister’s voice soughs like the wind.

When they sing all together, their winter basses remind me of Zeami’s vision of the true flower as an old tree with blossoms on it. All the same, how dismal they sound!

I find dozers better represented in this audience than at any other time in my experience: the lady beside me, the lady next to her; even my poor interpreter can hardly keep her eyes open.

Komachi halts by the first pine, gazing sadly out at us from the bridge. I have never seen that before.

She begins to sing in her trembling voice, while the men of the chorus chant a background curtain of sound, their voices like the wind. Once upon a time her lips were as red as the fallen autumn maple leaves at the Shoren-in. But colors do change, and one of her tankas reads as follows:

What do you now tell me,

I who age

in this tear-rain?

Your words, like these leaves,

have turned color.

Someday soon, windblown pampas grass will whip across Komachi’s skull in much the same way that a maiko’s headdress sometimes dangles its fruiting bodies of pearl and tortoise-shell down past her eyes. And like the grassblades, Mr. Kanze’s voice is vibrating and wobbling in a strangely lovely almost monotonous melodic portrait of decrepitude.

It has been said that the intensity of her poetic expressions of passion is such that they transfigure the subjective into the seemingly objective; and in Noh’s equally poetic envisioning of her elder days, Komachi appears on the verge of blooming again; her dance, like those words and leaves, has turned color; but which color? What is a woman? What animates the stiffness of a golden fan?

In her singing in “Sotoba Komachi” she alludes to her poem of reply to Bunya Yasuhide: Now she would cut her roots and float down any inviting stream, no matter how untrustworthy its waters; but no stream invites her anymore. Now what does she sing to the Emperor’s envoy?

When the others chant (they are Shingon priests), she halts, lowers her head and seems to sense the chorus, bringing alive Zeami’s maxim that for a skilled actor “movement will grow from the chant” because word and thought are superior to since causative of action; “functions grow out of substance and not the other way around.” And so it feels as if at the end of her wearily triumphant disputation with the two priests, followed by a paroxysm of her now chronic madness (brought about by Fukakusa no Shoso’s vengefully lovelorn ghost), and succeeded at last by her prayer, outcome unknown, for salvation, it were the chant that impels her into that slow creep offstage in her long yellow kimono while they sing for her as for a departed spirit.

But at the end of “Ono no Komachi” she simply halts. Slowly she turns back, reaches out toward the chorus, one wrist crossed over the other, and irresolutely creeps back onto the stage.

In one of her poems she describes her misery at perceiving herself cowering away from malicious eyes even in her dreams; but this seems to have been composed back in the days of her love intrigues. I can well imagine what so sensitive a person now feels, to be regarded quite simply as a disgusting object. She cannot yet escape the stage of this floating world; and so she comes to us, performing withered femininity with perfect grace. Holding an invisible branch of flowers, she dances out her weary agony.

I cannot tell you why I so clearly remember the long interval during which Komachi faces the messenger, he gazing at her, she staring down at the ground. Then an assistant comes, carries her hat off the ground and vanishes through the low corner door, adding to my sense that the characters are only half alive and must continually be cared for. The messenger departs to sit amidst the double row of kneelers at stage right.

When Komachi, still seated, bends down to gaze into her cupped hands, we can see the black band of hair on the crown of the mask. She creeps upward, struggling to rise. While one man drums, a second chants and a third plays the flute, three assistants gather around her right there next to the bridge, transforming her so that instead of being in yellow she now wears a burgundy kimono with rich gold splotches resembling leaves. Presently she is on the bridge by the closest pine, gazing out of her yellow skull-like mask. She faces almost to the rainbow curtain, raises her fan, her sleeve hanging open almost all the way to her waist; she creeps a trifle toward the rainbow curtain, then back again, stands on the stage gazing down into the woodgrain, raises her fan slowly; leaning on her stick, she beggar-creeps to the very edge of the stage, her golden fan extending, slowly sweeping up, gold on one side, red on the other. Most of the play has to do with her painfully standing and crouching, coming and partly going, staring down under the stage.

How to describe that mask? Golden-yellow with metallic hair, sunken-eyed, with a dark slit for a mouth, shadow-cheeked and aquiline — an uba, perhaps. I am too far away to see it clearly. The weight of it seems to bow her backward.

In some Kanze School performances of “Sotoba Komachi,” she incarnates herself in a higaki-no-onna mask, which may also be used to portray “a once-beautiful courtesan brought low by haughty arrogance who looks back from the secluded hut in which she lives out her old age, surrounded by a fence of cypress-wood, upon the golden days long ago when she was the toast of Kyoto.” The higaki-no-onna is perfect for jonomai, the slowest Noh dance. In a pair of reproductions, that mask looks at me, straight on in despairing dullness, the skin still smooth but greyed and whited down, and turned to the left, which causes Komachi to lose herself in herself, like the dreamy concentration one sees on the faces of corpses who died peacefully; harvest moon of femininity, this face of Komachi swims alone in outer space, sickly conscious of her disembodiment: She will never again feel a man in her arms — unless an actor ties her onto his face, and then… and then she will merely get carried about in a creep. As for “Ono no Komachi,” that play is so rarely performed that I have no information respecting permissible masks. And Mr. Kanze is dead. Laurel of the moon, human shadow, Komachi, our dying other self, what am I to do with you, you whom I see but cannot touch? Slowly Komachi orbits away from me. Soon she will be back in her box.

The messenger finally rises. Komachi straightens toward him. He stands and waits; then she glides past him and he past her. As it habitually does, the rainbow curtain rises by itself, and the messenger glides into its undershadow. Komachi stands onstage alone, chanting, then a sharp drum-click impels her to depart in silence, limping along the bridge.

BEAUTIFUL TOMBS

And it was Noh; it was beautiful, like a marble kore broken away from the Parthenon. Lacking arms, legs and even her head, this young woman first appears to us as an age- and pigment-stained boulder. Her young breasts are as worn as sea-glass. The incisions of her tunic-folds provide most of her surviving definition, aside from her right thigh, which, says the museum catalogue, “is revealed as she pulls the peplos to one side with her now-missing right hand.” Her belt is tight and her waist is narrow. Here stands, on sturdy modern pins, a chipped stone garment with someone inside it who is living yet incomplete. Before Lord Elgin conveyed her away, before his predecessors mutilated her, and the centuries abraded her paint into something less than a suggestion, who was she? Beneath the blue brows of Katsura, Komachi’s gaze once looked out. If we peer into her eyesockets, can’t we find it? Can’t we believe in the Elgin Kore’s right hand? If we can see old age and ruin as understatement in their own right, masked performances of a beauty in which we never could have imagined we would believe, then actor and audience together have won a victory.

In “Sekidera Komachi,” even as we are led to pity the vanity of worldly attachment, of Komachi’s longing to remain young and beautiful, we are simultaneously advised that poetry remains immortal and green like pine trees, that words of poetry will never fail.

To what extent could this possibly be true? During successful performances, Noh’s insistent disjunction between the lovely or at least artful mask and the actor’s flabby throat permits the former to triumph over the latter or at least to make it irrelevant: the adam’s apple moves without shame. And in the Komachi plays, the pathos of the heroine’s lost past (her present sad, her future worse) is beautified by her memories of her youth:

My rooms shone with tortoise shell,

Golden flowers grew from the walls,

And in the door bloomed crystal bead strings.

More clear-eyed than Murasame and Matsukaze (after all, she is not yet a ghost), Komachi admits to herself that the past is past. But grace dwells yet in her bones. As Zeami remarks, “white jade, even in the mud, will retain its real appearance.”

As for those artifacts of yellow jade called skulls, why, don’t those also remain as they are?

One summer dusk on the bamboo-shaded hillside above Choraku-ji Temple I am surprised to discover myself a guest of death. The narrow tomb-pillars, as pleasingly proportioned as packaged sweets, the trembling ferns, air and light shimmering through the tall bamboo, the loveliness of this world, which has put on a costume of shade, the bright white backdrop of sky through, beyond and behind like a theatrical backdrop of radical simplicity, my own joy, and the workings of my mentality (I have just realized that in this place, near the conclusion of the Tale of the Heike, a certain sad Empress took the tonsure) protect me from the reality: Someday, unless I get turned into smoke, wind or ants will pass through the eyeholes of my skull. Crows croak. Sitting on the ground, I cannot see Kyoto below me.

Chapter 27. Urashima’s Box

A Few Thoughts About Time

The grace of a woman is indeed a snow image. A snow-faced onnagata gazes sadly out at this floating world from the corners of her eyes, whose over-and-underlining thickens as it departs the nose, so that their inward edges are points and the outward ones rounded like raindrops; her crimson heartshaped little mouth takes on all the more beauty above her sky-blue collar and below her purple-black wig and eyebrows; with long white fingers she holds her striped robe just open or just closed at the breast, showing off the milky river-patterns on her slate-blue obi. Within a few hours at most she will be washing off her paint.

Katy might fall asleep with her makeup on, but tomorrow she too must slough off her female skin.

A Noh actor plays Komachi. Then in the mirror room an uba mask goes back into its box, and an old man goes home.

Once upon a time, Urashima of Mizunoé married the Sea-God’s daughter and lived immortally with her amidst the octopi until he foolishly decided to visit his parents, who of course had long since risen up in funeral-smoke; so, standing alone on the shore, he opened the casket she’d warned him never to open, and out came a white cloud that returned to the Sea-God’s palace without him; he immediately died of old age.

The grace of Noh is one more snow image, and likewise Kabuki, in which the faded block prints and paper screens of the past are reborn into stunning brightness. How easy it is to live delusionally beyond time, until the performance ends, the beautiful face returns to its box, and I swirl out of mine, joining the effervescence of salarymen in dark suits who march along with me all the way to Shinagawa Station, their heads high, only a few of them yawning, most of them resolute even when they bear dark hollows under their eyes, almost all proceeding in one direction, which is the same taken by the shoals of miniskirted high heeled schoolgirls in uniforms which vary the sailor suit theme; these people are concentrating sometimes on some intermediate point ahead of them in the night, sometimes on something within their skulls, or on the screen of an illuminated cellphone held at arm’s length, but hardly ever on each other; they resemble a school of fish, wide-eyed and together forward, passing solitary from womb to grave. As it gets later, the clothing grows more varied, the faces less resolute; one even spies grubby people. But every now and then a lovely face streaks across my horizon, always rightward, and, like all the others, rounds the corner and passes through the ticket gate. I reach my coffin hotel. It is time to hang up my wilted suit. The crowd continues on toward the Sea-God’s palace. I brush my teeth and say goodnight to my ageing face.¹

That ageing isn’t all bad I know from the time-scarred buttocks of various marble Aphrodites, not to mention those lovingly used Noh masks. Besides, as my late grandfather always used to say, in evident disagreement with Komachi, “well, Bill, it’s better than the alternative.” One such alternative is conveyed by this letter from Oda Nobunaga to Murai Sadakatsu, 1575, with vermilion seal: “The town of Fuchu is nothing but corpses… I’d like to show it to you! Today I shall search every mountain and every valley, and I shall kill them all.” Accordingly, just for today I will permit myself to get a trifle older, being not quite ready to choose death, as Mishima did. And next time I go to Kyoto and ask Kofumi-san to dance for me, the lines at the corners of her mouth will have lengthened. She will be no less beautiful to me for that, and perhaps more so: Sabi not merely enriches but defines the open fields painted by Andrew Wyeth, who called their implied loneliness “natural for me.” In Snow Country, that master of aware, Kawabata, takes note of a certain woman as follows: “It was such a beautiful voice that it struck one as sad.” This may well be the most characteristic sentence in his oeuvre. (Did this man not write a book called Beauty and Sadness?) The sadness, for him at least, comes from transience. Whenever his artistic gaze met schoolgirls in blue uniforms, green lanterns, red walls, necklaces of wisteria spilling down the tree-trellis, it was as if he remembered rather than perceived them. Mishima’s consciousness for its part would have sniffed them all anxiously for indications of decomposition. Urashima preferred to avoid them, and dwell — at least until his guilt or yearning prevented him — in a changeless place which I only imagine that I can imagine because it must be very old, and even if the gems remain in their sockets, the black calligraphy still frozen in rainstrings superimposed on the greyish cloud-shapes and grass-shapes of the palace screens, all the same, black must have flecked out of the courtiers’ hair, their faces decayed and flaked half away, their sea-flowers long since scattered and devoured by snails — unless, of course, Zeami is incorrect, and the true flower can in fact endure forever, like some precious mineral concretion in an E. T. A. Hoffmann fairytale.

The Sea-God’s daughter must have been perfect; her mouth must have been as cool as a mosquitoey afternoon exhaling from a moss garden in Kyoto. Beneath the cold waves on edge of which the saltmakers of Suma gathered seaweed to burn, the palace might have presented, like so many of Kyoto’s old temples, a curving roof of wavelike tiles, beneath which white panel walls and fragile wooden pillars stood multiply open to reveal a grid of paneled walls and tatami floors. Perhaps black snails kept them clean. And I imagine an open vermilion structure with silver-white rails from which Urashima and his wife could gaze down from the crest of a hill of tea-green shrubs — really more seaweed, but after his first thousand years of residence he might have forgotten the appearance of terrestrial plants, whose flowerings false and true would have been as lost to him as the changes of the moon.

Now that I think of it, the palace could just as well have resembled Mishima’s house, whose courtyard’s tile path winds among statues and urns. Mishima smiles widely in the old photos, drifting in or hiding from the shoals of guests who were allured by his talent, family, money, power, celebrity, physical appeal. He poses Napoleonlike on the stairs, with a painting of a three-masted sailing ship behind him. The house is a museum now. His Parisian clock, which in its swirling rococo intricacy resembles a hunk of tropical coral reef, no longer tells the time.

Mishima sometimes liked to pose amidst his statuary, which emanated masculinity. Well, and what is a statue to you? I myself prefer to meet imperishable femininity. From 350 B.C. or thereabouts, a winged nude goddess stares stolidly ahead, her dark and mottled skin its own armor, her breasts and nipples their own breastplates, her V-shaped pubis one more facet or plane which might perhaps open from within, like the air vent of a tank, her pupil-less eyes equally impenetrable surfaces flecked with greenish-gold. She is, apparently, Lasa, an approximate Etruscan equivalent of Venus. The alabastron she holds in her left hand is a perfume vessel. Her right hand visors her gaze. Her hair resembles swirling sun-rays. She is hard and slender. Call her a true flower incarnated forever. She allures me, but I can scarcely pretend to know her as an Etruscan would. Devoting the remainder of my life to learning to love her through her context might bring me joy, but I would be decaying ever farther from her with every instant; moreover, who would she be, if anyone? At least the mask sometimes has a living being inside it. If my feelings for her fulfilled me, how would they differ from autogynephilia? Wouldn’t it be more appropriate simply to set her beside another statue?

I remember two figures together on a Noh stage, the demon whirling, the goddess still and composed. Isn’t this how the marriage of a human with an immortal would go?

The Tokugawa Museum displays a scroll depicting Ono no Komachi: The eyebrow-lines painted high on her forehead, the arrowhead face, narrow eyes, and long, black hair could almost have represented any lady in a Genji Picture-Scroll — not quite, for her cheeks were not as chubby as theirs, but she had been analogously understated into feminine elegance; she dwelled with the Sea-God’s daughter in that realm where each eye is one stroke of the brush and all women have wide cheeks and small mouths, regardless of age and sex, and where, furthermore, they are depicted always in profile or half-profile, never with any expression, in the late Heian style of “female picture” called yamato-e. Why shouldn’t such entities endure for eternity? Komachi’s kimono opened at the neck in a series of nested outward-curving V’s like waterfalls or rainbows springing apart from the same root, revealing the zigzag dark-on-green of the inner kimono, and then a faint arc of snow-white inner kimono where multitudes of desperate lovers must have directed eyes, caresses and poems.

Was it this realm that Fukakusa no Shoso, he who failed to win Komachi on the verge of achieving his hundred faithful nights, truly wanted to enter? Would he have been content to live eternally in expressionless profile? Perhaps his soul was disordered from the beginning. In “Sotoba Komachi,” he possesses his enfeebled antagonist in order to announce through her lips: “She sent no answer, not the merest trifling word; accordingly for punishment she has grown old. She has lived a hundred years. I love her; how I love her!” — Thus Noh insists once again on the insanity of attachment.

That attachment is insane is, of course, no strike against it. (Andrew Wyeth again: “The only thing that I want to search for is the growth and depth of my emotion toward a given object.”) And for me the point of Komachi’s story is not that she was cruel, if indeed she was, but that she was thoughtless, as most living beings are and might as well be. She got old, then regretted the days when she had been thoughtless. In “Sotoba Komachi” the priests sorrowed for her. Why not for you and me?

If Kawabata had written about her, I think he would have concentrated in the days just before her mask began to get scratched. Mishima did take her up. He rewrote “Sotoba Komachi.”

Were this a more “literary” book I would have spent much of it on Kawabata, who was not, as Mishima is, the bitter victim of beauty, but its mourning celebrant. If you want to see what he saw, look at the youngest faces in the girlie magazines. Or go to the hot springs of the Snow Country. Or visit the Hiragiya Ryokan in Kyoto. This inn offers the paying guest a certain lovely tatami room with walled garden all around: stone lanterns, ferns and moss. The blinds are a trifle down and there is a lacquered table. So much of this inner world is soothing and beige. I remember the latticed sliding screens with snow-viewing windows at the right height for seeing when sitting. Kawabata used to stay here with his wife — although it is said that he rented another place to write in.

As for Mishima, when I think of him I remember Urashima’s box. Mishima might have married the Sea-God’s daughter, but, suspecting the treacherous limits of everything, even the immortality her profiled kiss would have offered him, he took that casket and immediately smashed it on the rocky beach.

Chapter 28. The Decay of the Angel

Komachi in the Noh Plays of Mishima Yukio

Like most novelists, Mishima writes principally about himself. In each volume of his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, which shines ever more obviously as one of the great works of the last century, the protagonist appears to have been reincarnated into a different body. First he is Kiyoaki, a sensitively self-destructive young dreamer who falls in love with the one woman he has been expressly prohibited from loving, and from that love he catches his death at age twenty. Next we see him as a kendo athlete with “a face like new-fallen snow, unaware of what lies ahead,” who matures into a rightwing suicide terrorist. In the third novel he’s reborn as a Thai princess who also dies young, of a snakebite; in the last, as a handsome, cruel young lighthouse keeper. The reincarnated person can always be identified by a certain birthmark, and the identification gets accomplished by the other protagonist, Shigekuni Honda, who is a judge — perfect profession for a soul whose task it is in the tetralogy to decide what might or might not be true, and what existence means. In the first novel, he muses about Kiyoaki: “Up until now I thought it best as his friend to pretend not to notice even if he were in his death agonies, out of respect for that elegance of his.” Certainly Honda never suceeds in preventing anybody’s death agonies. Scrupulous, empathetic, intelligent, aching to understand, and ultimately impotent, Honda might as well be — a novelist.

In effect, then, there are two main characters in this long work, the observer and the observed. Is the observed really one soul who comes to life four times, or, as the final volume hints, has Honda deluded himself (as I perhaps would) out of yearning for supernatural coherence?

Mishima was both Honda and Kiyoaki, the one and the myriad. As an artist, he could create, but creation can never substitute for action. Action, on the other hand, may be powerful but cannot transcend ephemerality. Action dies as does Kiyoaki, and as did ultimately Mishima himself, whose carefully politicized, aestheticized suicide was not only rabidly absurd, but a failure on its own terms: The troops refused to rally to his call for Emperor worship. At least Isao, the kendo athlete of the second book, succeeds in assassinating somebody before he cuts his belly open. Mishima was ultimately more like Honda than like Isao, which is hardly a terrible thing: while he may be sterile in the sense that he will not bring about any “great event” (he will not murder any ministers), his empathy will endure. Honda’s seeking, his sincerity, his fidelity to that not necessarily well founded belief in Kiyoaki’s reincarnations, here are the strands of perception, conceptualization and devotion which sustain patterns of recurrence into something permanent and precious. Without Honda, the four young men and one young woman who share nothing but a certain birthmark and a predilection to secret self-absorptions would not have added up to any collective thing. Thanks to him, they embody a sacred mystery. That is why Honda can be likened to the immense display case in the Mishima Yukio Literary Museum, where our author’s books shine as colorfully frozen as any collection of immaculate butterflies.

So Honda is Mishima; and the butterflies, the various versions of Kiyoaki, are also Mishima, whose strangely plastic features — and this is a quality more often pertaining to women, because more of them know how to dress the part and put on makeup — seem capable of forming themselves into any number of vastly dissimilar faces. Sometimes in the photographs his very head appears elongated, as though he were Cambodian or Vietnamese; at other times it’s rounder, like the clay head of some Assyrian idol; that frequently very sensitive and delicate face, Kiyoaki-face, can on occasion appear bleached and bleak like an ageing prisoner’s, or harden into the stereotyped clay vulgarity which I have seen in the attitudes of tattooed Yakuza gangsters posing for my press camera (this, perhaps, was an attempt to embody himself as Isao the suicide-terrorist). We have Mishima the suit and tie man, Mishima the flashy dancer (caught from above and grainily, à la Weegee), Mishima the artful poser in the dark kimono polka-dotted with light, and they are all his expressions of self, his legitimate incarnations, but only the Mishima called Honda sits down to the desk on which the bronze or brass letter-opener surmounted with the medallion of a Caucasian’s head (a certain Emperor Napoleon, I believe) lies beside a miniature sword; two very Japanese looking metal fishes and a metal lizard bask eternally by a golden Parker pen; it is none other than Honda who, perhaps wishing that he could be Isao, writes at the end of Runaway Horses: “The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.”

This defines Mishima’s agony. As he writes in his eerie confession Sun and Steel,

In the average person, I imagine, the body precedes language. In my case, words came first of all; then… came the flesh. It was already… sadly wasted by words. First comes the pillar of white wood, then the white ants that feed on it. But for me, the white ants were there from the start, and the pillar of plain wood emerged tardily, already half eaten away.

Regarding Ono no Komachi one sees the white ants in retrospect. But in her heyday, no doubt, one saw only the white wood of her perfect flesh, the white arms, black teeth, black hair.

Kiyoaki has the body, of course, and Honda the words. And the words despise themselves, knowing that their own fulfillment necessarily spoils the body with sedentariness. But without the words to define and cohere, the body lapses into its own separate incarnations; and even its most dramatic self-expressions, its mutilations and orgasms, cannot win to the understanding which words make possible and which will keep the body’s consciousness whole. For all his athletic poses toward the end, the mere existence of the Mishima Yukio Literary Museum suffices to prove that the body was not enough for our novelist, that like Kiyoaki he became too restless to stay in one body, that he wanted to be the man of a thousand faces even if the close-cropped hair, the half-smoked cigarette failed to remove him as much as he thought it did from kinship with any small boy who dresses up as a sailor. Yes, incarnation is restless, and so in some photographs, Mishima, whom my Japanese translator thinks of as “definitely gifted, but somehow not really sure how to cope with the ‘gift,’ ” wears a radiant if at times hysterically radiant smile, the white teeth tight together; in other images he’s trying to look stern. In the body-builder portraits, Mishima appears rounded and drawn in on himself, transformed into clay, a stolid corporeality which expresses itself more loudly than the inner spirit; but I suspect that the spirit, which accentuated that corporeality because it loathes itself, feels tormented by that loudness and dares not confess it. Could that be one reason that Mishima chose death?

About that death, or at least about its supposed inevitability, a little more should be said. In Sun and Steel he bitterly complains about the fact that men cannot objectify themelves, and from the context it’s evident that he means objectify their bodies as women can. I ask his ghost: What about the spectacularly objectified feminine beauty of the male Noh actor? Not answering, Mishima hurries on: “He can only be objectified through the supreme action — which is, I suppose, the moment of death, the moment when, even without being seen, the fiction of being seen and the beauty of the object are permitted. Of such is the beauty of the suicide squad.” Mishima wrote those words in that languorously white house of his, which might be considered a little peculiar for the abode of a Japanese nationalist given those white urns, Greekish statues and European horoscope mosaic, that house which serenely bides and forebodes behind its high white wall; if anything, it makes me think of the residence of the minister Kurihara in Runaway Horses, whom Isao stabs to death in punishment for the crime of sacrilege. Kurihara is, among other things, another Honda. The body hates the words (so, at least, the self-hating words say). The body freely, guiltlessly kills and copulates, marches, overthrows, dances, allures, inspires, makes history. It can do everything. But what’s it made of? The white ants are already eating it. When Mishima, naked but for his loincloth, sits on the tatami mat for yet another photograph (if you knew him by only this image, you wouldn’t suspect that he lives amidst French engravings of nineteenth-century experimental balloons), when Mishima leans on the staff of his sheathed sword, his face, which to others, including himself, may evince resolution, to me betrays resignation, even vacancy, as if it cannot escape its own clay.

And yet that house with its erotic luxury and hallmarks of foreign possibilities, that cosmopolitan palace which Isao would have hated, what a perfect womb for a creative mind! To be sure, he could have become soft and fat living in that house (and suddenly I think with more sympathy of Urashima, immortal so far, dwelling endlessly underwater with the Sea-God’s daughter). In his study stand Japanese brushes in a lacquerware cylinder, an elegantly slender calligraphy box, a block of scarlet ink for what I think is a stamp or seal; with those objects perhaps he could have incarnated himself into a living exemplar of the Japanese tradition which he imagined that he had to die for. He might have chosen any number of fates. And it may be significant that the tense, gruesome Runaway Horses, whose hero kills himself more or less with Mishima’s method, is not the final novel of the tetralogy, but the second. What if Mishima, like the ghost-shite of many a Noh play, had outlived his own death? Honda himself is condemned to outlive Isao’s seppuku for two more volumes in which nothing nearly as dramatic will occur. In the third volume, The Temple of Dawn, he witnesses what he believes is Kiyoaki’s reincarnation in the person of a beautiful, mysterious Thai princess. Mishima’s mood becomes richly tropical here, and the discourses into Buddhist theology, which irritate some readers, to me evince a last flowering of intellectual excitement on Honda’s part as he continues to attempt to find, and Mishima to convey, perhaps to feel, the meaning of existence. But halfway through this novel, the famous aridity has already set in. Lovesickness, ideological rapture, and divine mysteries are done. The final book, The Decay of the Angel, exudes a suffocatingly existential quality. It’s all about waiting for death — not the joyfully fanatical death of Runaway Horses, which Mishima tried unjoyfully to die, but the death of the white ants. Unable to move forward to oblivion, the shite chants out nausea and putrefaction. Reading The Temple of Dawn always makes me feel that the tetralogy’s end, and Mishima’s corresponding finish, were not preordained.¹ The enigmatic little Thai princess offers the prospect of something different, something not only almost as erotic as suicide, but perhaps more elusive, something worthwhile enough to warrant not killing oneself while one tries to uncover it. Very possibly, if The Temple of Dawn is any indication, this something could have been religion or philosophy. I wonder how feverishly Mishima hunted for it in his wood-clad study with the bookshelved walls.² He failed to find it, and that is why every year on 25 November, the white-clad Shinto priests lay down their prayer-streamers on the altar, which resembles a tabletop model of a round-towered castle, and the blood-red disk of the Hinomaru flag hangs above them in the darkness beside Mishima’s portrait.

MISHIMA’S KOMACHI

In the shade of his sensational end, Mishima’s Noh plays often go overlooked.

Of the five which I have been able to read in translation, three fall considerably short of their originals. Only his “Hanjo” is clearly superior. All of them gleefully defy Zeami’s edict that “one must not copy the vulgar manners of common people.”

In shocking contradistinction to the classical Noh aesthetic of yugen, Mishima begins his “Sotoba Komachi” as follows: “THE SET is in extremely vulgar and commonplace taste, rather in the matter of sets used in operettas.” In other words, “the white ants were there from the start.” One of Mishima’s hallmarks, like Poe’s, is nastiness.

In the original, as in the sister Noh plays, Komachi is a pathetic character whose echoes of her past beauty and arrogance render her grandly pitiable — and more, for having outlived the false flower of her youth she may win through to enlightened non-attachment. But in Mishima’s version she becomes, as women so often do in his work, an impure devourer whose weapons include ambiguity and hypocrisy. Mishima’s hero-protagonists are resolute. His heroines are the enemies of resolution.

One could write a diverse catalogue of the little avarices which occur when poverty marries old age. But when this ant-eaten Komachi of his counts over her hoard of cigarette butts, this seems not only appropriate to an aged beggar, but germane to the younger Komachi whose absence shines from behind the rainbow curtain — for didn’t she collect from Fukakusa her utmost toll of those hundred fatal nights? Mishima recapitulates her tale on a gruesomely petty scale. I, glorifier of my attachments, reject to my utmost power Noh’s assertion that clinging to whatever moves becomes torture — but Mishima’s Komachi is a horridly convincing argument against me. What makes her horrid is that he has stolen her grace away.³ In this anti-Noh of his, the Poet who stands in for Fukakusa insists: “The park, the lovers, the lampposts, do you think I’d use such vulgar material?” Mishima uses it with glee; Komachi embodies it, all the while assuring us that nothing was not vulgar once. The Poet, who himself lacks any sweetheart, loves lovers because they seem to each other more beautiful than they are. To this Komachi replies that those who keep such illusions are actually dead: Boredom and disgust prove that one has come back to life.

Here is an example of Mishima’s typically morbid version of aware. Komachi looks around her at the loving couples in the park and remarks: “They’re petting on their graves. Look, how deathly pale their faces look in the greenish street light that comes through the leaves.”

And presently one even finds a tiny bit of yugen, although it reminds me of some grim voyage to Hel in the Norse Eddas: “Shadows are moving over the windows, and the windows grow light and dark by turns with the shadows of the dance. So wonderfully peaceful — like the shadows cast by flames.”

Mishima continually implies that the beauty of femininity’s mask is not merely delusory, but dangerous, distracting, voracious: the ruination of male energy. (As it happens, he forgives the loveliness of the onnagata who gazes demurely down while the red-painted outer corners of her eyes curve impossibly up.)

Did Fukakusa no Shoso die a worthwhile death? In Spring Snow, Kiyoaki fruitlessly visits again and again the woman who, her virginity stolen by him, has been led to take the tonsure and renounce him forever. Like Komachi’s lover, he dies at last of exposure. There is, to my mind at least, an element of self-destructive stupidity in Kiyoaki’s doings; but what I interpret as the author’s accomplished irony may be something else, given how he ended his life (how horrible if he had felt “ironic” even then!). And Captain Fukakusa in Mishima’s “Sotoba Komachi” has certainly been warned by the old witch herself not to let himself be allured. He seems to inflict the spell upon himself, and therefore to be more self-aware, profounder, than his exemplar in the traditional texts. As for Komachi, like so many Mishima heroines (although certainly not all of them), she is not much more than evil, and therefore far inferior to her original. When Mr. Kanze portrayed Komachi in her old age I could almost see the white triangles of snow in the joints of the bamboo-grove at the Shoren-in, or the way that in late spring the moss of the Shoren-in mottled and marbled with fallen cherry blossoms;⁴ whereas Mishima’s Komachi is simply an ogress — or is she? The rule is this: Call her beautiful and you die. She sportingly warns the Poet of this again and again even as she entices him to dance. But is he perhaps already dead? He promises to meet her here in a hundred years, when she will have grown old as he will not. So could he be the ghost of Fukakusa? Tonight has dreamily become the hundredth night, so Komachi must give herself to the Poet, at which prospect he feels simultaneously happy and disheartened. But then he says: “If I think something is beautiful, I must say it’s beautiful even if I die for it.” And so he dies, and Komachi calmly sits counting up her cigarette butts.

As a matter of fact, Fukakusa’s character is hardly otherwise in the traditional Noh plays. In “Kayoi Komachi” the waki comes to the grass to pray for the release of her moaning skull. Fukakusa no Shoso’s spirit also exists here; but he at first refuses to accept the Law of Buddha and be enlightened. Clinging to his love and resentment, he goes so far as to menace the priest. Presently, however, he finds himself, in the accustomed pathetic fashion of ghosts, reenacting the hundredth night, on the verge of winning of Komachi’s favors, and this somehow enables him to reach the better consummation of enlightenment.

I see Komachi young and alone in a certain snowy landscape, at the bottom of a narrow vertical ukiyo-e painting, one branch of a leafless tree poised over her head, then far above her the scribbly rain of calligraphy. With her pale, stylized face she could have been anyone. I feel a trace of boredom; trapped in the Sea-God’s palace, I find myself preferring Mishima’s Komachi — but only for an instant, because what ruined Urashima was that his attachment became a trap, and Mishima’s tale ends no better; his attachment merely happened to be to death itself.

When I compared him to Poe, I was thinking precisely of the horror which stained their separate but not dissimilar thanatophilia. In Mishima’s fantasies, seppuku may come voluptuously, and the man’s corpse may allure other men, but there is no branch of flowers. In any good Noh performance of “Aoi-no-Ue” the goldenfaced horned monster of hatred and jealously lowers its mask-face, glowering and grinning, horrible, advancing upon the exorcist, yellow-eyed and almost cheerful but also dead and rotting, the reincarnation of the lovely woman who did not know how envious she was; whenever it lowers its head, it seems to be snarling and cowering like a dog; when it raises it, it embodies evil on the verge of triumph; and still it is beautiful with the severe beauty of a marble Artemis who has scarcely aged.

Meanwhile, Mishima’s Komachi scrounges cigarette butts. This act of vandalism refreshes me; it brings me out of the Sea-God’s palace; but then the decay I see in her brings me only grief. I feel in Mishima’s Noh plays the violence of a man who attacked his tradition because he hated himself.

The black cracks and wrinkles in even a Kamakura Buddha’s goldskinned face can certainly inspire any number of unhappy sensations, but there do remain to us three strategies for overcoming such feelings. The first is to make decay into something piquant, as I have done when making love with extremely aged women. The second is to obscure those signs of deficiency, as the Urashimas among us strive insistently to do (or, as Mishima does, to insist on them, which is almost the same thing). The third is to project and animate the material shell in such a way that its beautiful essence claims our immediate perception. Naturally this requires distance and deception. Or perhaps it simply requires understatement. We need not state the wrinkles to state the Buddha. In any event, it requires transient life to animate the mask.

What Kawabata says in opposition to Mishima, and many Noh texts also imply this, is that a recollected attachment can outlive the decay of the lovers, like the violet blossoms blooming reclusively on the ancient maple tree at the beginning of Kawabata’s novel The Old Capital. “As time passed,” he writes in Beauty and Sadness, “the memory of their embrace was gradually becoming purified within Otoko, changing from physical to spiritual… When she recalled what he had taught her, and imitated it in making love to Keiko,” her lesbian protégée, “she feared that the sacred vision might be stained,” as it always is in Mishima’s pages. “But it remained inviolate.”

The white pillar lists and rots; white ants attack it; they are as snowskinned as an image of a dancing courtesan on gilded paper. Mishima feels no sabi, or at least denies that he does. But neither does Komachi herself. Like him, she is less a teller than a protagonist of the tragedy. It is not that his art is any less “true” than Zeami’s. It is merely less neutral, “unattached” and self-observed. The Heian court poets might have best understood it in relation to ushin, conviction of feeling.

In the photographs of him he always appears “sensitive,” sometimes clearly on purpose, sometimes, as in the body building portraits, in spite of him. His lower lip frequently protrudes a trifle, like that of a ko-omote. His pale face is narrow, his handsome mouth occasionally a trifle twisted. Who is this person?

Mishima fears the white ants, and fears to fear (also fearing boredom), and so he offers himself to them. The result is a combination of bravery and cynicism: “To wash oneself clean of one sin that was permeated with sacrilege, one must commit another. In the end, the two would cancel each other out…” This is what I love Mishima for most of all. If he can only screw up his courage in this childish and twisted way, still, he dares; he strives to be “realistic.” Attachment without grace! How the Heians would have blanched! — And yet, Noh’s spiritual emphasis may be summed up by none other than the following sentence in Runaway Horses: “He was always thinking of death, and this had so refined him that the physical seemed to fall away, freeing him from the pull of earth and enabling him to walk about some distance above its surface.” Rereading this sentence, I seem to see Mr. Kanze gliding in beautiful agony across the bridge toward the rainbow curtain.