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 29. Sunshine on Silla

The Unknown

In Silla at the dead of night, the sun shines brightly.” Thus Zeami describes the highest of his nine levels of beauty. This is the flower of peerless charm. “The meaning of the phrase Peerless Charm surpasses any explanation in words and lies beyond the workings of consciousness… the Grace of the greatest performers in our art… gives rise to the moment of Feeling that Transcends Cognition, and to an art that lies beyond any level that the artist may have consciously attained.”

What Silla “means,” therefore, even Zeami could not say. Sillan sunshine, which I imagine to be as still and white as a geisha’s face powder, may in fact be less visible than snow in a silver bowl, or even pine trees ornamented with balls of snow. In the words of the eighteenth-century aphorist Lichtenberg: “The metaphor is much more subtle than its inventor, and so are many things. Everything has its depths. He who has eyes sees all in everything.” — And so I propose that Silla, that far away monarchy whose dominion over Korea’s Three Kingdoms collapsed more than four centuries before Zeami was born, is the place where the objects of our attachment live, and therefore the place where we can never go.

The Romantic poet Novalis wrote a novel whose protagonist wondered: “Do I not feel as I did in that dream when I saw the blue flower? What strange connection is there between Mathilda and that flower?” We know what Mishima would have replied: “That’s easy. They both equal death!” But how that connection would have played out we will never know, for Novalis died two years after Lichtenberg, with Henry von Ofterdingen unfinished. Meanwhile, Rodin’s “Psyche” waits for nothing, veiled by her own half-formlessness in the marble, the vagueness of her stone features haunting, almost shocking because what we can in fact see of her is perfect. The subtlety of that matter might have been likewise saved by the death of the inventor. I myself could hardly hope to rescue Psyche with a chisel, nor to definitively diagram Mathilda’s relation to flowerhood.

In the Noh play “Hagoromo” a man goes in quest of his vanished celestial wife. In such a situation, how high should be my expectations of success?¹ Wandering between Kyoto’s tall and narrow severally-decked pagodas, I encounter merely one more industrial sunset whose concrete-walled stage becomes blue in the fading light.

In the Tokyo National Museum, Kannon prays for me, her plump face all gold, her slender, tapering fingers pressed together at her chest, ever so many smaller jointed arms at her sides; she is the lobster or crab of mercy, holding many small bottles and other objects in her hands, perhaps charms or medicines. Can even she help me find the gold at the end of the rainbow, the place to which the metaphor points? The rainbow curtain goes up by itself; the bridge faintly creaks beneath a kyogen actor’s unusually rapid step.

But perhaps Silla awaits even in tonight’s dead of night! From the fifteenth century, in his “Errant Cloud Collection,” Ikkyu Sojun reports upon the arhat, or Buddhist saint who has expunged himself of the passions:

In this polluted world an arhat dwells far from Buddhaland;

A single visit to a brothel, however, will arouse his great wisdom.

Then again, an evening at the Noh theater might do just as well. A flame flickers at Yasukuni Shrine and the chanting goes on, each chorister’s mouth a square when he chants; and Yoroboshi, who is Mr. Umewaka, comes slowly, slowly creeping, his stick ahead of him at the perfect angle, because he’s blind; he’s chosen yellow-beige to wear and his mask is paler than anything which has ever existed. He sings, his long, long hair spilling down in two thin waves upon his breast. Slowly he turns, his voice so resonant and tuneful; and a cold mist of rain comes down on us and the drum begins to tap as the blind figure extends itself. The waki puts the golden fan over his head. Silla is the stately immobility of Mr. Umewaka, and the ethereal way in which he turns, his blind man’s cane never varying in angle, his hair tapering precisely down his back, cherry blossoms glinting in the torchlight and chorus-voices swelling into dreams.

I remember an eyeless Noh mask like a pupil-less marble Aphrodite; and the snowy-faced concentration of the ukiyo-e lady who with tilted head scissors away the stalk of a flower in just the right place to fit it into a formal blossom arrangement. I recall the overwhemingly beautiful curtains at the Kabuki-za glowing from behind like lantern slides; I especially remember one of that theater’s stage: Mount Fuji peaks above the clouds, accompanied by a blood-red sun; the light simmered behind it as if the sky were going overcast. These inspire me with visions of the Sillan sun, which, granted, I can discover only indirectly, as when I realize that in Wyeth’s paintings Helga is so often looking at something that I can never see, sometimes something between trees but more frequently something in the darkness.

In the British Museum I have seen many-grooved silvergolden bracelets from Silla. Who wore them I lack the education to imagine. Did those long-dead princesses shine in the dead of night as sun-brightly as Valkyries? — Since I cannot quite envision such a shining, please permit me to call it peerless charm.

Floating in a cracked and mottled heaven of gold, a certain Roman Muse touches her wreathed head while raising up the oversized and gaping mask of Tragedy, whose eyesockets are as melting craters. If I got too close to those (not to mention the mouth), I would fall into nothingness. I cannot believe in this fresco’s verisimilitude; but if it were true, I’d be better off keeping my distance. Anyhow, I can’t go there; I’m here in the noodle shop which is so narrow that when the sliding glass door closes there barely remains room to sit on the three little stools between it and the counter where the hoarse-voiced woman in black and her mother and husband make udon whose noodles are as thick as fingers with broth beautiful yellow from raw egg yolk. (They laughed with white teeth and clapped their hands when I said it was the best eel in Osaka.)

What is grace? — Two geishas view plum blossoms in the snow. Everything is pinkish, as in the sunset-infused winterscapes of Kawabata’s Snow Country — and against this “everything,” the snowy branches and the geishas’ skins stand out. How otherworldly, how Noh-like the way the ladies turn away from each other, each admiring her own chosen blossom! Their long, brocaded robes almost touch the snow. — This ukiyo-e print by Torii Kiyonaga (1752–1815) exemplifies the true flower. Those geishas, if they ever actually existed, departed beyond the rainbow curtain centuries ago. And yet here they continue their shining, like the sun from the night of Silla. — Needless to say, for me at my long remove of ignorance, the Edo era itself, from which ukiyo-e was meant to be a semi-fantastic escape, has become a province of Silla; for I can see it only as the prints show it to me: as a time and place when everybody was melonfaced and wore robes of yellow and of lead-vermilion faded almost to yellow, and everyone was rushing, bearing burdens, buying and selling, seducing, sitting folded-kneed on bamboo porches, flirting in doorways, paying mouth obeisance to the samurai while dreaming of Kabuki evenings, new silk kimonos, visits to the pleasure quarter. Which sun do you suppose shines there at night? Here is an early-eighteenth-century black-and-white ukiyo-e print of a plump courtesan with a maple leaf hairpin who is raising up her many-crested surcoat with her little hand in order to step toward the righthand edge; we can see one miniature foot, and we can tell that she is gazing at something through her sleepy little eyes, but to find out just what, we will have to board a discreet boat to Yoshiwara. And since all such boats have rotted, burned or sunk, what shall I do but listen to snow in a silver bowl, or, if I lack the wit to do that, watch a Noh performance?

Isuien Garden in Nara is a rolling Arctic moss-scape whose pools tease the gaze, going in and out of view. I remember an islet made of a single rock whose shape resembles a tortoise shell; its moss-spots, which possess the brilliant pallor of green tea, shine against the darker green of that rock-ringed pool whose reflections of sculpted pines seem to grow downward like roots; really there is no down; each reflection lies across the surface, which can be crossed by an irregular array of stone cylinders whose tops are almost level with the water; what does it mean to go from here to there across the water? What could be more simple? On that mossy islet-rock is a single feather. What does that mean? The stone steps are still; the water moves ceaselessly, so gently that ripples but rarely mar its representation of the green, green world of upside trees; but a water-strider, having rested, suddenly kicks its back left leg and sends concentric circles across the jade-tinted reflection of a cloud. Beyond that insect, the trembling reflections of the many leaves comprise a complexity whose magnitude, like that of a Noh kimono’s brocade design, overwhelms perception-all-at-once, and thereby achieves at least one order of infinity. By “perception-all-at-once” I mean the opposite of consciousness’s systematic trolling: the data banks of a corporation, or the memories of a lifetime, may add up to any number of items; this leaf, that leaf and any number of others may be brought back into consideration; an artist may carefully represent each leaf in the reflection, but when all’s said and done, the result is more than we can take in all at once. Meanwhile, thanks to the breeze on the water, that totality alters at every instant, which increases infinity by another order. And all this is but a semblance acted out upon the skin of the water: the relationship between the reflected and the so-called “real” add another order of infinity, what goes on beneath the surface of the water, what stories the ancient carp enact, there’s another order; and beyond this vaguely heart-shaped pool, whose shape can almost be recorded by perception-all-at-once, lies “the world.” Never mind all that. Cross the stepping-stones from here to there and perhaps you are in the other world. In that case, what does the island signify?

The silhouette of a carp slides by and vanishes behind or under the green-gold reflection of that pine tree. Just then the wind blows, and the reflection breaks up into myriad prismatic ovals of light green and white, pine needles duplicated, replicated, distorted.

Grace is under the water, or reflected on the water. I can see it; why can’t I touch it?

Chapter 30. Pine Tree Constancy

“Takasago,” “Izutsu” and “Matsukaze”

In an anonymous fan created sometime during the middle Tokugawa period (1742–91), pine trees express their peerless charm as ovoid needle-clouds in a sky of pure gold, rent along the fan-curve by two crimson irregularities studded with gold leaves and insects, and also by a very stylized blue shard of water with green lilypads. The pines offer Japanese asymmetry in all its grace. Their needle-clusters have been embellished into fans of rays within each cloud-lobe, and eyelashes-like constructions along the edges. The Noh actor who employs this fan represents a shrine priest. What could be more appropriate to his station? After all, the pine remains evergreen. In defiance of my epoch’s botanists, Zeami asserts that pine blossoms appear every thousand years, ten times in all — a span which for humans practically equals eternity. “So, awaiting this occasion, the branches of the pine / Bear leaves of poetry, shining with dewdrop gems.” — This marriage of the eternal with the transient expresses much of lies within Noh’s mysterious heart. The old man transforming himself into the young female, the stillness that frames passion and delusion and violence, the constant endeavor to neutralize opposites, all these can be expressed in the trope of the flowering pine. No wonder Zeami writes that the Noh actor who successfully impersonates an old man becomes “like blossoms on an ancient tree!”

It would not be going too far to ascribe divinity to the pine. When I asked the Noh actor Mr. Mikata Shizuka what it signifies on the Noh stage, he began with the surprising information that “before the Edo period, we didn’t have that pine tree,” I suppose because in the past the plays were usually performed outside;¹ then he said: “The god has to come to something, and it is to a pine tree where the god comes. Toward the tree we dedicate our art.”

TAKASAGO

One of the best known Noh plays is called “Takasago,” and indeed the fan just described was fashioned for use in this very drama, which portrays two pine trees. Zeami informs us that they “grew up together,” although their residences, Sumiyoshi and eponymous Takasago, lie three days’ journeying apart. The enigma solves itself when we learn (as the play’s original audience knew quite well) that they are god and goddess.

Hokusai offers us a simple line-image of this old couple, the man with a rake over his shoulder, the woman with a broom below and behind her. This is how we first see them in the play, in the typical Noh mode of unassuming mortal disguise. It is, after all, as exemplars for humans that they are best known. The song beginning “O Takasago!” is still sung at most Japanese weddings, which would please Zeami the populist entertainer. And apparently this song or a similar one once opened the year’s Noh repertory. Fenollosa’s notes inform us: “And while the cup of the Shogun is poured out three times, Kanze sings the ‘Shikai-nami’ passage from the play of Takasago, still bowing.” The play is a lovely evocation of conjugal fidelity,² and its last lines are especially beautiful: “The pines that grew together dance in the wind, / resounding with the rustling voice of joy.”

I myself, a product of skeptical individualism, have never been impressed by “Takasago’s” pieties, which must have been cliché’d before Zeami was born. In the late tenth century, we find the author of The Gossamer Journal penning such poems as

The pine-clad mountain

will never be inconstant

and I wonder how many times I have read this before. The Gossamer Lady’s husband, who ultimately will prove quite inconstant indeed, has already written her father a promise-poem comparing the length of his fidelity to the long-lived pines at Sue-no-Matsuyama. She wryly supposes him incapable of sleeping alone “even if you were dwelling near the peak at Takasago.” Even then, it would seem, the allusion had become sufficiently well worn to permit irony without impiety.

But although I cannot feel, much less believe in, the mystical dimension of this play, I admit that others can and do. After seeing a sequence of his plays I asked Mr. Umewaka what his most challenging role had been, and he replied: “Today’s ‘Takasago,’ because it portrays a god.”

ETERNAL GREEN, VAIN THOUGHTS

What is inconstancy, really, but time itself? I quote from A Tale of Flowering Fortunes: “On the Day of the Rat, the pines at Funaoka impressed everyone with their eternal green…” That happened almost a thousand years ago now. Even if Zeami is correct, and those pine trees have up to nine thousand years more of life, someday they will be gone. As we read in an eighth-century poem from the Manyoshu, “the maiden’s crimson face is gone forever with the woman’s three duties to obey, and young white flesh is destroyed forever with the wife’s four virtues.” To whom, then, is her husband being faithful?

In Nara a five-tiered pagoda stands almost obscured by a pine tree, and as dusk comes on, its greenish-grey tiled roofs increasingly come to resemble the pine needles in hue; its wooden walls resemble the tree; only the white panels, subdivided into hexagram-like patterns by the wooden railings, stand out. Someday this too will be gone.

Through March’s bare branches, a pine tree’s swaying can be seen. When spring comes, new leaves of other trees will hide this view; the pine will be lost.

In the Nara period, a noncommissioned officer of the frontier guards likens rows of pines to “my own people! / They stood just so / As they came out / To bid me farewell.” — Then what? The farewells end; isolation begins.

A woman loves a man and marries him. They promise to keep faith with one another. Someday death will end their faith even if they lie together in the same grave — or is this not so? Why not insist that it is not so? Once both parties have reverted to soot and dust, how can it do any harm to call their fidelity eternal? (Even Komachi was eternally faithful — to herself.) In the spectacular “Izutsu,” the shite, ghost of a dead man’s multiply betrayed woman, grieves for the love she cannot forget. Her lover was Arihira no Narihira, who composed the poetic core of The Tales of Ise. “His name alone lives on,” sings the chorus in “Izutsu.” And we hear that the temple named after him has long since collapsed into the mold. “An ancient pine is rooted in the mound.” Hare sees the pine as ironic, given that Narihira’s bone-dust lies beneath it; I am not so sure.

In Kawabata’s typically understated novel The Old Capital (1962), twin sisters separated almost at birth discover each other when they have become women. Chieko has been raised by foster-parents in the refined culture of Kyoto; Naeko is a peasant girl in the mountains. A young man in love with Chieko mistakes Naeko for her. After recognizing his mistake he nonetheless proposes to Naeko, who remarks (and it is precisely this that Mishima’s Noh plays react against): “Even when I’m an old woman of sixty, won’t the Chieko of his illusions still be as young as you are now?… The time never comes when a beautiful illusion turns ugly.”

Of course by symbolizing attachment the pine tree necessarily represents imprisonment also. The shite’s situation, which is to say ours, is grounded in yearning for an inconstant illusion. Hence the fundamental contradiction of life itself. About her ex-lover a geisha writes: “I couldn’t break the bonds of my insane attachment to him… I was writhing and squirming like a snake left for dead but alive.” How does this differ from the anguished constancy of a widow? How is it inferior to the loyalty of Takasago?

In the museum in Kanazawa I see a vermilion-and-pale-green checkerboard undergarment from the Edo period, the vermilion squares enclosing cloud and treasure-ring patterns, the green ones containing cranes in diamonds. This robe was worn by the shite in the second act of “Takasago.” The farewells ended centuries ago. The men who wove and acted in this garment are all dead. Surely even Takasago must feel bereft in time. Why wouldn’t she writhe like a snake? Malraux writes that “all art is a revolt against man’s fate,” and even when Noh advises submission to fate, revolt being attachment, all the same, Takasago stands firm, and Mr. Umewaka worries that today’s kimonos will remain usable for the merest hundred and fifty years! Is that or is it not insane attachment? If not, what is it?

The pines that grew together dance in the wind — and one of them falls, then the other. Why? Every literary critic has his theory as to what brings actors and spectators together in the Noh theater. As Pinguet says in his essay on Japanese suicide, “love is a madness, but therein it is pure, like flame, empty and transparent… the most touching truth is the supreme innocence of gratuitous suffering and gratuitous love, which takes fire and burns away unexplained…”

The instability of human love is fundamental to the Tale of Genji, and to Komachi’s verse, not to mention “Matsukaze” and “Izutsu.” The abyss between us can be bridged only provisionally. The feminine grace that I long for and, if I am lucky, consume may not suffice to maintain my decency and responsibility to the woman I love. Such was the case with Genji’s eponymous hero, whose myriad women could count on his support but not always on his attentive presence in their lives. And so a twentieth-century scholar concludes, perhaps a trifle glibly, that “there are fundamental barriers created by society and the marital system” of Heian times “which even the most devoted, sensitive, and well-intentioned lovers cannot cross.” Accordingly, “it is the women” in the novel, not Genji, “who come to a deeper, albeit bleaker, vision of love and marriage.” It is certainly true that in the period when the Genji and the various Noh plays under consideration were written, women enjoyed far less power than men. All the same, the women to whom I am drawn seem no less likely to break my heart than I to shatter theirs; and even Genji grew sad at the end.

As a man and a woman chant together in the Noh play “Nishikigi,” “Perhaps with love it is always so: vain days, vain thoughts unnumbered, and no way to forget.”

Another Noh play (“Aya no Tsuzumi”): “The anger of lust denied covers me like darkness.”

But attachment, in its epiphanies, at least, can approach the oblivion of Nirvana. In “Izutsu” we hear this about the lovely and loving shite: “At nineteen I first pledged love with him, she said, and vanished in the shadows of the well curb…” Of course her fate is to haunt her lover’s tomb, which sometimes becomes the well into which he and she once gazed; now she is immortal because her loneliness cannot die. But must this be the human situation? In the Greek myth of Baucis and Philomen, a poor but contented old couple ask the gods for nothing but to die at the same time. When their moment comes, they turn into a pair of trees. If death is, as I hope it to be, oblivion, they will certainly be spared the vain thoughts unnumbered; if there is postmortem consciousness, then hopefully their proximity will be a comfort.

What about the rest of us? Our story tells itself in the drama I find most affecting of any: “Matsukaze.”

SALTMAKERS’ TEARS

Although the play was performed even earlier, as a dengaku, much or most seems to have been written by Zeami, with one sequence near the beginning credited to his father. In that epoch, “Izutsu” was considered to express the highest artistic level, that of “peerless charm,” while “Matsukaze” achieved merely the “flower of profundity.” I disagree.

The plot has already been summarized: A travelling priest comes to Suma, and finds a pine tree bearing a wooden memorial tablet and a poem. — Suma is, like any other spot on this Noh stage that we call the world, rich in ghosts. It especially epitomizes loneliness. In the Genji Picture-Scrolls we see the Shining Prince himself seated with two male companions in a thatched-roof pavillion, watching the black moon rising through a hole in the dark-flecked goldness above the pines of Suma. When, if ever, will he be permitted to return to the capital? And so he writes poems and seduces a young lady in nearby Akashi. — But this memorial tablet discovered by the waki relates more overtly to other ghosts; for a villager now informs him that here is the grave of the sisters Matsukaze, “Pining Wind,”³ and Murasame, “Autumn Rain.” Night is falling. The priest sees a salt shed, and asks for shelter there. It belongs, of course, to the two ghosts, who finally overcome their shame and let him stay. They tell him the story of how the exiled courtier Yukihira⁴ chose them for his own. (Genji himself makes allusion to Yukihira. Hokusai has left us a sketch of his own imagined Yukihira, who huddles over his outdoor writing table, his eyebrows high painted dots in Noh mask style, and in the background, no doubt in reference to the sisters, we find a steep hill of pine trees and rain.) “He changed our saltmakers’ vestments for damask robes, scented subtly with fragrance.” Three years later, he was recalled to grace, and died, “so young!.. Now the message we both pined for would never come.”

He had condescended to cross the abyss to them; they had gratefully crossed the void to him; now he was not merely beyond them but gone, right out of this crazy-edged world, which is tipped and tilted, above all, broken, with the long twisted snow-flesh, clouds and lichened blocks of it spilling down like milk from a shattered pitcher. Where did he go? Perhaps he now dwells with Yokihi, better known as Lady Yang.

The two tokens he left them, his cloak and hunting hat, increase the torment. Matsukaze drops the cloak, picks it up, as unable to forget as that lovelorn geisha who squirmed like a snake. And so the play’s sadness grows as lush as snow on the roofs in the zone that Kawabata called Snow Country. Presently Matsukaze’s insanity makes her mistake a pine tree for Yukihira. In the end, the two sprites beseech the priest to pray for their rest. Then they fade away.

The site of Yukihira’s exile, and Genji’s, also encompasses Atsumori’s stupa, where the nighttime sea shows itself across railroad tracks as a row of yellow lights underlined by their funneling reflections. Atsumori’s eponymous Noh play informs us that the defeated Heike warriors took on the lives of saltmakers for a time, awaiting the last battle. Meanwhile, Atsumori’s spirit masquerades as a grasscutter during the first act. In the second, the Honsho School sometimes employs a juuroku mask; I have seen one from the sixteenth century that is very white-skinned and infantile, the expression of the mouth similar to a ko-omote’s, the eyes perhaps a trifle more open and the lower lip definitely fuller, like a true girl’s, but in place of long womanly locks wrapping around his forehead and cheeks, his bangs go ruler-straight across his forehead. His thin eyebrows slope up and out.

The yellowish clatter of a local train rushes behind Atsumori’s stupa, almost bisecting it. Crickets and leaves gild this diminished thing with whatever sabi can be obtained in its courtyard with cars before it and the train behind it. It stands still and sad, a forgotten giant in five stone parts.

The walk is short from there to Suma-dera Station, which can feel lonely with its late night electric humming, cigarettes, beer and coffee glowing in the vending machines; crickets; a man’s singing voice, recorded or not, coming from the Pony Coffee Shop, no sea smell at all, but a plenitude of asphalt, concrete, lights and gratings; and from there it is an even briefer walk to Matsukaze-do, the memorial for Matsukaze and Murasame.

Here a sculpted pine whose leaves are as clouds inclines itself before three cages, before the middle of which hangs a thick braided rope ending in a bamboo knocker. Behind the latticework, twin bouquets in twin vases may perhaps represent the two sisters; my interpreter does not know. Behind them stands another latticework window whose darkness occasionally blooms with reflected headlights. As for the righthand cage, bulbous rock objects and one feminine-seeming doll stand arrayed in bibs behind another more slender rope. In front of the cage is a teapot, which may for all I know be a dipper of purifying water. And in the lefthand cage, behind the sculpted pine that I first mentioned, remains an impressive stump, supposed to be the remains of the pine tree on which Yukihira hung his clothes. The sculpted pine is the one he planted. Here he supposedly lived and met the two sisters. Then they moved away to die, somewhere up the hill. I could not find their tombs, but I did go to Suma-dera Park, where from a pavilion on a black pond streaked with ovoid pillars of pale light I watched a hotel’s orange window-lights and especially the consecutive lobby or restaurant brightnesses of its first level bleeding greenish-orange onto the black ripples of the pond; to the north I could see the silhouette of hills, and somebody thought that the two sisters might be buried there.

MASKS OF FEMININITY

Donald Keene insists: “It makes no sense whatsoever to imagine Matsukaze’s height or coloring, or even to ask if Yukihira was equally in love with both sisters or favored Matsukaze over Murasame. Such matters are not mentioned in the play and therefore, almost by definition, they are irrelevant.” All the same, being an ape in a cage, I will imagine what I choose. For the most enduring incarnation of the true flower is that of the image, or the ghost. If I were a Norseman, my vision would give them both white arms. Were I Japanese, they would have black hair; and had I lived in old Egypt I would have likened their hair to lapis lazuli. — Now that we have gotten all that out of the way, why not imagine Matsukaze in a waka-onna mask? So the Kanze School portrays her. The mask carver Ms. Nakamura imagined that a waka-onna would be more appropriate for Matsukaze than the younger ko-omote, because she must still be beautiful but had already begun to suffer. Indeed, this is the mask now commonly used for performances of the play. But until sometime in the seventeenth century, Matsukaze was considered sufficiently careworn to be expressed by the fukai instead.

The rarer fushikizo mask, which closely resembles a waka-onna and is sometimes considered to be one, can also be employed. I have seen a photograph of a fushikizo used for this role. It partakes of the narrow oval of an ukiyo-e beauty’s face, although the latter’s lips are much tinier, her nose more angular and pronounced, her willow brows more elongated. Its carver describes it thus: “Yuki style with the nose tilted to the right. The cheekbone on the right is lifted sharply like a yase-onna’s, while the left cheek is full and round. Therefore, the lips are round like a ko-omote’s and with a smile on the left, but are noble like a zo-onna’s on the right. Left and right should not be made the same.”

This amalgamation makes me envision Matsukaze rather differently than I would have otherwise. You may recall that the yase-onna, skinny woman, portrays the pathetic aspects of vengeful female ghosts; and the pathos of Matsukaze’s situation is all too evident, I resist considering her as vindictive; she seems too gentle and literally unworldly for that. But this only goes to prove yet again the correctness of Mr. Umewaka’s dictum that “the mask is most important always.” What is grace? What is a woman? Why should the tilt of a fukai mask’s nose determine what that mask best performs?⁵ And so what signifies the lift of a cheekbone? Since the old Native American lady with high cheekbones whom I once met on a Greyhound bus was not, insofar as I could tell, a sadly vindictive ghost; since, in short, the predictive and diagnostic virtues of physiognomy have been discredited, recognizing the hint implied by a specific choice of Noh mask, and allowing our interpretation, and resulting aesthetic pleasure in it, to be guided accordingly, will always unsettle me a trifle. But just as Claudio Arrau’s performance of Chopin’s “Nocturnes” and fugues is so profoundly warmer and more hushed than Daniel Barenboim’s that we could almost be listening to two different compositions, so a Matsukaze whose madness has literally split her face, like the ghost of Yokihi dancing out the everlasting pain of “Rainbow Skirts” in a moon-style ko-omote, is alien to a Matsukaze who incarnates the perfect coherence of sweet sadness.⁶

In any event, narrower than a ko-omote’s face, the fushikizo’s offers its audience dark red lips parted in a smile of knowing submission to pain. Turned to the left, the face expresses a readiness to smile even as the lower lip seems on the verge of trembling. Angled right, it seems more resigned. (Doubtless other viewers would see it differently.) Knowing as I do that this fushikizo can represent madness, I find myself elongating the eyes and mouth-slit in my memory, haunted by, and yes, I confess it, allured by that smile, that smile of pain.

When I asked Mr. Mikata which masks he might consider using to play each of the two sisters, he replied: “Procedurally both are ko-omote, but it can be up to the actor; one could use any woman mask.”

“Would you consider a fukai or must each woman always be very young?”

“In the case of ‘Matsukaze,’ the hardship is not really related to the age. Time is not conspicuous in this matter. Our information says thirty years. In “Izutsu” it is also eternal, since in childhood they got married. Both have others and got separated and still they are in love.”

“Which gestures would you use to differentiate Matsukaze from Murasame?”

“Basically when you show a distant scene, both are lined up like this” — and his hands went out. “When you want to put focus on the shite, the other players stand still and do this, while only the shite moves. What is interesting is, there is a scene where you scoop seawater. In the Kanze School, just the shite and the chorus does it, because the focus is on the elder sister, the shite. Even if you are looking at distant scenery, focus is on shite. In the Kita School both sisters sing together, and focus will be on both. That is in first half, but in second half, their feelings are in conflict, and the procedure alters.”

Who then is Matsukaze? How does this ape imagine her?

A poem in the Manyoshu remarks that the fisher-girls of Shika, who could not have been too dissimilar to those of Suma, almost never find time to comb their hair, so busily must they drudge at seaweed-gathering and salt-burning. I imagine that they often stank of smoke and sweat. Much later, Hokusai illustrates a thirteenth-century poem about burning seaweed on the beach of Matsuo, which faces Suma. Two men are stacking bundles of kelp; a man blows on the fire and a woman feeds it; meanwhile, two other women depart with their double buckets of salty ashes on poles across their shoulders. One leans forward, her feet splayed, and the other throws her shoulders back, gazing upward. How then could Matsukaze and Murasame not have had red, callused hands, sooty faces and unloosed, matted tresses? The translator Tyler insists, however, that some fisher-girls were entertainers and prostitutes. Lady Nijo mentions meeting on the isle of Taika some nuns who had once been such: “They would perfume their gowns in hopes of alluring men, and comb their dark hair, wondering on whose pillows it would become disheveled. When night fell they would await lovers, and when day broke, grieve over the separation.”

These were very real women, to be sure, with real boxwood combs, and my book-acquaintanceship with them encourages me to imagine Matsukaze’s height and coloring, thus:

One hot sad night I lay tormented by the indifference and evasiveness of the woman I loved, who had once cleaved to me with wild passion. She now communicated with me at rarer intervals and more superficially; when I asked her what was the reason for this change in her she irritably closed the subject. On various occasions she told me that she was tired, that she hardly knew whether we were lovers or friends, that she reserved the right to refrain from saying I love you whenever she liked. She had gone away, found a perfectly practical reason not to see me on her return, then gone away again. I telephoned her and she did not answer; once she would have answered immediately. It seemed only too clear that our attachment must soon end. And so that night, having stayed up late in hopes that she would call, I slept very little, mostly trying to find a comfortable way to dispose my body, wondering how to endure the aching of my heart. And then into the room there drifted someone in a pale nightgown, someone tall, with long hair; and I realized that she had come to me. In a single graceful motion she slowly pulled the nightgown over her head and was naked. Then she lay down beside me. All this had happened before, especially in recent months when we had frequently grown silent and bitter with one another, so that I went to bed alone; waiting rigidly on my back in the darkness with a child’s hurt pride until she finally came silently in to me. And so this new visitation was not exactly surprising. All the same, there had been an instant when she first came in when I had not known who she was; and then there was the silence of her silence, the luminous pallor of her nightgown, and the way she approached me without seeming to move her feet, just as a Noh actor could have done. And when she got into bed with me, that, too, was all in one motion. Now she had come to me, and the grief in my chest was instantaneously relieved. Then in the next instant I awoke, with her far away, of course, and at once my heart ached as if a sledgemallet had struck it. Until dawn I lay in misery, but also in gratitude at the loveliness of the visitation, during which I had not even seen her face as more than a pale blur in the darkness. Her phantom caused me pain, as Matsukaze’s vision of her absent lover did for her; yet how glorious it had been to see it, like watching the Noh play itself…

Zeami has said that the flower does not exist in and of itself; and perhaps another of attachment’s errors is to feel that it does, in which case, even though “the mask is most important always,” it remains nothing without the actor to animate it. She had been my flower. Now what was she?

After our final quarrel, which I desperately precipitated and angrily concluded because I wanted a resolution (she told me that I could keep her even now if I would only stop making demands; but the way I saw it, I was already losing her, and what I asked was merely for her to become again to me what she had once freely and passionately been), I exchanged the desperation of losing her for the anguish of having lost her, and that was as reliable as a friend. When I was younger I would have done almost anything to ameliorate this feeling, but now that I was older like a ghost, I realized that anguish is constancy.

But what was it I was longing for? I still think I did right, when she began to turn away from me and many efforts could not win her back; to leave her of my own accord before she glided entirely off the stage. Glide away she did, to a better place where she need not think of me; and all I could do was wait on my side of the rainbow curtain, imagining the joy she felt on ascending into this resplendence; nearly her last words to me were that she had no time to open the conversation.

As the days without her passed, my anguish naturally deepened. So did my constancy. But I remained merely human.

The constancy of Matsukaze and Murasame is as white as cherry-blossoms; their agonies give off the fresh smell of the wind in Nara.

Only a mask can be utterly constant. The mask possesses the true flower — as also, I suppose, does a ghost.

“Now the message we both pined for would never come.” But love itself remains, in much the same way as a Noh mask floats in the darkness like a Tanizaki heroine’s face, while a living woman has a neck — and, by the way, “as a last step,” advises Marie Claire magazine, “always blend around the jawline and down the neck — just blurring the line between fact and fiction.” In the ko-omote mask called “Flower,” carved, so they say, by Tatsuemon, and one of his Three Treasures, that pallid face, ever so dreamily smiling, gazes through me, the face of a red-lipped, black-toothed, high-eyebrowed girl who has just climaxed, I see darkness in the pupils of her half-closed eyes. Flower’s face widens toward the chin, like a firm pear from the moon’s best tree; her pinkish-pale cheeks are shining at me, and the parting of her hair is very white. On the other side of her face the lips seem a darker scarlet against the dark wood; the eye-holes are simple goggling roundnesses, above which, in characters of gold, the following has been written: “Received from Lord Hideyoshi, the ko omote ‘Flower’… among the three best masks in the world, an original.”

Chapter 31. Kagekiyo’s Daughter

“Semimaru” and the Plays of Separation

And so constancy is attachment, which condemns us shites to mistake perishable manifestations of this floating world for our already perished fellow ghosts with whose beautiful heart-flowers we remain enthralled, anguished — but in some Noh plays, as in life, constancy to a principle requires us to detach ourselves from people we love. Unfortunately, even then, unless we withdraw from the world as monks and nuns, our principled constancy merely resolves into another form of attachment. For instance, bushido, the way of the warrior, which requires the utmost loyalty, self-discipline, uprightness, courage, endurance of pain, will still, as Mr. Umewaka has told us,¹ consign a man to hell for having taken life. All the same, the plays assert that steadfast defense of the lord, or of honor itself, remains equivalent to faithful love; and they honor it accordingly. Noh’s critique of attachment is far more ambiguous than it pretends. And how could matters be otherwise? A seventeenth-century treatise explains that “the Way of Heaven has no love for” the fighting man, “yet has to make use of him.”

Once in Nara when I saw the play “Ebira,” which means quiver, Kofuku-ji’s white-clothed priests came clicking onstage in their wooden clogs; one bore a sword in a red lacquered scabbard; and presently the shite was extending his fan of many metallic colors as the musicians played faster; his kimono consisted of filigreed golden diamonds upon blackness; his soul was a bearded, moustached mask which wore a white headband and an immense black axehead of hair, the rest of its locks spilling almost to the navel and down the middle of the back. With its immensely wide golden legs and arms it sometimes seemed inhuman, especially when it flashed fan and sword so fiercely. What I felt resembled my sensations on seeing my own era’s soldiers on the rubble-stage of this half-ruined world; they patrol from one burnt pine tree to the next, wearing wide-flaring helmets, swollen-shouldered uniforms, cartridge belts and heavy guns. — Who are they? What have they done? — “Mission accomplished!” crows the President.

In his eponymous play, the exiled, senescent warrior Kagekiyo rejects his daughter’s care: “The end is near: go to your home; pray for my gone soul.” We are informed that love of woman scarcely ever prevented the Japanese warrior from doing his duty as he saw it; and even though he calls her “candle to my darkness, bridge to salvation,” this man, like other warriors defiled by blood and death, can hardly expect his daughter to save him from hell. Perhaps he is truly better off alone. Did the affections of Matsukaze and Murasame do them any good? Their pine tree fidelity reminds me of the old poem by Ariie about being in one’s rainy garden, one’s sleeves wet from pine tree wind so that one almost wonders whether tears from some secret grief have dampened them — or, still more to the point, the nightmare image in an equally ancient Shunzei poem of a dead wife lying eternally under the moss, listening to the pine-winds of midnight.

But what about what would have been best for Kagekiyo’s daughter? Well, never mind her.

“What should he have done?” I once asked Mr. Mikata, who replied: “The pride of a Japanese man at that time was this: When you were a strong warrior you should not think about any woman or girl. But this Kagekiyo has humane sentiment, and when the Heike declined, he did not want to see the Genji’s prosperity, so he damaged his own eyes, became a beggar and relied on local people, living in a shabby hut. There at this time, his daughter visited him. Of course he wanted to see her. But his pride that remained in his bone said that this is not my daughter.”²

In the play itself, the chorus sings that this once great man who hosted multitudes now feels shame at exposing to her his wretchedness; moreover, he wishes to spare his “flower so delicately tended,” his girl in a box, the humiliation of being known as a beggar’s daughter. And so poor Hitomaru, who voyaged all the way from Kyoto, only to be dismissed, literally pushed toward the bridge and the rainbow curtain, departs with “no remembrance other” between them than his “I stay” and her “I go.”

No matter how attachment incarnates itself, says Noh, the finite will continue hatefully toward infinitude; the soul will be unable to die. Like erotic attachment, the love between parent and child must also be dissected by death or separation, and then what? Every human bond is a trap.

In the Noh play “Michimori,” we watch the eponymous Heike hero (played by Mr. Mikata) drinking with his wife for the last time, and then the Genji attack increases; so he must leave for war, all the while thinking of his wife, but fighting hopelessly until the end. We see the actor slowly, darkly gliding in a middle distance between the lamps and the void where the audience sits, his golden fan a subdued flash in the darkness. He seems to rise up to an immense height, then to shrink down to the level of the chorus, folding away his fan. Later I will remember how the yellow cylindrical torch-lamps, two open flames, made the stage a soft golden beige. Then came silence, all still except for the flickering of the two flames… and suddenly sang the flute, followed by the first beat of the hollow drum.

What could Michimori have expected? — Nothing but death. — Did he put his wife out of his mind, then? — I hope not; in fact, I hope that he loved her as he died, leaving her with understanding.

Accordingly, Michimori, like the Inoue geisha, had better “prepare a mind of mirrorlike emptiness.” Indeed, it has been said that “the hieratic calm and simplicity” of Noh is “in absolute harmony with the bushi ethos, the life of a samurai swinging like a pendulum between sudden and violent action and quiet, contemplative repose.”

DEAD WHITE LIGHT

Noh’s violence has most often to do with severance of ties.

The typically loss-centered Noh play “Semimaru” portrays two cast-off Emperor’s children, the sister having been expelled because she is mad, the brother because he is blind. A functionary shaves the brother’s head and makes him a priest. He consoles himself that his life in either a palace or a hut would be short-lived in any case. He tries to believe that in abandoning him to this wilderness, his father is helping him to atone for whichever sin from his former life made him blind. His sister Sakagami meets him accidentally, hearing the Imperial beauty of his lute-playing. It is never explained why it is that she must leave again, but she does, and both weep at their parting.

Semimaru may never have existed, but if he did, his hut would have overlooked Lake Biwa, in the borderpoint called Otsu, which receives two mentions in The Taiheiki. Meanwhile, on the south shore of Lake Biwa, Choan-ji is the site of “Seki-dera Komachi.” Otsu is not called Otsu anymore, but if you go there you will find a Semimaru Shrine proclaiming itself by means of a grimy torus on the far side of the railroad tracks, followed by a curtain of worn and flaking moss, the remnants of a fence with roof-tiles on them all in an ugly heap, a rusty shed, stone lanterns, a small platform, probably for dancing, the central room or honden with its pallid bell-pull and its latticed windows, to which written wishes are attached (help my son pass his exams; help my aunt recover from her illness), written on the shingle-like pieces of wood called ema (literally, picture-tablets). Around all four sides of the honden runs a roofed walkway. It is dank and dark. Within the honden stands another platform with “paper hair” hanging for purification and a curious table which in shape and position resembles an altar.

In a Hokusai drawing, which was never colored and printed as a woodcut, we see the blind man as strong and youthful, with long black hair and a black moustache and beard. His biwa projects from behind his back as if he were carrying a living turtle. Travellers come and go on the road before him that he cannot see. He leans backward, resting on his stick, dreaming and perhaps even smiling, with his hut lushly thatched behind him and a tree in leaf as a doorpost.

But in the Noh play, Semimaru wears such a glossy white dead masked face!³ He stands in a pale yellow robe and a longer blue-crested underrobe, gazing down through the audience’s feet into blindness. Two attendants follow behind, holding a slanted framework box over his face, a red square in the middle of it. It must represent a palanquin.

What is there to say about his mask? It is dead white light itself. But I think this only because I know it represents a blind man. If it were a ko-omote I would enthuse about its milk-white beauty. It is beautiful, and delicate.

The two men vanish with the litter-frame. No one will convey him anymore.

The green-clad old messenger in the tall hat kneels before Semimaru, who stands still, listening.

Two members of the chorus strip off his whitish-yellow cloak, revealing the greyish undercloak. Then they place a poor man’s pointed hood on his head, while the messenger stares sadly into space.

Semimaru stares straight ahead, while the chorus gazes at his hands. Now comes the melodiously sorrowful, slightly wobbling male singing of Semimaru in dialogue with the equally sad and deeper bass of the messenger, who presently advances to bestow upon him the wide conical hat of priesthood. Semimaru feels this object, then sets it gently onto the stage; and the messenger brings him a slender staff of blindness, at which the hip drummer begins to chant “Whooh!” and taps his drum. Presently the chorus begins to sing together, magnificently grieving, while the hip drummer chants, “Whooh! Whooh!” and the two protagonists face each other.

And so his messenger and attendants leave him alone forever at Otsu.

We see the white flash of Semimaru’s skullish mask from within the bamboo skeleton that his well-wisher Hakuga no Sammi has built for him. We see Semimaru in his cage as the rainbow curtain rises and the rainbow-lovely sister glides gorgeously forth, bearing a branch of madness in just the same way as any expresser of Zeami must carry a branch of flowers. Her name means “upside-down hair.” The gleam of the electric stage-light rests upon her white forehead and upon the darkness of her human throat. The chanting man in the female mask (a zo-onna or masugami) is the lovely girl in the shining robe, gliding on her white-tabi’d feet. Her costume is peach-golden and metallic.

The Kanze family owns a certain fifteenth-century masukami⁴ mask by Yasha; it is “the face of a woman possessed by a god.” We are informed of its appropriateness for the role of Sakagami among others. The face, which is of a pale terracotta color, cannot be called beautiful; to me it even seems a trifle coarse. Two diagonal creases roof off each side of the nose-bridge; dimples “convey the faith of this character in the gods.” Thin and crooked strands of hair twist down the cheeks. Simultaneously smiling and grimacing, gazing right through this floating world, perhaps even seeing beyond the rainbow curtain, this rather squat-nosed face seems perpetually on the verge of laughter or tears.

In the performance which I now describe, the face was much whiter.

Semimaru stares sightlessly at her from his cage while she sings on the bridge. Precisely when he becomes aware of her we cannot tell; we have already heard Zeami define fascination as a sensation experienced prior to the consciousness of the sensation, and no doubt understatement is nicely conducive of such effects. When a Noh mask gazes at me just after its embodiment has crossed the pine tree bridge into my world, or when a woman whom I feel for studies me and I do not know what she will do, then I most certainly tend to be fascinated. Semimaru, of course, is not a person at all, but the representation of certain aspects of regal patience, poesy, filial loyalty, disempowerment and death. But because it is my nature to want to kiss the mask, invading it with my passion and my belief, I wonder all the same just when he senses the presence of his sister?⁵ He wonders aloud if it is Hakuga no Sammi whom he hears. Sightlessly he gazes at the rainbow curtain from behind which she came and behind which she will go. She arrives on our side of the bridge, glides and whirls about (in decorous Noh stillness, of course), then raises her branch and begins fencing with it. The white mask leans forward at the very edge of the stage as if the madwoman it portrays will let herself fall off into the dry moat of white stones. It dances almost all the way back across the bridge — a rare sight, which I recall seeing before only in a Komachi play — and slowly returns. It comes and goes. It is the shite Sakagami,⁶ played by Kanze Kiyokazu. Like her brother, Sakagami has been cast out. The rainbow curtain will not rise for her, but she stares at it for a long time. And this is what I remember most from that slow sad performance: the eerily smiling mask of the crazed sister.

Finally Semimaru begins to sing from his cage, the shining sister frozen on the bridge, holding her green branch, gazing away.

When they meet, they each kneel, facing one another, each echoing the hand and face gestures of the other.

He cannot see her grace, which she herself may well be barred by her insanity from knowing. And so her beauty is a gift to us alone, to us, the audience, who do not exist. And this is “Semimaru”: the transient conjunction of two loving and damaged attachments. Grace is a branch of flowers; flowers die.

The chorus sings out the turn their lives have made: from jade pavilions to straw mats and rattling doors. What finally happened to Komachi in possible retribution for her cruelty to Fukakusa no Shoso has struck these two in their youth, and they suppose that perhaps they, too, are being punished for misdeameanors committed in their previous incarnations. But although at the play’s beginning Semimaru bravely insisted to the Imperial messenger who left him in the wilderness that his father has treated him lovingly in expiating his karmic burden, we can scarcely celebrate the Emperor’s kindness. “Denied the moon,” chants the chorus, “in a straw hovel that closes out even the sound of rain, day or night, my mind runs on grief and misery.”

The two masked exiles sit very still on the stage, not quite side by side, gazing out at us that we might contemplate them.

A long chant endures. Semimaru gazes down, wearing his tall bishoplike hat; the sister likewise gazes down, half smiling.

Why must she go away? One might as well ask why flowers must die. The chorus informs us that he longs for her black hair.

The play approaches its end. Semimaru bows in agony, outstretching his grey sleeves as the lovely mask of Sakagami vanishes forever behind the rainbow curtain.

WILD GRASSES

I will never forget a performance of “Sumidagawa” which I saw in the Kawamura Theater in Kyoto in 2004.

The chorus traverses the long bridge with nearly unseemly casualness. Then two assistants come, bringing a large green-curtained box draped with greenery. They carefully position it. The flute begins to shrill. From the unknowable realm on the far side of the bridge creeps a man on his knees, or so it seems, for behind his heels stretch two long tails of his crested, wave-patterned robe. His head is cropped. He begins to sing, his ageing face staring straight into space. He is the waki, the boatman of Sumida River. Then he reaches his position and stops in it, gazing away from everything. Silence falls. Then the chorus howls: “Yooooooooooo — oooooo.”

A merchant traveller appears in this world. A madwoman comes behind them. The merchant and the ferryman agree to wait for her, so that her ravings may entertain them. When we see her face, we may well find her in a certain brooding Edo period fukai mask, which has flatter cheeks than the ko-omote but is still smoothskinned excepting the dimple-like wrinkles around the mouth. Her forehead and chin project slightly forward. The corners of the mouth do not turn upward like a ko-omote’s; and the eyebrows are thicker. This mask is often used for a mother who has lost her child or, as we know, for a lonely wife, for instance in “Kinuta,” and indeed we are now informed, mostly by the chorus, that her son was stolen away by slave-traders from the east, and that she has lost her way while searching for him.

The golden mist-patterns of the fan she holds, at least when this play is performed by the Hosho School, are indicative of strength; and so I see her as desperate but not yet broken by despair.

And so they begin to cross the Sumida River, where long, long ago the nameless young gallant of the Tales of Ise declaimed a sad poem about his lady back in Kyoto, center of the world — a poem which made everyone weep. Yes, they cross the abyss; they cross the river, whose various floating, swimming and sinking lives, of course, are far too self-absorbed to be much moved by her concerns. For instance, a faded picture scroll of “Sumida in Autumn” by Chobunsai Eishi depicts passengers on a boat admiring the moon. There are faint torii in the distance. And in a woodblock by Isoda Koryusai, circa 1770, we see a man and a courtesan seated on a veranda overlooking the pale-green-inked Sumida River, on which a fishing boat rests, one fellow in the act of poling, the other drawing up his net; and on the far side, small figures, some of children, wander across the street-plain of Edo beneath what might be the “gazing-back willow,” the spot where this courtesan’s customer may well stand tomorrow, looking back across the river into Yoshiwara and perhaps even seeing the same lady who now leans on her elegantly sleeved elbow, facing the river, her eyes closed as the man drapes her white leg over his shoulder, entering her oysterlike vulva with an organ whose many parallel wrinkles, especially in the testicles, recall the rocky mountains of traditional Chinese painting.

Soon the crossing will be completed. Already they can see on the far bank a crowd around a willow tree. The mother asks what they are doing, and the ferryman answers that they are marking the first anniversary of a child’s death. The child was, of course, her son, whom the kidnapper cast away when he became weak.

In 2005 I visited this spot. The Buddhist temple to the child, Umewaka, was destroyed in 1870; a Shinto temple replaced it. The building was saved by chance from Allied air raids. One can see a few black-ringed bullet-holes. In an apartment complex, the stele’s eight characters — three small, five large — descend within a niche of concrete wall to two geranium planters side by side, and then the shrine itself, a nondescript modern glass-and-steel cupola (which fire regulations require) enclosing the old fish-scale gable roof.

The young boy lost his father early, we read, and was deceived by kidnappers. He sickened and died at age twelve. A priest was moved by his deathbed poem, and accordingly erected this stele, planting beside it a willow tree, whose Japanese name is umewaka. (A young plum is a waka-ume.)

We see a young willow, a rope, a wrapped heap of volcanic rocks before the triple-storey freeway on whose lowest level the blue-tarped houses of the homeless focus the eye; then runs the Sumida unseen, above which the roofs of the far side call out.

Stepping away from the stele, one discovers a lovely spot in the blacktop, with the noise of children playing baseball unseen beneath the trees which rise partway up the height of the apartment monoliths, steel bridges and the milky-grey Sumida.

And so the merchant, the ferryman and the madwoman disembark. The chorus asks the crowd to disinter the corpse, so that the mother can see her son one last time.

All of them call upon Amida Buddha for his sake; even the madwoman summons the strength to do it.

Then they hear the child’s voice.

Zeami, ever favoring rarefication, opined that the play would have been still more effective without a child actor in the mound, but his son Motomasa, who wrote or completed the text, thought this would needlessly increase its difficulty. It seems to me that Motomasa was correct. When I saw this performance I did not know the story at all, but the instant the child began to sing, my eyes grew damp and my throat choked up without my knowing why. As I looked around the theater, I saw tears in the eyes of many others.

The effect now closely resembles the final exchange between father and daughter in “Kagekiyo,” for mother and son each ask: “Is it you?” She tries to embrace him; he goes away. The chorus chants: “What appeared to be a dear child is wild grasses thick on the tomb… Oh, sorrow! Nothing else remains. Oh, sorrow! Nothing else remains.”

Chapter 32. Behind the Rainbow Curtain

Going Home Beneath the Skin

Once a man met, courted and won a woman who lived in Yamato. After a time, he had to return to the capital…

THE TALES OF ISE

In that archetypal Japanese romance, Taketori Monogatari, a lovely moon maiden, sent down to our unworthy realm to atone for some unnamed sin (and simultaneously to help her adoptive father, the meritorious old bamboo cutter), gets recalled at last to the place where she belongs. The Emperor himself cannot prevent her departure. Upon the arrival of the radiant moon entities, his two thousand guardsmen lose all will to shoot their arrows. Her foster parents grow pitiable with grief, but the moon entities disdain their uncleanliness. Against her will, Kaguyahime must take leave of them. And so one of the lunar attendants dresses her in a celestial robe of feathers. “No longer did the maiden consider the old man pitiful or pathetic, for one who dons such a robe is emancipated from sorrow. She entered the carriage and soared into the heavens, escorted by one hundred heavenly beings.”

She might as well have put on a Noh robe.

In “Hanjo,” the prostitute Hanago, crazed by attachment to her absent lover, quotes the old proverb that “a jewel is stitched in our robes,” meaning that enlightenment lies nearer to us than we imagine, “but the sting of love makes us forget.” Kaguyahime pulled the stinger out. She donned better garments. Then she remembered who she was.

Once upon a time a certain woman loved me, and my faith in our mutual attachment resembled my belief in the immortality of that ecstatic moment when the actor in the Noh mask glides out of nothingness, moving more slowly than a geisha although more rapidly than his colleague Mr. Umewaka. When Kofumi-san dances for me in that teahouse in Gion, she gazes into my eyes, so that I feel, in part deludedly, that she sees me; and this woman who loved me said that she saw me, truly; her face used to descend by sweet degrees onto mine as we lay together in the darkness. One morning she arose and went away. Once I comprehended that she was emancipating herself from me I entreated her to open her heart, but she had become enlightened, which must be why it is that my memory of her face has now become like my vision of that Noh actor’s mask turning slowly like a hanged man in the wind, shite of a ghost, lovely mask of a woman offering herself to be looked at, naked in the same sense as Kofumi-san is when she dances, yet singing with a man’s voice. What do I possess now but my memory of the last slow angling of Kaguyahime’s face? She has returned to her native place. And Kofumi-san and Konomi-san have both gone home; they’ve washed away their white paint, which is called shironuri. As for that Noh mask turning almost imperceptibly through various jewel-degrees, hasn’t that gone back to bed in its dark box?

But I remember when the mask was still vital. It was during Mr. Mikata’s chamber production of “Michimori,” performed in a certain temple in Kyoto. The doomed Heike warrior enters slowly, bearing the white skeleton of a boat about his waist; he sets it down on the floor within the glimmer of firelight, and the righthand torch flickers over the chorus. The woman with the man’s voice is his wife, with whom of course he must soon exchange the last cup of parting, for the Genji are pressing the attack, which is to say that this is our life: Some of us die; others, stung by love, mourn them, then soon or late must follow them. The warrior now stands beside his wife within the boat. Everything is wan in the torchlight; the face of the lady in the audience beside me has grown as ivory as a Noh mask. The man stands frozen; the fan swoops; all goes grim; then the woman slowly begins to rotate and diminish. The man also kneels. He wears a gorgeous checked costume the tail of whose white sash hangs down; and in the dimness there appear to be four chrysanthemums on it. His long queue is very dark and glossy. They sit together in profile, he and she, utterly still, bloodless but for the low, trembling chants which recapitulate the sound of wind blowing across wide-mouthed earthen jars; these wind-songs are issuing from the two masks.

In time they rise. She raises her hand and he his, at the same place and rhythm.¹ What is she now, but a pale mothlike figure? What is he, but her morbid memory? They both pivot and freeze, with their elbows extended at the same angle. They draw apart, each one isolated in the light of a single flame.

A chilly night-exhalation has crept in, pushing out the sickening smell of ginkgo trees. The flames twist up brighter, the long silences between chants punctuated by the flickering of flamelight. Soon Michimori will enter on his fate more rapidly, and the bamboo quality of the drums will grow somehow more pronounced. The darkness will deepen behind him as he slowly pivots to face his wife from far away. The music will increase in pitch, volume and rhythm.

A mask gazes sideways at me, narrower than the head and wig it parasitizes, the flame behind it imparting the flicker of life to its hard flesh. The warrior mask gazes down, very pale against its crest of dark hair; and from the side its mouth is almost sad and almost cunning. Then it advances toward wife and flame, the closed fan thrust before it like a lance. According to Mr. Mikata, a fan conveys no directional meaning whatsoever. It can be a whip; open and extended it can become a sake cup, and there exists a stylized gesture for pouring the sake, but the figure that a fan-gesture makes defies deconstruction into any element but beauty itself. What then is Michimori doing with his fan? Shall we just say that he is reaching toward the one he loves while sternly pushing her away?

When the tempo increases, he must gaze away from her. She gazes after him from her flame, and then he has departed. He has set out for the capital.

The chants swell almost into shouts; the flute is now frenzied, the drumbeats as rapid as battle itself; soon it will be time to sink into Michimori’s death when the chant slows and the flute blows. Then they will all go to a place I do not know. This place, like the face of a geisha, of a ko-omote, or of the woman who used to love me, excites my desire in part because I cannot attain it.

(Kawabata, 1934: “For me, love, more than anything else, is my lifeline. But I have the feeling that I have never taken a woman’s hand in mine with romantic intentions.” And perhaps the same is true of life itself, he continues; perhaps he has never taken life by the hand.)

In the Tales of Ise, that nameless courtier-poet whom we think of as Narihira weeps for the capital, and for his beloved there — who may be one or many women. Whenever he woos rural beauties, he condescends (in the archaic sense of the word) to bestow on them the same exquisite courtesies as he would have done for a lady in Kyoto. “Even in the provinces,” the narrator enthuses, “this man did not depart from his customary behavior.” There shines one more indication that someday he will return to the capital. Then all the country maidens he seduced will pine eternally, like Matsukaze and Murasame. As for him, I hope that he will achieve some measure of Kaguyahime’s emancipation from sorrow — although, being a Heian noble, he would surely not forgo that bittersweet, poetic melancholy called aware.

As a spectator of Noh, which is to say a man of the provinces who loves beautiful women (which category includes all women), I am a backwater sort on whom grace has been occasionally bestowed. I want to hold onto my life but cannot. Year by year, it flies away up to the moon. Disobedient to my plans and wishes, my hair has gone grey. I want to keep my loves in my heart’s treasure-box, but those likewise dissolve into moonbeams, either through losses and endings or through familiarity, which is of course a gain as well as a loss, but most definitely a loss! I want to understand every Noh gesture, to recognize each Chinese box of nested textual allusion; but, as I so often complain to you, I will never know either the language or the canon. Even if I could, I could never follow the shite behind the rainbow curtain at the end of the final act. He goes home to the moon, the capital, long lost Kyoto.

What is the capital? For Kawabata it can be signified by red weeping cherry trees, not to mention schoolgirls and maikos. For the lovely concubine in “Yuya” it must be the home of her dying mother. For a certain poet in the Manyoshu, it is youth itself; the sight of it, so he pretends, would restore his best years. For me, so I infer, it is all the women whose love I have lost, and the woman whom I love now and with whom I wish to merge utterly, but cannot, thanks to the abyss between man and woman, soul and soul. Lady Nijo and Lady Sarashina expressed kindred formulations. For Mishima the capital can be reached by means of a homoerotic violent death. For Ono no Komachi, home is youth regained. And now the capital moves to Edo, where pagoda-compounds peer out between golden clouds of ink, and Fuji lords it over the horizon across the bridge all along the avenues of booths and houses, and peering between the shoulder-poles of palanquin-bearers I covetously spy all the many inkstained woodblocks hanging in Edo’s bookshops; lovely ladies sport katsuyama hairdos; I see the heartstopping dark blues of ukiyo-e skies, the courtesans of Yoshiwara; in one theater I am gladdened by the red-outlined eyes of a pale-faced Kabuki beauty; in the next, by a Noh actor in a white and gorgeous mask and a silver-turquoise kimono with gold embroidery; and then another figure, even more fantastic, comes down the bridge in a higher, narrower golden crown, like the first wearing both long dark hair and a golden fan, but its kimono is dark purple and its undergarment is yellow-gold. — Each of us who is the shite perceives the capital in terms of his own attachment. Never mind that; as we glide about within our world’s polished wood, with a stylized pine tree as the backdrop, the chorus will remind you, our audience, what forms our particular delusions take. Here they sit, a half-dozen men, with sharp grey shoulder-winged vests over their black kimonos, and pale medallions over their breasts. In deep, stern, mournful voices, in chorus thrillingly inhuman, they sing a Shinto song.

In exile at Suma, Genji tells his best friend of his fear that he will never glimpse the capital again. As Mr. Mikata once said to me, “Suma’s image is loneliness.” The woman he seduces and impregnates there (she will become one of his less distinguished concubines) torments herself thus: “Born at Akashi! What a hideous thought!”

I was born at Akashi. I will never go to the capital.

Worse yet, I do not want to. When I learn that the Kokin Shu anthology, which first appeared in about 905, walled in for centuries the entire permissible vocabulary of poetic diction, I feel sad and stifled. I would not care to express that sadness only in whichever gestures Noh approves. Were I a woman, I would never choose to be constrained in the garments and gestures of a geisha. I prefer what Mr. Umewaka would call the easy choice.

But the idea of the capital as a heavenly home allures me as much as the fantasy embodied by a maiko or a man in a woman’s mask.

Whenever we seek to peer into our own lives and those of others, we place ourselves in a neutrally perfect imaginary place: the capital. Only there can we discern attachments accurately.

In the ancient times of the Genji Picture-Scrolls there were the fukinuke yatai, the roofless houses, so that we could look in and see in stylized drawings Heian aristocrats diverting themselves. In the seventeenth-century woodblocks made to accompany Saikaku’s tales we could spy on, for instance, the courtesan-turned-letter-writer, who has nearly completed her first column of calligraphy, kneeling beside her customer on the tatami mat while the maid brings a single cup of tea in her left hand. We saw their lives; they could not perceive us; we existed while they were but fictions; they were provincials, and we, residents of the capital.

Or am I dead wrong? We, the audience in the Noh theater, may possess a certain knowingness about the story, which pretends to occur uniquely but which to us may be familiar and more; we may even feel superior to the waki, who fails to recognize the shite in his first humble contemporary manifestation. All the same, we who watch are here to receive and be moved, to be, as the cliché goes, elevated. If anyone is perfect, it is Yuya or Matsukaze, not us. The mask slowly, slowly turns, beautiful, ancient and virginal. It is of the capital, and I am of Akashi. The stage radiates vital superiority in the costumes, gestures, etcetera that it bears. Some of its interest derives simply from its availability to the gaze. From a dark wooden-floored brasserie in Paris I look past the shiny brass railing which is dabbed milk-white with fingerprints, and into the stage beneath the dripping awnings — a street with ripples in the puddles on the white crosswalk, and across it, another red-awning’d café much like the place in which I sit; I see old men gesticulating, married couples slowly eating, pretty girls crossing their long white legs, and I want to watch everything. That girl in the hooded black raincoat paces in the foreground, her pale hand clenched against her ear; she must be talking on her cell phone. She finishes, deposits her hand in her pocket and goes away. Where is the privileged place? My voyeurism makes me forget that the world is in fact not a stage. But the Noh stage is truly a world set apart from mine, an island world in a moat of white stones. And that bridge over which this higher order of beings comes and goes leads not to Akashi, but to that unknown realm behind the rainbow curtain.

Is it the capital or is it something else? The antique treatise of Pound and Fenollosa informs me that the three pine trees besetting that wooden bridge from stage to curtain symbolize, in increasing order of distance, heaven, humankind and earth. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Why can’t this ape understand?

I sit in a private room in the ochaya, and at last the geisha comes to me. She is so lovely I can hardly describe her. She dances for me until I begin to worry about being able to pay. I thank her; she goes; I return to Akashi. That private room, like the Noh stage, was a way station, a temporary representation of the capital.

The woman I love comes to me. She promises to be with me forever. She says that no one can see her as I do, that she sees me. Then her love departs. We leave one another. I know where she lives; I used to sleep there in her arms. No matter. I have also seen Mr. Umewaka in the mirror room behind the rainbow curtain. The far side of the painted curtain is dull. Then, from behind its dimmed down colors — I remember this from the Omi Noh Theater in Kyoto — a gap between fabric and doorway shows the crowd, the people from Akashi: the audience now waits. But that is merely what I have seen; I have failed to see the unseeable. And that woman who used to love me, I could visit her house, but would never find her there, merely her semblance; she has departed for the capital.

Clutching this transient life

I survive on the seaweed,

Which I, soaked by waves,

Gather at the isle of Irago.

What did she do for me? She showed me how beautiful heaven is. Her flesh was red and white, like the azaleas at the Shoren-in. And what did I do for her? My plainness helped her loveliness shine all the better. The Noh actor Mr. Mikata once remarked to me that for “Kinuta” a fukai mask “is almost a rule. You don’t use a ko-omote, nor a waka-onna either. That is because the servant of her husband wears a younger mask That way the audience will have an image that the husband may now love this younger woman.” I was a fukai from Akashi; she was a waka-onna from Kyoto.

Had I been sufficiently educated in courtly custom to attach a faded chrysanthemum to my poem of resentful love, thereby expressing the neglect doubly, she might have despised me less.

I go home to Akashi, where my losses live. With every step I take away from the theater, I diminish all the more into my loneliness. Even Semimaru’s palanquin-bearers are affected by this phenomenon, which resembles the falloff of sunlight according to the inverse-square law — and they know that they will be able to return home as soon as they have completed the formal abandonment of the blind prince. “I was not intended for a world in which women shackle themselves in garments that are not even made of cloth,” complains Proust, who also laments the substitution of motorcars for horse-drawn carriages. “My consolation is to think of the women whom I knew in the past, now that there is no elegance left.” This is likewise one of Noh’s consolations. The masks bring back the Heian capital, most of which perished in the Onin Wars of the mid-fifteenth century. The capital remains as still as leaf-shadows on the white panels of the Shoren-in, where each breath of camphor afternoons is cooler and more refreshing than the last. But being from Akashi, I wander through the weedy outskirts of time, interviewing men who sit in grass or plastic lean-tos, men who gaze red-eyed and yellow-eyed at their cigarette stands which hardly anyone patronizes. I have no objections to a world in which women wear garments of metal, or shoot machine-guns. (InStyle magazine, January 2008: “Trend Watch: Metallics. No need to gloss things over this season — make them shine in rose gold, silver or copper.” Here’s a little vinyl purse, a clutch, they call it, metallically blushing at a discounted price.) I try to make the best of the fact that I was never intended for the capital, and could not expect to be welcomed there. My companions are grey water, clouds, slatey wave-shoulders, and, should I ever be so foolhardy as to seek out the capital, seasickness. (Tales of Ise: “The sea her world, / the fisher-girl can but gather / her dreary seaweeds…”) All the same, I feel; I love; I perceive; hence I sincerely believe that my life here is or can be as fantastically lovely as the snake-necked cranes on a faded vermilion nuihaku Noh robe, each crane different, some with their triple-taloned feet open, all yellow-beaked and golden-eyed, the tops of their heads crimson like setting suns; the centers of their bodies are green-feathered in butterflylike shapes, and they wear underskirts of black feathers.

I go away, because the Noh-masked Heians have gone away. The play is over. They are the ones who were not intended for this world.

Not every personage in a Noh play departs by means of the rainbow curtain. The koken, the assistants, often leave through the tiny door at the base of the main stage, and in “The Sought-for Grave” the two tsure who play the roles of village maidens do the same. Because I am from Akashi, I cannot say whether they return to the same district of the capital as the shite. To me the capital understates itself, keeping its secrets.

The actors’ costumed reflections appear in the worn gloss of a Noh stage. Then they depart across that bridgeway, whose function and appearance remind me of what the Tale of Genji calls “the bridge of dreams,” the frail connections between man and woman, soul and world. It must be this that the shaman crosses on the Emperor’s behalf when he visits Yokihi and is regaled by her dance of everlasting pain. In his journey, he recapitulates Teika’s thirteenth-century tanka about the traveller who is crossing a bridge over a deep gorge: the autumn sunset lights of the far side of the chasm with loneliness, and his sleeves whip about in the wind.

How could she have stopped loving me? Why must Yuya’s dance come to an end? And what is it like behind the curtain? Is it a realm of more dances, ever more exquisite, like those in Dante’s Paradiso, or does it partake of the pallid severity of a Zen rock garden in Kyoto: raked gravel, tall narrow rock, long rock laid down, cloudlike rock, all enclosed in bright summer ivy? Surely there is a path behind the rainbow curtain to the mountains of Hagai, a place which contemporaries from our age gloss as “unidentified; but presumably it was a hill near Kasuga.” Long, long ago a poet’s wife died, and he wrote in the Manyoshu that he had been told she was in Hagai’s mountains. “Thither I go, / Toiling along the stony path; / But it avails me not”; he found not even her shadow. — Somewhere behind the rainbow curtain lives her shadow and more.

To any and all of these conjectural forms, Akashi remains strikingly inferior. I suppose that when Kaguyahime dons her moon robe and then gazes on her foster parents with indifference, the home they gave her disgusts her. In The Taiheiki this note is sounded so frequently that it almost becomes ludicrous. For instance, one exile’s “eldest daughter alone was suffered to remain in the capital, but eighteen daughters departed from the city weeping, to go to wearisome Tsukushi. How pitiful it was!” The narrator repeatedly applies this last ejaculation to ritual suicides and battle-deaths. Can exile really be on the same level as those? If so, how sad for us inhabitants of Akashi and Tsukushi!

How could she have stopped loving me? She saw a chance to escape from wearisome Tsukushi.

Of course she did not depart instantaneously; for a brief time I could witness her grace while she stood upon the bridge. All summer, until I pressed her at our final meeting, she would not say that she no longer loved me. After all, in both Noh and Kabuki the actor continues to perform while protractedly entering and leaving the stage-world by means of a special bridge or passageway. Zeami specifically advises that after leaving the mirror room at the commencement of a Noh performance, the actor ought to stop one-third of the way across the bridge, study the audience; and precisely when their expectations of his entrance song have reached the maximum, he should sing it. This he called “matching the feelings to the moment.”

A DEVIL ISLAND TRAVELOGUE

Akashi and Tsukushi are dreary enough. But other points of exile are even worse than these.

“And Lord Suketomo they banished to the land of Sado, making his death sentence one degree easier.” Thus The Taiheiki. As it happens, it was to Sado that Zeami also went. In 1424 he composed Kakyo, that just quoted treatise which defines “matching the feelings to the moment.” Some people say that it was his refusal to divulge these secret writings of his to the Shogun that caused his punishment; others speak of rivalries and vanities; no one knows anymore. In 1429 he was prohibited entry to the Sento Imperial Palace. And in 1434 they dispatched him on what must have been an exceedingly long, wearisome, perilous and sorrowful journey by land and sea, crossing the abyss. Again I think of the Noh play “Yokihi,” of the Emperor’s sorcerer crossing space to find the isle where Lady Yang’s ghost grieves endlessly over her attachment. No doubt Zeami has played many female roles in his time; who knows whether he played Lady Yang in some lost play? Now he must play her for life.

Yes, he crosses the abyss, in keeping with Basho’s haiku:

The rough sea —

Extending toward Sado Isle,

The Milky Way.

so that, like the infant Kaguyahime at the beginning of her parable, he has departed the true world to which he belongs, the realm of such complete perfection that the very rustling of a plebeian woman’s gowns will be detected as loud and coarse; so he gets rowed through outer space, until Sado appears beneath the clouds like a long sea-mountain, an icy leaden amethyst with white snow-grooves.

Will his kindred moon beings ever descend to Sado bearing a celestial robe of feathers for him? Sado has become his mirror room. He sits enshrouded in bitterness and old age, waiting to be masked so that his performance can begin. But onstage it’s only one kyogen after the other. Perhaps he will never again be called past the rainbow curtain.

The shite of the eponymous Noh play “Shunkan,” left alone on Devil Island² when his two companions in exile have been recalled to the capital, chants out his situation: “ ‘Wait awhile and you’ll come home to Kyoto,’ say the voices coming faint from far away, and faint his hope…” He will die alone there, of course. I see a seventeenth-century Shunkan mask, carver unknown: The mask bares its teeth, in the tranquilly resigned manner of its kind; its sculpted bony prominences of cheek and chiseled forehead-wrinkles render it something between a burlwood contortion and a skull. The narrow eyes are almost flat at their lids. The mask remains caught between this world and the other; wait awhile, wait awhile. But why not hope? At very rare intervals an envoy in gorgeous robes may indeed come to us from behind the rainbow curtain, which follows its own celestial laws of permeability. Once upon a time, a lady-in-waiting of the Nijo Empress finally agreed to receive her suitor, but with curtains between them. The poem he uttered in reply contains these lines:

Please put aside

the River of Heaven,

that barrier between us.

“Struck with admiration,” the Tales of Ise reports, “she accepted him as her lover.” And so he was permitted behind the rainbow curtain, although for how long no one knows. So why should not Shunkan, if he were patiently loyal, have been carried home across the River of Heaven?

I waited for my lover as long as I could. Unable to bear the alternative, I kept faith that she would come for me. How ordinary! The longing of the wife for the absent husband in the play “Kinuta,” the yearning which the geisha song “Sekare sekarete” expresses for more than rare secret nights together, the temple bell ringing out another separation at dawn, what are any of these but drip-drops in the water-clocks of Akashi? “Wait awhile and you’ll come home to Kyoto.”

From The Taiheiki’s description, Zeami’s punishment nearly recapitulates Shunkan’s, Sado being likewise “a dreadful island, unfrequented by human beings.” Here Lord Suketomo’s death sentence will presently be carried out after all. “The cutting is like a gust of wind. And indeed the wind of Sado is like an executioner’s blade.”

Standing on Sado’s snow-striped sand, watching a column of snow approaching over the brownish-grey water, I find that the mountains are now nearly charcoal-dark. A cormorant flies furtively overhead. Wind chills my back; snow-devils devour ever more of the sky.

All the same, Sado’s winters are no worse than Kyoto’s; moreover, Zeami encountered any number of human beings there.³ In the courtyard of Ho Sho Ji, the second temple where he reputedly lived, a haiku concerning him has been cut into a rounded boulder; and on the cemetery’s edge a bamboo fence encloses a rounded stone on which he is supposed to have sat. Here, in deference to the laws of iki and miekakure, white gravel discreetly betrays itself beneath the white snow. Somewhere on the grounds (due to the shrinekeeper’s absence I could not see it) resides the many-wrinkled wooden mask which they say he brought from the capital, on one occasion successfully employing it in a dance for rain.

From the gable’s downspout, melted snow runs down a chain of bell-like metal cups and into the snow. Slide aside the wooden panels and you will smell incense. Gold-lettered dark pillars frame an altar-centered darkness.

In Sado there is an ancient agricultural shrine, which Lord Suketomo’s executioner later dedicated to his victim. And here one also finds an outdoor Noh theater, one of thirty-three on the island, so I am told; this one is at least as old as the Edo period; of course Zeami never lived to see it. In fact even Sado’s one indoor Noh theater postdates him. — Perhaps Zeami wandered to this very place, in order to visit the shrine. I imagine the refrain of his bitter blood: “To die at Akashi! What a hideous thought!” — But I, a good Westerner, believe in Progress. Now that we have thirty-four Noh theaters in Sado, I refuse to say that we’re in Akashi anymore.

The pine tree, repainted in 1978, appears not on the bridge but on the rear wall of the main stage, and for some reason it is accompanied by a red sun. Leaving my shoes in the snow beneath the first step, I stand upon those grey pine boards in an ocean of white. I tread the bridge, which lacks that rainbow curtain of the thick pastel stripes, and come into the mirror room. Here the wickerwork bell of “Dojoji” awaits its next performance. Then through the door that the musicians and koken use I reemerge onto the stage, and gaze out from my pine island, with the painted pine at my back. Here the world begins. A white rope hangs in the dark entryway of the shrine, whose name is Dai Zen Jin Ja. Behind two snow-shouldered stone lanterns the red paint is busily flaking off a torus. Then come snowy trees. This silent silver-grey stage reminds me of snow in a silver bowl. After all, exile does not lack its own charms, categorized by the entity called wabi, or “desolate beauty.” After awhile I begin to hear the dripping of the eaves; then when a crow caws I see and hear farther, although not yet far enough to reach the wet snow in the shade of the bamboo groves, the shining white grass-dyked rectangles of rice fields, the high northern mountains, which are lightly glazed with white; the milk-glow of waves beneath the white sky, white rain dripping from the pines; the roughly conical “Married Rocks” at the sea’s edge; one of them is grooved; in this area the rock-lilies bloom in May; they die if they are taken away.

No one is sure if Zeami died on Sado. There is a tomb for him next to Kanami’s, in the old capital; it may be a mere cenotaph.

It is said that he once heard the cuckoo singing on Sado, and remembered the flowers of Kyoto, because when the cuckoo sang there, the flowers were in bloom.

“I can’t help thinking about the capital today,” we overhear voyagers repeating on a certain New Year’s Day in the tenth century. “I wonder how it all looks — the straw festoons, with their mullet heads and holly, at the gates of the little houses.” And just before performances start, I myself, hearing through the curtains of Euro-American theaters what Proust compares to the sounds within an egg just before it hatches, am compelled to wonder who and what I will see. Thus likewise the moment when the geisha is giggling at the bottom of the teahouse stairs and the musician is tuning her shamisen. Will Kaguyahime herself appear to me, or shall I make do with some imitation? No doubt Zeami treasured his own anticipations.

In a Noh theater, of course, not a sound passes through the rainbow curtain. How could I have ever expected to perceive anything but silence? As a human being in a world of gods, as a lover where my beloved is, a deaf and blinking spectator in Noh theaters, I am base. The mask gazes at me without seeing me. It is incomparably above me.

In Kanazawa I see a shrine tree overlined with snow, people clapping three times and throwing their coins into the box with a dry rattling sound, the sky grey and yellow, in the snow a dark puddle trembling with pale gold reflected fire. What happens to those coins? Do their Platonic forms reach the capital?

Spying snow on bamboo leaves, I try to imagine snow in a silver bowl. Well, I’m a good ape; I know it must be as white as a koto’s thirteen strings—

In Sado I live and breathe, my progress of inhalations and exhalations as steady as the pond of blue sky in the thunderheads above the ocean.

I see a crescent of perfect snow upon the beach’s leaden sand, colored along one side, as if eyelined, with rusty grass. The bay is calmer, hence bird-ridden; the ice is hard. A line of birdprints on the snow seems to have been made by a single foot. What would it mean to tread this stage? Where could I go? Where can I go on this prison island, this world?

THE PROPER ENVIRONMENT

What is the capital, but the abode of grace? And what is grace? What does Kaguyahime possess that a denizen of Akashi lacks? Her robe must be equivalent to one of those Edo-era Noh costumes of gold thread and silk embroidered with flowers, which outshine anything I could ever hope to wear. One would need connections in the capital to obtain such treasures. But more fundamentally, grace must derive from the woman’s inner being — although the proper environment brings it out, of course. “Thus by living in the capital” and performing before refined spectators, writes Zeami in “Kakyo,” “the actor is in the proper environment, and the insufficiencies in his art will naturally disappear.” I suppose that when she departs the capital to take up residence with me in Akashi, insufficiencies in her art will naturally reappear.

Nara-era maidens combing their morning hair, will their combing slowly lose its grace once they get married and carried off to Akashi?

Gazing at my female self, quite mindful of Yukiko’s categorization of her clients as narcissists, I nonetheless feel excited into joy. Have I crossed the abyss, then? Was there an abyss at all, or was the gulf, as some transgender people would have it, the merest figment of prejudice and ignorance? Who is this woman in the mirror?

When Mr. Umewaka becomes Yuya in the mirror room, who is he? Noh actors and Inoue School dancers aim to feel nothing; Odori dancers do the opposite. When the sorcerer in “Yokihi” travels through space to meet Lady Yang, when Zeami departs for Sado, when I face my own death, or myself as the opposite gender, or some biological woman whom I desire or love or whose love I have lost, or some mask of beauty, what is common to all of these?

Whatever that commonality might be, it surely lives within me already. Mr. Umewaka is his own Yuya; he cannot become entirely alien to himself. And when I first emerge into a traditional garden in Kyoto, the shrine’s wooden overhang forms a space partway between inside and outside. The air touches me but my gaze continues to be framed within a rectangle, so that, to borrow from Shakespeare, the world becomes a stage. And there I am, character and audience.

The tiny eyes and lips of an Utamaro beauty bejewel the old print, and I regard their stylized grace. Utamaro and his model have both long since turned to smoke; anyhow, the woman represented by this bijin-ga must have been more individual than this. So has my attachment merely been tricked forth? Is deception the common element of allure in this floating world?

A beautiful woman named Nancy sits in church in Provincetown, Massachusetts, gazing diagonally, as do the congregation’s other members, out of the black and white photograph; her large hands are clasped in her lap, and if she is in her middle thirties then her face is a trifle worn for a woman’s but smooth for a man’s. In a sweet color photograph from the following year she stands in a meadow beside her Aunt Ida May, both of them holding uprooted plants, Nancy with her left hand, Ida May with the right, and Ida May is saying something just to her while Nancy in her pink blouse and floral slip gazes again diagonally beyond us. In church Nancy had wavy hair. Now she has straight hair and bangs. The year after that, Nancy stands nude in her home in Cambridge, with her hand on her hip, looking younger than ever, large-eyed and small-breasted, so beautifully feminine, slim-bodied like an adolescent girl, and a penis hangs between her legs. In this portrait only does she gaze directly at us. Who is she? Is the mystery of who she is any more enigmatic than yours or mine, or Mr. Umewaka’s? A mask is a lie, of course, but by virtue of being so, it leaves behind many of flesh’s native-born accidents, asserting a specific being, and hence, if you believe that we can make our destinies, truth. All the same, who is Nancy? What does it mean to desire her as a man desires a woman? Who would Nancy be to me if I had never seen her nude, if I never knew that she possessed a penis?

I quote again in full Shun’e’s advice to Chomei that

when one gazes upon the autumn hills half-concealed by a curtain of mist, what one sees is veiled yet profoundly beautiful; such a shadowy scene, which permits free exercise of the imagination in picturing how lovely the whole panoply of scarlet leaves must be, is far better than to see them spread with dazzling clarity before our eyes.

And I also quote the seventeenth-century Chinese writer Lu Yu: “A man’s true feeling for a woman does not arise from the bodily contact, but from the eye contact that precedes it.”

Would Nancy prefer me not to know about her penis? Would she rather be half-concealed by a curtain of mist? If so and if not, what does her posing for a public portrait signify? Who is she? Is her womanhood substantially other than Mr. Umewaka’s? If she lived in the capital and performed only before refined spectators, would I never guess that her body was partly male? If I were attracted to her without knowing, then found out, would my reaction be disappointment, revulsion, or an awed grief that someone beautiful and plausible in her grace, the half-existing biological woman whom I had believed in, was now flying away forever to the moon? Or would my attraction be unchanged? — If I never desired her, if I loved her only as a friend, then I would be indifferent if my conception of her gender changed. I know that I could continue to treat her as I would treat any woman, employing appropriate pronouns and compliments. In fact, I might admire her performance. — But what is grace? Perhaps (this also I resist) it is the space between fascination and fulfillment. Fascination, as you may recall, Zeami defined as the sensation before the consciousness of that sensation. Fulfillment, he says, is the union of becoming and of settling in place. The cherry blossom falls. Sakagami departs, and Semimaru completes his tale forever in the blind immobility which might almost be death.

I see the mask of beauty, and I want to kiss it. Then what? I taste wood.

Drawn to the mask of love, I give myself. My fulfillment will be separation. One will stop loving the other; or one will die. Wait awhile; wait awhile.

No, I reject that! I want grace that lasts forever…

Then down with me to the Sea-God’s palace! Having married an immortal, I wait awhile, wait awhile, but then I long for life, the outstretched red and gold fan whirling, the figure so fantastic, spectacular and immobile even as it moves. If I get desperate I’ll open Urashima’s box. The actor’s right arm rises to the crown, and suddenly…

A face is a mask; a lovely face is a lovely mask; even if I kiss it I can never “possess” it even though my desire insists that I can; but because desire is hunger, then if possession were actually possible than it would partake of consumption; therefore, how excellent a thing is a mask! My eyes drink of it without depleting it.

Is the heterosexual attachment of a man to a woman who unbeknownst to him retains some of a man’s attributes any more of an illusion than any other attachment? Noh asserts that all attachments are equally useless, even harmful. I myself cannot help but feel that Kaguyahime’s abandonment of her foster parents was cruel. But it was cruel because they were still attached to her. — Well, then, should they have stayed in exile on the dull side of the rainbow curtain, eternally declining to perform their roles and be attached?

Grace creates attachment. Would it be better, then, to remain an ape in a cage, incapable of appreciating grace?

All attachments must end. A famous poem in the Tales of Ise asks the moon why it must disappear so rapidly, leaving us unslaked. Already the actor has gone behind the rainbow curtain to remove his mask! Well, then is it preferable to absent myself from the performance? I could remain unattached in Akashi, determinedly distant, ironical, dreary and irrelevant, like some fading Noh under-kimono dedicated primarily to the representation of foreigners and warriors in light armor (purple, with eight-feathered fans between waving golden lines); awaiting my end without anticipation or fear; they’d call me beauty’s teetotaler… If I see only insufficiencies in art, will I have maintained myself in the proper environment?

In the Gnostic Scriptures we find a writing called “The Thunder: Perfect Mind,” in which God is female: wife and whore, barren mother of all contradictions. She says: “For many are the pleasant forms which exist in numerous sins… and fleeting pleasures, which men embrace until they become sober and go up to their resting-place. And they will find me there, and they will live, and they will not die again.” If I withhold myself from sin in Akashi, will I finally be able to attach myself to beauty once she invites me into the capital? Just as a kimono pulses around a woman’s white ankles when she goes upstairs, so the robe of Kaguyahime allures me as she ascends to her lunar home. Should I blind my recollections to it until I am called, if that ever happens? But what if I am no longer fitted for beauty by then? Doesn’t it take a lifetime to comprehend the flower of peerless charm? Even then, how much can this ape hope to learn when grace so often follows the model of one family’s Noh theater which I saw reconstructed in Kanazawa: partitioned chambers for the elite enclosing the open tatami space for mass audiences? — Where would I be? Since I’m from Akashi, they’d surely show me to my proper environment.

Even an Edo dweller might be able to visit the theater only once a year, perhaps dressing one’s hair in a special way, awaiting the moment of passing through the “mouse gate” and entering another world: To the seductive, almost leering wavering of many shamisens, a snowfaced Kabuki warrior throws back his head and raises his parasol! Upon the stage bridge begins a slow parade of a Kabuki courtesan with her retinue. — And then? — Back to Akashi.

There is a geisha song about a pair of butterflies tied to each other by dreams which cannot come true; they flutter to “the end of the end.” The commentary explains that two lovers who could not be together in this floating world killed themselves, and became butterflies. What then? Why, at the end of a butterfly’s life they reach the end of the end.

All attachments must end. And every time I see a performance of “Matsukaze,” I will see it end in the same way, down to the very last gesture. About this fact, Mr. Umewaka once remarked: “It’s more difficult to always do the same thing than to change; we chose to do the difficult thing.”

And I, too, would rather do the difficult thing. I prefer to experience grace even though I must lose it and fall back down to my death in Akashi; I defy my proper environment. My dream is over; last night’s autumn rain has ceased; now nothing remains but the wind in the pines. But I remember when Komachi’s throat was as white as a new tatami mat, and someone who proved cruel and treacherous still loved me. My proper environment may soon be a waste of pampas grass where the wind sings through my eyesockets, but I’ll turn away from that while I can; why not listen to the song of the capital bird?

Indeed, it seems to me, perhaps because I am not a shite but a waki, that my way was never a sliding path upon the polished stage of a Noh theater, but a pilgrimage through places far more irregular than the stepping stones in the gravel paths of the Shoren-in Temple; and on many of the occasions when I have passed into Japan, I have visited spots where ghosts in various guises have told me of the past. Against all Noh’s warnings, I have always sought out attachments. I seek to know these ghosts so that they can allure me all the better. The dances of Kofumi-san and the faces of all the maikos of Gion who shine like jewels in the darkness, the loveliness of Suzuka-san as she transforms herself, the sweet happiness in the dances of Masami-san, the flashing golden fan of Mr. Mikata, the slowly, slowly turning head of Mr. Umewaka in a ko-omote mask, the warmly neutral eyes of Konomi-san, the shadow of Konomi-san’s neck and wig upon the wall of the teahouse, they tell me stories to which I cling far more than a true courtier from the capital would find needful; for all that I, a man, client, spectator, reader, foreigner can grasp is a single instant; whereas their performances exist far before and beyond me. Although you may see me as a sliding, passing consciousness upon the smooth stage of these printed pages, I believe that I have actually been places. Once in Pakistan I heard the muezzin calling in the darkness as rain flowed down — rain? No, it was the simultaneous ablutions of the faithful, running down pipes in walls all around me. The street lay crisp beneath the full moon. A horse canter-clopped by. Then the chorus of prayer-song arose from the mosque, more unearthly to me than the raptures of a Christian choir because the tonal scale was so different; it reminded me of the wind-soughs and river-music I’ve sometimes heard alone in my tent in the Arctic. It echoed weirdly; it might have been a crew of sailors singing far away on a storm-tossed ship. And all these things that I thought I heard were in reality a Noh chorus which sings to you what it is that I, a mere construction of words, claim to perceive.

KISSING THE MASK

“To see with the spirit,” writes Zeami, “is to grasp the spirit; to see with the eyes is merely to observe the function.” What lies beyond function? Is it what lies behind the Noh mask? If so, are we supposed to see it?

If her face is a mask, then perhaps the vulva of the woman whom I love is a square lacquered box whose white butterflies resemble both pointed-tipped hearts and the black-ribbed fans of women; these insects browse on silver-gold brier roses in a blue-muted darkness, reminding me what a certain lady wrote in 1818: “Those who dedicate themselves to pleasure realize that they are like insects playing in the flowers, but find it difficult to forsake these frivolous habits.” Meanwhile, every one of this box’s decorations is misted toward silver, as in Shun’e’s advice to Chomei.

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

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

SMEARS OF HAIR OIL

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

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

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

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

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

She let her left sleeve spill down from the central band of her obi to her lower calf; while the fingers of her right hand gestured upward at the level of her forehead.

I do not know, but I want to know, so when their performance is finished I inquire: “What makes a woman beautiful?”

Hachishige-san, the ochaya’s proprietress, replies: “In our generation, experience of life will make the beauty come out. Other people might value only physical beauty.”

Says Masami-san: “We just want to be beautiful, and for that our inside self must be beautiful; we must take something from the heart. We begin by imitating others.”

And Fukutaro-san says: “There are many beautiful Elder Sisters, fortunately. I was frequently scolded. The Elder Sister reminded me that the customers always watch you, how you move.”

I ask the musician what she was thinking of when she performed, and her reply is quite unlike anything I ever heard from practitioners of the Inoue School.

“I am still a beginner,” she begins modestly. “I try to visualize what the music seeks to express. In that second song, which is a sad song, I try to feel sad. But every time I perform, I hear something new. I was lucky that my Elder Sister taught me the tricks. For instance, it is very difficult to sing properly to make the right sound. The posture is like this: Sit straight, looking down with chin up, so the voice goes better. Breast should push forward, buttock backward.”

I ask the geisha: “When you dance, do you feel or are you trying to keep your mind blank?”

“I am trying to be the heroine. In this occasion, I try to imagine that you are the lover I left.”

“To what extent is beauty a performance?”

Fukutaro-san says: “Regardless of age, it should appear easy and smooth.”

“Is there anything a woman can do that an onnagata cannot?”

“Give birth,” laughs Fukutaro-san. There it is again, that answer I so often hear.

Masami-san tells me: “In a dance whose theme is longing for the other sex, in that case a woman can really think and feel that.”

She hesitates, then continues: “When I was turning my back to you and trying to look sad, trying to look most defenseless, the key, which I learned from my Elder Sister, well, it’s kind of embarrassing. You can be careful of the shoulders and other parts. The trick is to make the vagina tight. That affects your appearance, particularly when you show the back.”

THE MOON IN CUPPED HANDS

Could I ever possibly have discerned it, had Masami-san in her kimono and obi, with her back turned to me, actually clenched her vagina? If I could not, what does that say about my gullibility as I pay out money all through this floating world? And if I could, as I sincerely believe that Masami-san considers to be within a habitué’s capability, then might understatement contain still more universes than I suppose? What if I simply trust that I might someday learn to perceive such subtleties? (“Wait awhile and you’ll come home to Kyoto.”) Wouldn’t the possibility enrich me just as much as if the mask actually kissed me back?

Masami-san dances. The Higashi Eastern Pleasure Quarter may not be the old capital, but from my point of view (I now remember it several summers later, in another country) it might as well be the moon. — I feel the impulse to tell you about Masami-san’s faintly smiling dark red lips, not to mention the hairpieces and ornaments frozen in her wig like candy statuettes in the frosting of a fancy cake, her throat still young and her face just beginning to coarsen, although she was a good fifteen years older than she looked. When her dark eyes actually gazed into mine, she remained detached, and her sky-blue sleeves drew together in her lap. — Better not to miss her too much! In the Noh play “Nishikigi,” a suitor sets out unavailing love charms before a woman’s house for three years, and finally dies; his grave is called the Brocade Mound. When she hears this news, the woman also dies, and is buried there also. The two ghosts call each other husband and wife. Their attachment torments them until the arrival of the usual priest. — Why ask to feel that? And so farewell to Kaguyahime and Yuya and Matsukaze; I will not desecrate the rainbow curtain; wait awhile, wait awhile. Hence this book resembles the deathbed poem of Ki no Tsurayuki, who wonders whether the world he now departs could ever have been any more real than moonlight reflected in water in his cupped hands. Where, if anywhere, dwells the Noh play’s shite who has been released from attachment by the priest’s prayer? And where does she go when the actor who expressed her removes his gown, wig and mask? We will never know before we follow Tsurayuki behind the rainbow curtain. We might not find out even then. So for now, why not click little sake-glasses with whomever in this floating world I can love? Why not kiss the mystery’s blackened teeth? “We had been fussing about with our dress and powder since early dawn,” writes Murasaki in her diary. She seeks to control how she is seen: a swiftly glimpsed or never-glimpsed face, masked by long black hair and an elegant fan which sprouts from her gorgeous sleeve. Now she is ready. Now the play will begin.