The Mask Carver's Son

by Alyson Richman

  Grandfather surmised that because the young carver had no family of his own, he would be proud to be brought into the Yamamoto family and to inherit the prestigious name. He poured sake for the young man and, with great elegance, thanked him for his visit. He commissioned three masks from him and then, before my father bade him farewell, Grandfather slyly inquired if he was married.

  “No?” My grandfather repeated my father’s answer. “Well, I am not sure of your schedule, but next Thursday my wife Chieko is planning to teach our daughter to prepare chawanmushi. Should you have the time, we would be delighted to have you join us.”

  My father, understanding that this was the old man’s way of initiating an introduction to his unmarried daughter, offered a deep and reverent bow to my grandfather. He bade the great patriarch farewell with the promise to visit his home the following Thursday.

  TWO

  When I think of Father, I think of his hands. Lined with rivers that charted through coarse and tired palms. Rough and callused; yellow skin and white nails. Hands carefully veiled by the sleeves of a kimono.

  Hands that had earlier destroyed his family. Hands that later brought him fame.

  * * *

  When Grandfather asked how he came to be a mask carver, Father at first could only extend his hands while Grandfather simply stared. But later it would be revealed that Father had taught himself to carve, as he had no words to express his sadness. He dug deep into the wood, as if to drive a sword deep into his own heart. He wished to feel pain. He wished to know tears. He wished he could fall to his knees like a wounded animal and howl to the moon.

  But the gods had stolen his voice. He could not yell in anger. He could not weep in grief. He was driven by a force that grew inside him, one that could not be controlled. It choked his larynx, and it dried the ducts of his eyes.

  His hands, however, moved freely and could not be restrained. They belonged to no one. They had a life of their own.

  * * *

  He first discovers his hands in the forest. He goes there to be alone. To hear no voices other than those trapped inside his head. He feels the soft soil beneath his sandals, inhales the deep, damp smell of humus penetrating his nostrils, and sees the leafy green canopy of branches over his head. Only here does he know he is safe.

  He is a young boy and is humbled by the nature that surrounds him. He recognizes its glory as well as its power to kill. Nature has killed his parents and left him an orphan.

  He cannot prevent his mind from transporting him to his life before their death. He remembers his old house. He pictures the thatched roof that his father replaced each spring. He remembers the hearth, with its eternal flame. There he was warm. There he spent his evenings sleeping next to his mother, her gentle sighing coaxing him to sleep.

  He feels the wind riding through his hair, and he remembers his mother’s caresses. He sees her slender throat rising from the neckline of her blue linen kimono, her long black hair flowing over her shoulders. She is his mother and she is beautiful.

  He recalls how she would greet him and his brother when they returned from school. “Tadaima,” he would holler as he slid his sandals off in the genkan, “I’m home.”

  His brother is older than he. He does not crave their mother’s affection and instead purposefully tries to avoid it. The older brother grumbles the greeting under his breath and brazenly drops his satchel. He prefers to play with his friend on the nearby farm. He turns his back and is walking out the door as his mother cries from the kitchen.

  “Okaerinasai,” she sings to my father. “Welcome home.”

  She walks toward the entranceway and kneels. She does not cover her exposed knees. She is not refined. She is not elegant. But she is smiling. She extends her arms and he playfully presses her hands to his face.

  “Okasan, okasan,” he says in between giggles. He can smell their dinner deep in the skin of her palms. Dried seaweed. Bean paste. Eggplant.

  “Yes, Ryusei?”

  “May I go into the garden and pick some plums for you?”

  “Yes, but you must be careful climbing the branches. The tree can be dangerous.”

  “Of course, Mama,” he assures her. “I am a big boy now. I can take care of myself.”

  She is smiling again. He is her baby.

  * * *

  He changes from his school hakama and into his simple navy yukata. He ties the sash himself and walks to the garden. He sees his small, plump legs peeking from the cloth. He stops for a moment. The plum tree stands before him. It is a thousand times bigger than he.

  His eyes are parallel to its ancient trunk. The bark is gray and gnarled, rough to the touch.

  He pulls up his robe and reaches for the lowest bough. He grabs it and pulls his leg up to the V of the trunk. He climbs until he has reached the highest branches. He can no longer see his house. He is trapped within a sanctuary of leaves and yellow fruit.

  He shakes the branches with his tiny hands. The leaves rustle and the boughs quiver. The fruit tumbles to the ground. He shields his head with his forearms. It is raining a yolk-yellow rain. With a shake of his hand, plums fall from the sky.

  He returns to the ground and giggles to himself. A field of glistening golden fruit surrounds him. He has three baskets to fill. Each plum fills his hand like a perfect glowing orb. He eats one. He eats two. The juice swooshes through his mouth, then runs down his chin. Its stickiness dries on his hands and cheeks.

  “Ryusei . . .” his mother calls from inside. “Don’t spoil your supper.”

  She sees him without seeing him. She is his mother.

  He drags his sticky hands across the front of his yukata. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve. A storm is coming. Dark clouds are moving across the sky.

  He must swiftly gather all the plums. He pulls up the hem of his robe and uses the cloth as a basin and then dumps the fruit into the baskets. He does not examine the fruit to see which specimens are bruised or underripe.

  * * *

  His father has been in the fields all day. He is tired and dirty. The saltiness of his perspiration penetrates the room. He goes to the garden and pours a bucket of cold water over his body. He scrubs his back until it is red and raw. He runs his palms over his wet hair until it is smooth and changes into his yukata, later joining his family by the hearth. He sees his two boys sitting at the low wooden table, the steaming bowls of nabe beneath their small faces. He meets their gaze with pride and begs them to eat before him.

  His wife serves him a large portion of vegetables and tofu from the kettle and lovingly ladles the broth on top. Their evening is illuminated by rapeseed lanterns. They stay with each other until the wick burns low and the night casts shadows across their tired faces.

  She clears the table and removes the futons from the shelves. They roll out the mattresses and the buckwheat pillows. They will sleep deeply. Tomorrow the father will stay at home. He must collect wood for the long winter.

  His young son touches his cheeks before he slides into his futon. “Tomorrow we will play in the soybean fields together, after you return from school,” he gently says. “Off to bed until tomorrow.”

  * * *

  The boys return home the next day. Ryusei calls out to his mother as his brother drops his satchel and heads out the door.

  “Tadaima,” he hollers. “Okaa . . . san! Okaa . . . san!” he cries out with childlike glee.

  There is no answer. He cannot understand where she could be. He removes his sandals and walks over the house’s earthen floor until he reaches the kitchen.

  What he sees there is too terrible for words. Words cannot do justice to the horror. His face is red now. His knees give out, and he crumples to the floor.

  He shrieks.

  Brother arrives. He stands beside him. Both their faces are locked in grief.

  * * *

  One of the baskets of plums rest
s proudly on the table. They are the golden plums he picked himself. There is a plate with a small knife. One of the plums has been cut and shared. The pit rests alone on the ceramic plate while his parents lie on the floor as white as frost, their fingers stiff, their bodies heavy, and their eyes staring up at him wide open.

  “They are dead,” his brother says firmly. “It must have been the plum they shared.” An underripe plum. What we now know to be as lethal as poison.

  He follows his brother to the garden as he turns on his heel and heads straight for the tree. His brother’s eyes are fierce and angry; he has the face of a warrior. He is swollen and orange in the face. He has become his rage.

  He seizes the trunk with his outstretched arms and tries to lift it with no success.

  “We must destroy it!”

  The elder brother thrusts his foot into its center and makes his ascent to its sparsely fruited boughs. He tears at the branches and rips apart its leaves. With clawlike sweeps he grabs what fruit remains and smashes the plums to the ground.

  The smaller one joins him. He creeps up the trunk, swallowed by his brother’s tremendous shadow. He does not shield himself when the fruit falls on his head and splatters its juice over his young skin.

  He joins his brother in the breaking of the boughs and the slicing through the leaves. They tear off its few remaining blossoms and smash its yellow fruit. The juice stains their hands as they smear it over their stinging faces and break its branches over their bleeding knees.

  In the end, they chop at its trunk until it falls over like a crippled old man. Its roots have been unearthed from the ground, resembling huge fingers clawing at the earth.

  Blood mingles with the broken wood. Tears run rivers with juice. Pain rips the golden tree to shreds as dark clouds once again appear in the sky.

  * * *

  The young boy’s grief consumes him. He picked the fruit that killed his parents. He handed the poison to his mother in a basket made of ruby straw. He is lonely for his mother’s touch. He aches. In his heart he believes he has killed her.

  In his furoshiki he keeps a little sliver of the murderous plum tree. At first it serves only as a reminder, then slowly it is transformed into a symbol of his pain.

  For a long time, perhaps many, many months, he just holds it between his small hands. The wood shines from his oils. It is molded to the shape of his palms, curving from the pressure of his grip.

  He holds it to his nose and smells its light floral fragrance. He sees colors: the pink blossoms and the yellow fruit. He sees his mother kneeling in her blue linen kimono; he sees the whiteness of her knees. His nails dig deep into the smooth shard of wood. He feels his nails penetrate the wood’s soft skin. For a split second he is at one with the wood and all the memories it contains. His knees are still scarred from where the tree branches splintered into his legs. The wood is now inside me, he thinks to himself. He attributes the thought to his madness. This madness that has forced him into a world of silence.

  * * *

  The home of their aunt, where he and his brother now live, is not at all like the home where they were raised, where they were loved. Thatched roof snapping from the sound of gnawing vermin. Mud walls. Threadbare tatami. Hunger sweeps through the house’s dusty hollow like wind through the rib cage of a fleshless carcass.

  Their aunt glares at them with hard, stony eyes. Pupilless eyes, eyes that rest in deeply welled sockets. Irises bleeding black. Hunger had devoured her compassion years before. Now all that that remains of her is a bony skeleton swaddled in stinking cotton.

  At mealtime she serves him and his brother last, ensuring that her husband and two children receive what nourishment there is to offer. He and his brother eat what remains in the empty iron pot. The ladle banging around its bare inside, that ringing a sign that now they can skim their fingers around the hollow cavity, to sweep up the scum with their fingers, to suck them until they are raw.

  At night, when he is exiled to the drafty side room, the younger boy watches his cousins through half-closed eyes as they sleep like silkworms, their futons scattered around the four sides of the hearth. His brother holds him tightly to his chest, not out of brotherly love but rather out of a savage yearning to keep himself warm. It is there that he whispers, with his breath hot in the younger boy’s ear, of his plans to leave the next day for the city, to find work and be free of this misery.

  “I will come back for you, brother,” he says.

  But he never did.

  * * *

  It is a month or two later that he finds himself alone in the woods. He has learned to fashion a chisel by hand. He binds a piece of flint to a stick with rope and practices carving on scraps of wood.

  He carves nothing but faces. He has no image in his head, and he has no schooling in the craft. The faces simply reveal themselves in the wood. He strips the layers of bark away like a surgeon. He unearths the faces from their slumber with the swiftness of his hand.

  One might think that he carves only sad faces, but he does not. He has no control over what he carves. He does not dictate to his chisel. He only follows.

  * * *

  No one knows of his talent. He hides it. It is something that is precious to him, and he fears that it will be taken away. His fingers blister. Callused palms and bleeding skin. But he feels no pain. He feels nothing at all. Nothing except the sensation of wood between his hands.

  The faces carved from the wood become his family. They are eternal and will never die. He wraps them in rags and buries them in the soil. “I won’t abandon you,” he whispers to them as he smooths the earth over their shallow grave. “I promise that I will always return.”

  * * *

  He carves faces of young women and wizened old men. He carves warriors and demons with horns. Yet he uses no pattern. The lines of the wood are his only map, his guide to what he believes is his salvation.

  He believes that he is alone in the world. The image of his mother and father becomes less clear. He can no longer remember the exact curve of his mother’s smile, the precise length of her hair. He tries to recall the pitch of her laughter, the smoothness of her voice.

  She is fading from his memory. He carries only stones in the cavity of his mind. His head is heavy but empty. There are no more colors. The young boy has been consumed. His hands are all that remains. The hands with a rhythm of their own.

  * * *

  One day a priest appears, draped in white linen, his shaved head covered by a hat made of straw. He sees the boy in the distance, his back round as a boulder, his head bowed to his knees.

  He holds his breath and raises his sandals carefully with each step. Peering over the tiny shoulder and craning his neck to get a better view, he discovers a boy carving. The boy is whittling a face out of a block of wood.

  It is not an ordinary face. It is not one that is recognizable to his trained eye. Yet it is extraordinary all the same. It is haunting. It is in the process of being born.

  The planes of the face are smooth and supple. The cheeks gently sloping, the forehead high and round. But it is the eyes, staring wide and wild, that are the most disturbing, bulging pupils and raised lids. It is a face whose spirit cannot be contained.

  The priest is speechless. He has not seen a mask like this in more than thirty years. He feels himself tremble. He feels his fingers tingle and his wrists begin to cramp.

  He too was a carver, a long, long time ago.

  * * *

  He befriends the young boy. At first the boy is frightened and tries to flee. He is like a wild animal feeling threatened by an unfamiliar predator. The priest does not try to follow him. He remains where he first glimpsed the boy carving. He stands there and waits. He waits until the young boy returns.

  “I call myself Tamashii,” the priest says in a solemn voice, “and the forest is my temple. If you will listen, I shall share my story with you. And y
ou might learn something from me.”

  It is a long and complicated story. There are elements that the young boy will not comprehend until years later. The words the priest uses are unfamiliar to him. “Without knowing it,” he tells the boy, “you have entered the world of Noh.”

  * * *

  “Close your eyes,” the priest whispers to the boy, “and I will offer you all that I know.”

  He begins with a story. It is a legend that has been handed down from master to disciple, from actor to actor, from father to son.

  The story begins in the ancient capital of Nara, where the wooden shrines are black with age, where torches illuminate the vestige of the great Bronze Buddha, where deer run wild and eat from the palm of your hand. It is here, in a city that stands as a testament to the past, that the ghosts of emperors roam, that the voices of fallen warriors boast their glory, and that love-struck maidens bemoan their broken hearts. And it is here that the great Pine of Noh still grows.

  They say that over five hundred years ago, an old man performed a dance under the crooked boughs of the Yogo Pine, a tree that grows at the base of the Kasuga shrine. They say that this man danced in such a way that he awed the people into silence. His limbs floated like wings, his feet slid like sleighs, and his hands extended before him like small paper fans. They say that through his dance he ceased being a man, a divine spirit possessed him, and the gods directed his movements. They say that through his dance he was briefly transformed.

  And centuries later the great pine still stands. Its trunk still twists, and its branches still blossom from Nara’s ancient soil. And on every Noh stage it has since been painted. For it was beneath the great Yogo Pine that Noh was channeled from the gods in heaven to the humble world of men.