The Mask Carver's Son

by Alyson Richman

  * * *

  “Noh is a dance,” the priest declares. “Noh is a recital of poetry. It is a performance incorporating sound and stage.” But the boy continues to look blank; he continues to be unmoved.

  It is only when he hears the priest whisper, “Noh was created to pacify the troubled dead,” that he hears the message and is forever transformed.

  * * *

  Before the boy ever began to carve, he had heard voices in his head. He saw the whitened corpses of his parents; he heard their piercing shrieks and their wails.

  But the carving has made this all stop. He no longer hears the wails of his parents’ ghosts; he no longer feels the anguish of his guilt.

  Has he placated their tortured spirits through his carving? Has he entered the world of Noh, this esoteric world of transition, where mortals channel the voices of the dead?

  “There are spirits trapped in your masks,” Tamashii tells him. “You are a son of Noh.”

  The priest speaks of Noh as a rare and selective family, saying that it was a privilege to be allowed within its walls.

  “The carver holds the fate of Noh in his hands. Noh begins with a mask, and the mask gives birth to Noh.”

  “The gods have channeled the spirits through your hands, and you in turn infuse the wood with their presence. Only the actor can release them into the world.”

  Tamashii breaks a branch from the pine tree that grows behind him. “Consider the forest our stage,” he says as he circles the soil around him. “I will teach you the plays of Zeami. I will describe to you the faces of the stage!”

  * * *

  The boy becomes his disciple. The priest shaves the boy’s head and dresses him in the robes of an ascetic. He teaches him to fear the dead more than the living. He teaches him to love nothing but the wood.

  Within the grounds of the monastery, the two live in a makeshift hut built from bamboo and straw. Every morning after their ablutions, they carve. They do not stop for meals; they barely speak between themselves. They simply carve until their hands cease to move, till their chisels cease to meet the wood.

  The boy consumes the wood; the craft consumes the boy.

  “We are driven by our ghosts,” Tamashii tells him.

  “I feel nothing when I carve,” the boy confides in the priest.

  “To be in a state of unawareness is the highest goal for a carver,” whispers the master, his voice already lost in the wind.

  * * *

  The boy’s addiction to the wood can be easily explained. When he carves, he feels no pain, he hears no voices, he sees no ghosts. He is no longer shackled to the mortal world. His mission is to appease the troubled dead.

  He need not study models to learn the traditional attributes of Noh masks, as almost all other carvers do. He simply closes his eyes and listens to Tamashii describe each play and its characters. He simply has to glance at him as he carves the Ko Omote mask, the Okina mask, and the countless other faces of the theater. He was born with a gift. He is a son of Noh.

  * * *

  They do not speak of the past. They do not share the weight of their guilt. They share only their meals and their wood. They are outcasts, bound to their only family, the family of Noh.

  Tamashii does not reveal his own troubled past until the boy is much older. He does not speak of his exile until he lies on his deathbed, his hoary face white with death. “Come closer,” he says, his voice dry with pain. “You must know it is through you that I have finally appeased my master.”

  He tells the boy of his life before the priesthood. He tells him of how as a young boy he was the prized apprentice of the carver Mitsuzane. He tells of his betrayal.

  “As a young apprentice, my talent for carving was spotted early on by Mitsuzane and eventually he had me carving many of the masks which were commissioned to him. I was ordered never to reveal that I had carved these masks. I was instructed to carve my master’s seal into their underside and pass these masks on to the theater as if they were his.

  “I carved many such masks, but I grew weary of receiving no recognition of my own. One day I stopped imitating his seal exactly. I devised a way in which only I could tell who had carved the mask.”

  Tamashii’s voice is now barely a whisper.

  “Should you ever find a Mitsuzane mask. Look at the seal that reads ‘Deme Mitsuzane’ If the me character extends further on the right, it is mine!”

  Tamashii smiles up at his pupil. Death is now consuming him from inside. “My master discovered my betrayal, and I have never known greater shame. From that day on, I was banished and sent away with a curse.”

  And so the master tells his student what had been his master’s last words to him. He tells the boy he should never become tangled in the world of emotions. “It will only ruin you,” the priest warns. “Learn from me. Have no ego and avoid emotion. Such worldly burdens have the power to destroy your craft!”

  But he is not finished. Death has not devoured him yet. He lifts his frail head from the straw pillow and with great desperation insists, “It is essential, Ryusei, that you be formally adopted into one of the great Kanze families. You belong to the Kanze school, as that was the school of my master.” He pauses in an attempt to regain his voice. “A carver needs the official backing of a school. It is imperative that you receive their support. Go forth, Ryusei. Go forth and show them your masks!”

  * * *

  The boy, now a man, does not cry at his master’s death. “Life is fleeting, Noh is eternal,” echoes the voice of his master. “Spare yourself pain and never become attached to anything but the wood.”

  These words are difficult to abide by, but his master spoke the truth. His masks will never die. He is their creator. They are a family that will never leave.

  He builds a coffin of pine. He does not carve the exterior with flourishes, he does not adorn the coffin with symbols. He simply incises his master’s seal on the lid’s center. Without tears, without a eulogy, he returns Tamashii to the earth, to sleep with the roots of the trees, to rest his days of eternity at the base of a bending pine.

  * * *

  He brings his masks to the Kanze theater, where the actors are awed. “Go to our patriarch, Kanze Yamamoto Yuji,” they all agree. “Go and show him your masks.”

  He travels the next day to the theater, his masks tied in furoshiki, his wooden children tucked warmly underneath his arms. He unwraps them under Grandfather’s watchful eyes, he reveals that which has come from him.

  Words do not come easy to him. But he need not speak in support of his masks. The masks speak for themselves. He offers them to the great patriarch with the extension of his marble hands, and presses his forehead to the tatami floor.

  He sees their magic revealed in the cupping of the famous actor’s hands. He feels the ghost of Tamashii smiling at the mention of my mother’s name. He bows reverently to my grandfather’s request that he visit his home. The priest has spoken the truth. He is a son of Noh.

  THREE

  Wait until you see his hands!” Grandfather called out excitedly to Grandmother from behind his dressing screen.

  Grandmother was busy in the kitchen and could not discern the exact words of her husband. She put down her long chopsticks, took her pot off the flame, and went to see what he was saying.

  He stood there basking in the light of his discovery, his legs slightly apart, his stomach puffing through his yukata, his palms resting on his forearms.

  “I have found a man that I believe is suitable for Etsuko to marry,” he told her, his red face beaming.

  Grandmother looked at him, wild with excitement and brimming with plans. She fell silent, her eyes locked to the floor.

  * * *

  He stood staring at his wife for a moment, as she had the capacity to move him deeply. He would never tell her this, however, for that would make him appear ridiculously sentimental
. Seeing her stand before him, quiet as a squirrel, brought him comfort. She supported his every wish. She had been his wife for almost thirty-three years and, in his days of joy, had borne him a lovely daughter and, in his days of sadness, borne him a stillborn son.

  He disliked thinking about his son. It only revealed wounds that could never heal. While his wife’s despair manifested itself in weeping, his had revealed itself in anger. He lashed out at the gods with an angry fist and challenged them with the volume of his voice. It was unfair that his son not be allowed a single breath on this earth. It was unjust that the Yamamoto family be denied an heir.

  He had watched as his wife, wrapped in blankets and her hair matted to her face, cried until her eyes swelled shut. Their son’s face in death appeared identical to hers wrought in grief, both pairs of eyes pink, sealed, and raw, both pairs of cheeks whiter than mountain snow.

  He preferred to remember how beautiful she had been when they first met. The vision of her kneeling at the base of the stage, her slender arms extended before her, searching the ground for her missing comb. If he closed his eyes, he had the ability to be transported back in time.

  “What are you looking for?” he had asked her as he descended the stairs of the main platform more than thirty years before. He had just finished one of his first rehearsals at the Daigo theater.

  “I have lost one of my combs,” she said shyly, lifting one arm to contain the section of fallen hair.

  “Let me help you,” he replied. He watched her as she smiled up at him, her pale cheeks blushing with embarrassment.

  After searching for a few minutes, he turned to her and asked why she did not simply redo her bun using the remaining combs in her hair.

  “It is so long that it requires nine combs to secure it above my head. Anything less will cause it to tumble.” She giggled and her laugh was soft, nervous, and feminine.

  He thought her charming. He thought her innocent. And in his heart he knew that one day this woman would be his wife.

  He courted her for months. He gazed for hours at her perfectly round face. Her skin as translucent as gossamer silk, her eyes like two shining stones. When he lay in his futon, the night separating their bodies, he could imagine each peak and plateau of her cheekbone, each thread of her eyelash.

  Theirs was a love marriage. Their union, rare and precious, defied custom because their parents had not introduced them or arranged for them to marry. Instead, the sacred walls of the theater had cloistered them, led them to each other.

  In his sleepless nights, her sweet melodic voice would come to him, whispering into his heart the words of the ancient Heian poem: “If not for you, then for whom shall I undo my hair?”

  He ached. He yearned. He envisioned himself swept into the blue-black sea of her hair. When he performed on the stage, with the mask veiling his eyes, he searched for her in the audience. She was there, as promised, with her mother sitting beside her fragile frame. The kimono bound her straight, her head cocked toward the stage. She allowed her body and soul to separate for those three hours. Her ears opened to the sounds of her father’s drum, and her heart to the magic of my young grandfather.

  * * *

  The afternoon his family and he traveled to Grandmother’s home to ask her parents for her hand in marriage, he was so nervous that perspiration seeped into his undergarments. He tried to comfort himself that he had nothing to worry about; it was a family alliance that benefited both parties.

  Both he and his wife, Chieko, had been born into established Noh families. Although they specialized in different areas of that segmented world, they were forever tied by the same traditions. His father was an actor, as his father’s father had been, as had those before him. The Yamamoto line could be traced back nearly seven hundred years, a time when his ancestors performed Gagaku for the imperial court.

  Her family, by contrast, contained a long line of musicians. For three hundred years her ancestors had played the otsuzumi, the hip drum that accented the Noh actors’ chants on stage. Each child born to that family, his wife included, contended that the beating of the drum was the first sound they ever heard. They believed they heard it through their mother’s womb, that the walls reverberated with each beat, and that the rhythm was born into their veins.

  During the brief and fleeting moments of their courtship, when they found the time and privacy to meet, he would produce a small otsuzumi from the folds of his robe and playfully tease her by pounding the skin of the drum. She in return would pull up the hem of her kimono, only an inch or two above the ankle, circle round him, and slide her sandals over the earth as if to imitate the movements of a Noh actor. In her mirth, she would feel compelled to cover her mouth, as the force of her laughter would pry her budding lips open and expose her flash of white teeth. Grandfather, however, was always relieved that she chose to continue dancing for him, rather than surrendering to a silly rule of hiding her smile.

  As her combs loosened and the tresses of liquid black hair fell down her back, he beat the drum harder and faster. He pounded the drum until they both fell to the earth, their bodies exhausted from releasing such an uncontainable amount of joy.

  * * *

  Her family accepted his proposal of marriage. “It is with great pleasure that we give our daughter to your family in marriage,” her father said, his head lowered in a courteous bow. “It is a strong union that will fortify our families as well as the theater.”

  The two families exchanged gifts in the traditional Yuino ceremony to show their support of the marriage. They sat across from each other, each family offering their gifts on exquisite black lacquered trays. Grandfather’s family gave envelopes of money. Grandmother’s family gave a beautiful spice set comprising five porcelain jars covered in a deep purple lacquer with the Yamamoto crest painted in red and gold. In addition, her family made a promise to provide the new couple with furniture: two tansu chests, a zushi-dana, a writing cabinet made from the finest paulownia wood, and an entire set of lacquerware.

  It was May and the house had been opened up to the garden. Outside, the cherry blossoms danced for the young couple’s happiness. Behind the shoji, Grandmother clasped her kimono in an attempt to contain her excitement. Her face glowed like a paper lantern.

  * * *

  The woman who now stood before Grandfather was but a distant memory of that young girl. Her beauty had faded, but she was still handsome. She had long since cut her hair. Now she only required two combs. The color was no longer the blackest black, but streaked with rivers of gray. In her middle age she began to use powder, as her skin had begun to bruise in patches below her eyes and at her temples. Her body seemed to shrink, and her eyes became less clear.

  After the death of their son, nearly fifteen years before, she had ceased to laugh. And now, as his wife approached her forty-third year, he detected that her shoulders had begun to slope and her back was beginning to bend forward. Like the great pine always painted on the Noh stage, her body twisted and her outside had begun to show the lines of age. Yet even though she had never given him a male heir, he still loved her. She remained a sacred and eternal part of his life.

  * * *

  The warm winter sunlight penetrated the rice-paper skin of the window. Grandfather stood there, his lungs inflating his size, the golden light illuminating his face. A tremendous amount of satisfaction flowed through his magnificent frame. He had found for his daughter a suitable marriage prospect as well as a distinguished candidate for an adopted son. He relished his sense of accomplishment. Now his only concern was how his wife and daughter would receive the news.

  “Yesterday a young mask carver by the name of Enchi Ryusei came to my studio,” he confided to his wife.

  “Enchi?” she asked, her gaze rising from the floorboards and settling on her husband’s carefully knotted sash.

  “Yes,” Grandfather confirmed the name once more.

  “I a
m not familiar with that family name. Is he a carver for the Kongo school?” she questioned softly.

  “He has studied under a monk whose name and school are unimportant. What is important is that he possesses the greatest talent I have seen in a carver.”

  “Really?” She appeared intrigued, because her husband rarely showered compliments on anyone. “But if he studied under a monk, he comes not from a family of carvers. Were they at all involved with Noh?”

  “His parents died when he was a child, and I did not inquire of their background. He is thirty-three. He is not homely and he is not ill-bred. Above all, he possesses great talent, and I believe he will be the most famous mask carver this century will ever see. He is the next Mitsuzane. And with no family of his own, he will surely be proud to adopt our prestigious Yamamoto name.”

  With those words she fell quiet. The son I could never give you, she thought, her heart shrinking like oak leaves under a flame.

  “It is Etsuko’s feelings of which I am unsure. Has she ever mentioned anyone to you? Do you know if she has feelings for another, or what her marital aspirations are? We do have a few eligible men in the theater who could also suit her, although their potential for success is not as great as I believe Ryusei’s to be.”

  She looked at her husband, proud and radiant, his mind swimming with the thoughts of having discovered this young man.

  “I know of no other,” she said.

  But she told me later that she had lied.

  * * *

  My grandmother was capable of great love and enormous guilt. She carried both of these like a woven iron rope around her heart. Without either, she would probably have been carried away by the wind, as she was as ethereal as the heavens and carried no other allegiances than those of her family and those concerning the ways of Noh. She loved her daughter, but despised herself for wishing my mother were a son.

  She was not envious of her daughter’s beauty, as some mothers are. On the contrary, she lavished attention on the child. They would both enter the bathhouse together. Grandmother would carry in her wooden caddy three scrubbing brushes made from fastidiously polished pine and bristles of wild boar, a pot of ground azuki beans, and a balm made of soybean and almond blossom. She would scrub Mother’s back with the azuki paste, circling the grains over her skin with the pine brushes, and rinse her down with a bucket of cool water and the sweeping of her hand. As her daughter became a young woman, she would chide her affectionately, “Concentrate on the elbows, the knees,” she would say. “And don’t forget the balls of your feet.” After their bath, they would rub camellia oil on their hair and smooth the soybean and almond blossom balm over their glistening limbs.