The Mask Carver's Son

by Alyson Richman

“I believe it is far easier for a woman to learn to love her husband than it is for a man to learn to love his wife,” Grandfather had told him before his wedding day. “I know my daughter, Ryusei, and I know that she will learn to love you.” Father remained skeptical, convincing himself that their marriage was acceptable because it fulfilled desires within both parties outside the world of love. But as much as he knew he should avoid all feeling for the material world—one of his master’s strictest rules—he could not help being captivated by its enticing powers.

  He knew his wife was particularly fond of the love poems of Ono no Komachi. Those words of a woman who cannot sleep, whose love burns inside her like an inextinguishable flame, how they captivated him too! Only in his most fanciful dreams could he imagine his wife ever feeling that way toward him.

  He recognized in himself that he appeared staid, almost passionless. Yet he had been told that his masks had the capacity to move audiences to tears and the finest actors to cries of awe. His spirit was in each and every one of those masks, infused with what he could never convey with words. He worried that his wife could not recognize that. Would she always think of him as just a man of the wood?

  * * *

  Despite her initial resignation, Mother did learn to love the man who was chosen for her. And perhaps that made the remainder of Father’s life all the more painful. For eventually she grew to love him deeply.

  As no one else ever did.

  Her love for him grew slowly, beginning almost as an abstraction. Undoubtedly, Mother loved that which gave joy to her family. In the beginning, her feelings toward her husband were defined by a sense of duty. For now she had given her parents a sense of completion in their old age. Her father seemed to breathe a new zest for life now that he had a male companion in the house. The family dinners were now convivial, unlike the quiet meals of her childhood, which had become the norm after the death of her brother. Grandfather’s eyes sparkled, as they hadn’t in years, enjoying the entirely new set of ears to which he could tell his colorful stories. Grandmother’s body began to relax slightly as her daughter assumed the chores of head female of the household. With great anticipation and happiness they began the next stages of their life.

  When Mother announced that she had forgone two consecutive monthly defilements, the response to the news was overwhelming. She had never seen her parents more filled with joy.

  Grandmother walked over to her daughter’s side and gently kissed her blushing cheek. “Your father and I are so happy for you,” she whispered. In her heart she prayed that the child would be healthy and male—the two things that had evaded her own family.

  Grandfather raised his cup of sake and toasted my health, the heir to the Yamamoto name.

  “Soon I will have a grandson,” he declared, upon rising from the low table. He seemed to believe that since the gods had denied him a son, they would smile on his good deed of having adopted the lonely mask carver, and now bestow on him the grandson he so passionately craved. He knew it would be selfish for him to insist that the boy be raised to be an actor, and so, to appease the gods with one more selfless act, he added to his toast: “And as it is with so much pride and joy that I look upon this day, I hope that my grandson will live to become as great a mask carver as his father!” He lowered his gaze to Father and raised his cup. “With great anticipation do I look forward to the day that Mother and I can bestow on him his first set of chisels.”

  Father, slightly overwhelmed by all of the emotion that was flowing through the room, managed to awkwardly raise his cup and acknowledge Grandfather’s toast. His wife had told him the night before that she suspected she was with child and he had received the news with mixed emotions. Certainly he was thrilled with the thought of creating his own family, perhaps he truly was no longer bound to the wood. It had never occurred to him that he might have the power to create a human life. For the past thirty years of his life he had felt almost nonhuman. Neither a man nor a ghost. Perhaps something in between, a man made of wood.

  Now there was a life growing inside the womb of his wife that he was partly responsible for. Another person to protect. Another person who must be sheltered from the clawing vines of death.

  He allowed his wife to place his hands on her stomach. So that he might feel the heartbeat, my heartbeat. So that he might feel the difference between flesh and wood.

  Her stomach was still as flat as a tablet. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine their child being formed from each of the fibers in my mother’s womb, a process so different from his craft. Within that warm, carefully cushioned shrine that contained the cells of generations of tradition and talent, I would be created.

  He remembered the eyes of his father and how his life had seemed to begin at the hour when he arrived home. When his eyes fell upon those of his wife and those of his sons. His family.

  With each passing day Father found it easier to imagine himself in his newfound role. His masks became less interesting to him compared to his family. Perhaps Tamashii had never known such joy, I believe Father thought to himself as he searched for reasons why his master so strongly advised against an emotional life. Perhaps his life was filled only with sadness. But perhaps Father believed, for the first time, that he could triumph where his master had failed. Over sadness. Over death.

  The first thing he did after Mother announced her pregnancy was forbid her to eat plums. “They are no good for you or the baby,” he told her, gently sweeping one from her hand as she sat in the garden one day, her hair loosely tied in a bun.

  “But why, Ryusei?” she asked, puzzled.

  “Hasn’t your father told you?” he asked, equally perplexed that his father-in-law had never divulged the story of his past. “No good can come from them. You must trust me. Promise me your lips will never touch one,” he pleaded. Not wishing to scare his wife with his former misery, he pretended his superstition was grounded in an old wives’ tale he had heard long ago.

  “I promise,” she whispered, looking down at his kneeling form. “I would do anything to ensure our son’s arrival into this world. Anything.”

  As she watched him return to the house, it occurred to her that she had eaten a plum on their wedding day. The night of the child’s conception. She considered whether she should divulge this to her husband. “No need to worry him,” she decided. “It is only a silly old wives’ tale.”

  * * *

  Father’s interest in carving waned over the months of my mother’s pregnancy. It seems she was the only one in the world who had the power to distract him from the wood. The orders for his masks continued to pile up even though the number of performances the theater was producing began to decrease. His masks became almost rarities, limited editions that demanded far higher prices than the theaters could afford.

  “Don’t forget your carving,” Grandfather began reminding him after the family dinners. “The actors in the theater are beginning to wonder if you have given up on your craft.”

  “Don’t worry,” Grandmother comforted him. “It is just the baby’s impending arrival. Once he is born, all will return to normal.”

  “I hope you are right, Chieko,” he sighed with the day’s exhaustion. “It would be a shame to let a talent like his go to waste.”

  * * *

  Mother, however, enjoyed the attention that her husband lavished upon her. Never in her most colorful dreams had she imagined that he would be so attentive to her. Although he seemed uninterested in lovemaking, his hands would find themselves on her expanding belly. Like a blind man, he would trace the gentle rounding, the sloping that began beneath her breasts and then gently merged with her thighs. At night he would thread his fingers through her hair, gently caress her cheekbones, her eyelids, the soft line of her lips. As if to memorize her.

  Indeed, she began to believe he truly loved her, and subsequently her love for him blossomed. No longer did she feel that she was preparing h
is meals or attending to his needs only out of a wifely duty. Now she truly desired to make him happy.

  His sweetness grew. He spent less time carving and more time at her side. When he did carve, he often called for her to come and see something he had just completed.

  On one day in particular, he asked her to come to his studio. When she arrived, an exquisite female mask rested on a piece of silk cloth.

  “It is you, Etsuko,” he whispered to her as she knelt beside him, the strips of cypress curling under her knees.

  She recognized the mask as the beautiful Ko Omote mask. White as rice powder. Lips as demure as a doll’s.

  He placed the mask in her outstretched palms.

  “I have made her for you, my wife,” he said, almost shyly.

  Mother remained silent. She knew that if anyone could interpret her lack of words, it would be her husband.

  “She is you and you are she,” he said, pointing to the mask.

  Deeply moved, tears beginning, she turned the mask over to examine the lines of the carver. Her husband.

  The strokes were deep. Lines like furrows. Channels that wound in a pattern almost too complex to convey. It was now she truly saw him for the first time, not as she had seen him when they first met, when she was limited to the masklike quality of his face. Now she saw beyond it.

  “You have shown me your soul, my darling,” she said, her words almost lost in her sobs.

  He placed his hand on her shoulder and he knew that he probably appeared clumsy. But, for the first time in their marriage, that did not bother him. He knew she now saw him for what he was. A man far deeper than the wood.

  * * *

  According to Grandmother, by her seventh month, Mother’s stomach was as large as a small bear. She carried all of her weight in the front, which grew so large that, when she walked, her back seemed lost in its perpetual arching and her shoulders pushed even farther behind.

  Every morning, however, she continued to rise to prepare her husband’s breakfast. She never tired of heating the pails of water for his bath, no matter how great the strain. It seemed as though each of them had finally discovered what the other needed.

  In the last month of my mother’s pregnancy, she announced that she would like to make a trip to Kiyomizu-dera in order to pray for my entrance into the world and buy a blessed anzan o-mamori charm from one of the priests. Grandmother insisted that the three-hour journey from Daigo to the temple would be too exhausting.

  “I must go,” she said obstinately. “Ryusei will accompany me. We will visit the inner shrine, Jishu Jinya, the shrine of the love rocks. We will pray together and ask Ubugami to look over our child. It is the only way.”

  Her parents lowered their eyes, knowing they could not argue.

  “Are you sure you feel up to such an arduous journey, Etsuko?” Father asked with concern.

  “I am sure. Please do not worry. Seeing the temple and praying to the birth deity will calm my nerves.”

  The three of them looked at her, swollen with my unborn form, and nodded in weak consent.

  The next day Mother, too fragile to be carried by chair men, was placed in the palanquin that had carried her as a bride. Her parents, still concerned that she might damage the child, made one last attempt to dissuade her from making the trip.

  “Thank you, Mother and Father, for your concern, but I will be fine,” she insisted. “My husband and I want to pray for our child together.”

  Grandfather shook his head, and Grandmother clutched her wooden prayer beads. The two of them watched as the carriage took them away.

  * * *

  When they arrived home late that evening, Mother was as pale as the inside of a Chinese guava. Her lips, no longer the pink of lotus blossoms, suddenly white as ash.

  The rains had begun late that afternoon, after they had departed, and they could find no shelter along the way. The roof of the palanquin had collapsed, and Mother lay drenched and covered in thatched straw.

  Wiping her brow with his soaking wet sleeve, Father helped Mother from the carriage. When she proved too weak to stand, he hoisted her weary body in his arms. He cradled her like a child, the anzan o-mamori charm dangling from her hand.

  Grandmother and Grandfather stood in the rain transfixed. They did not flinch even as their silver hair fell like wet grass over their scalps, as their kimonos became so drenched one could see the outlines of their forms. How could it be, they thought, in only eighteen hours’ time, their beautiful child had paled to nothing more than a ghost?

  “Bring her into the center room,” Grandmother ordered. “The braziers are warmest in there.”

  Suddenly, from where she stood, Grandmother noticed a bloodstain expanding from underneath her daughter’s loosened sash. That stain, as bright as fire, spread within seconds over the entire front placket of her kimono. Streaking like bolts of red lightning.

  “I will run for a doctor,” cried Grandfather. “Ryusei, bring her inside!”

  He laid her down on the tatami and brought the brazier closer to her side. He lowered the flame of the lantern, untying the sash of his own kimono, covering her belly so she would not see her clothes saturated with blood.

  In the few moments that transpired before the quilts were brought to him, he held her face in the gentle basin of his palms. He pushed back the damp locks of her hair. He whispered into her ear all the ancient love poems she had held so dear.

  My face white as Fujiyama betrays my red, red heart.

  On my way to Edo, I found your face in the weave of my sleeve.

  When the blankets arrived, he removed her wet robes, like a mother changing the soiled clothes of her baby. He dabbed her sweating brow with a cloth soaked in fragrant tea. He wound his fingers tightly into hers and looked deep into her frightened eyes, never flinching all the while as Grandmother pressed strips of boiled cotton between Mother’s bleeding thighs.

  When his mother-in-law appeared finished, he stood up to retrieve the stack of blankets. Hoping to appear helpful, he placed each warm layer over his ailing bride.

  “Take the fourth off, Ryusei,” Grandmother told him before the blanket had even reached my mother’s chin. “You, if anyone, should know better.”

  He grew pale, realizing his near mistake. “You are right, Mother,” he said wearily. “Indeed, I should.”

  * * *

  When the doctor arrived, my mother had already lost consciousness.

  She had spent her last hours of memory pleading with my father to save their child’s life before her own.

  “Please,” she had begged him. “Save our son.”

  He had not wanted to hear her. She was the one he most wanted in this world. He did not need an heir. He did not need a disciple. All he truly needed was her.

  * * *

  He held her hand even when she no longer had the strength to grasp his fingers. He pressed her smooth wrist to his cheek, inhaled the sweetness of her lips, even when the breaths no longer seemed to come.

  * * *

  When the doctor arrived, he tried to pry the mask carver’s fingers free. My father would not budge.

  “Yamamoto Ryusei-sama,” the doctor insisted. “You must let me attend to your wife.”

  My father lay next to her, his forehead lowered to her brow.

  He heard the doctor’s words, but no more would come from his lips. He only stared.

  It was finally Grandmother who pried his fingers from hers. She never forgot the sight of those two interlocked hands. Laced like two tendrils. Clutching until icy white.

  SIX

  My father’s greatest betrayal was caused by neither his wife nor his former patrons but by me, his son.

  Had my father not believed in magic, perhaps the reality of my birth would not have been as painful. But he was no ordinary man; he created faces that lived on the stage, and he did this all
with the sheer sorcery of his hands. He believed that happiness was owed him for his suffering. But he should have known that the gods do not reward those who believe themselves owed.

  Journeying to Kiyomizu, they had each prayed separately for a son. They rang the temple bell, clapped their hands, bowed their heads, and prayed for my health. But unfortunately they forgot to pray for my mother’s.

  Yes, I was born from the waters of my mother’s blood and in the blue-black darkness of her death.

  “I am not sure we can save her,” the doctor had informed them as he walked to the adjacent room lit with coal. “Her placenta has disengaged.”

  “And the child too?” Grandmother asked.

  “The only chance for survival is if I cut,” he said with resignation.

  All eyes fell onto Father, already collapsed in anguish.

  “Do what you can, Doctor,” said Grandfather.

  And so the doctor did. Carved me out from my mother’s belly, with a small knife, not with a chisel.

  My mother, nothing but an empty gourd, resting on a blood-soaked tatami, her eyes as vacant as two black stones. Her greatest duty fulfilled, she departed without a sound.

  The three of them stood in silence. Grandmother whispered to herself: “I have killed her.” Father thought to himself, Death follows me wherever I go. Neither could speak the thoughts aloud. It was only I, screeching my newborn cries, and Grandfather, who thrust his fist into the bamboo pole of the tokonoma, and cursed the Gods for taking his children, who refused to be muzzled.

  Grandmother looked at me and then at the room where mother lay, her womb ripped to shreds. She remembered the four tortoiseshell hairpins with a shiver. She recalled her last words to her daughter on the day of her o-miai: “When you give your husband a son, you will be free . . . I hope you know a freedom that I have been denied.” And the pain inside her was overwhelming.

  Her daughter lay in the same room where Grandmother had given birth to her stillborn son years before. The room was dark and rank with death, “a cursed room,” as she would later describe it to me. It was there within the claws of the timber that she had first lost her son and now her daughter. She crumpled to the floor.