The Mask Carver's Son

by Alyson Richman

  But now, crying in the arms of the man my mother was forced to marry, was I, the grandson. The much anticipated heir who had arrived under the greatest sacrifice.

  Father held me in his arms, but no warmth could be detected in his embrace. He looked at my newborn head: my features shriveled, my skin a mottled mixture of pink and blue, my eyes and mouth oozing with newborn wetness, and at that moment, all his fears and anxieties were confirmed. He believed that all he touched and hoped to love was cursed, for even my image in infancy echoed his haunting memories; I was another poison plum.

  He should have given me up. I am sure he thought that often during the earlier years of my childhood. He should have left me to my grandparents. They had wanted a son so desperately that they had taken my father as their own. He slept in their house, ate at their table, and adopted their name. But, later, it was I who they considered their own. To my grandfather I was a true Yamamoto; the blood that flowed through my veins was his, red and strong.

  But, to everyone’s surprise, Father insisted on raising me.

  “Let us take him,” Grandfather implored. “You are still young enough to remarry.”

  “I will never remarry,” he replied, almost taking offense at Grandfather’s suggestion.

  Father had taught himself to carve on the ume-ki, the very plum wood whose fruit had killed his parents. The fruit had brought him misery; the wood had brought him fame. He did not know what his son would bring him. But he believed that I was his burden to bear.

  Perhaps my father’s actions were admirable; perhaps they were plainly selfish. Of this, I am still unsure. I am, however, certain of this: it was I who fought for eighteen hours not to be born, not to be given to a father whose expectations I could never fulfill. For my birth coincided with the birth of a new era, and as I would later discover, my artistic calling was in sharp contrast to those of my ancestors.

  * * *

  I have heard that my mother’s death nearly destroyed my father. Grandmother once told me: “Had your father not had the support of the wood, he surely would have died. It was the only thing that could heal his wounds. The only thing that could absorb his silent, bleeding heart.”

  But much like a tourniquet, it stopped all feeling.

  After Mother’s burial, he walked up to his studio and shut the door. No longer did he sleep in the room he had shared with her; now he slept on the sawdust floor, beside the masks he carved by blade. He refused to eat his meals with his in-laws, requesting that they leave only a bowl of rice and a jug of water outside his door.

  They did not know what faces he carved. They did not know how many masks cluttered his shelves. They only knew that he carved from dawn to dusk. I, the newborn babe, was put to sleep in the room where my grandparents slept, and according to Grandmother the hum of my father’s saw was the only sound that lulled me to sleep.

  * * *

  Nearly fourteen days after my mother’s death, my father walked down the stairs.

  “Forgive me,” he muttered. “I am in need of a cup of tea.”

  Grandmother stood in shock for what seemed like minutes, she told me. The man who stood before her now was as gray as a ghost, his skin ashen.

  Clutched tight to his side he held in his right hand a shard of wood. Had he been thirty years younger, he would have appeared identical to the image of himself as a young boy after the death of his parents.

  She told me he grasped the wood so firmly that the skin around his knuckles betrayed his bones. The flesh under his eyes had slackened, his cheeks sunken like two valleys. He stood there, a man deflated. That which had existed underneath his skin had been consumed.

  When Grandmother asked him if he would like to hold his child, his first instinct was to decline. His son, his heir, lay in a long basket lined with white cloth, crying for an embrace.

  “He is your son,” she told him, her voice suddenly firm, “and, Ryusei, you have told us that you wish to raise him. How, may I ask, do you intend to rear a child you are incapable of holding?” For the first time in her life she seemed to reveal her anger.

  “I do not wish to betray my son with an embrace,” he replied vacantly.

  “What ever do you mean?”

  “Should I raise him to depend on me, to love me, as I let myself love his mother, when I die he will only feel betrayed. Should I raise him to love nothing but the wood, that which he will know will never leave him.”

  He paused. His body felt heavy and dead around him. He would now live his life and rear me as his master Tamashii had urged him.

  “Your son needs to know that he has a family that cares for him!” she cried.

  He looked at her, his eyes suddenly aflame. “My child needs only to know that he is a son of Noh!”

  With those words, Grandmother fell silent. There were certain boundaries that she knew were forbidden to trespass. This was one.

  “But, Ryusei,” she said, her frustration curling inside her like a snake, “your son has no name.”

  “I’m so tired, I can hardly think of such things.” He brought his long white hand over his brow and sought the support of the banister.

  “I am afraid that you have little time. By law, we must name him by the fourteenth day after his birth.”

  He stood there for several moments.

  “Call him Kiyoki,” he told her finally. “Use the Chinese characters kiyo meaning ‘pure’ and ki meaning ‘wood.’”

  “Yamamoto Kiyoki?” she asked, trying to disguise her disapproval. In her mind she had always hoped that he would let her choose my name. She would have chosen something stronger and more lyrical like Shotaro, with the characters meaning “shining first,” or Zenkichi, meaning “the very luckiest of names.”

  “Kiyoki is a fine name!” he said. “He should have a name that evokes the strength of wood and the purity of his mother! Those are the two forces from which he was born.”

  Grandmother fell silent again. The son-in-law who had become her adopted son by law was a difficult man to comprehend. There were so many opposing forces enshrined within him. She had seen him fall in love with her daughter right before her very eyes. He had arrived at their house as stiff as a wooden doll, but over the months spanning her daughter’s pregnancy, he appeared to have been transformed. His gaze softened, his touch no longer sounded like the dropping of lumber. She believed he had changed. That love had penetrated a heart that had petrified long ago.

  She had not anticipated that death would propel him back to his original state. She would have never guessed that a young man could grow ancient in a day. But here he was, standing before her. Had she never met him before, she would have mistaken him for a mountain pilgrim, hoary as the snow.

  Undoubtedly, her daughter’s passing had a severe impact on her, too. She held herself personally responsible for her death. Had the gods been so vengeful that they would not overlook her mistake with the hairpins? Had her own criteria for a husband been so strict that she could not have divulged to her husband that she suspected Etsuko had burgeoning affections for another?

  Guilt consumed her. Now that my mother was gone, Grandmother could no longer escape the realization of how selfish she had been.

  She could not deny her self-loathing. She knew on the surface that she appeared the dutiful wife. She spoke to her husband only when he addressed her, she maintained a large and beautiful home and ensured that she, her husband, and Etsuko were always dressed appropriately. The death of her son, however, had affected her deeply, and perhaps that had been the turning point in her life, when she realized that there were some obligations for which she was responsible and others that she could never control. Etsuko had become her extension. Perhaps, even before her daughter’s death, Grandmother knew in her heart that it wasn’t fair to expect her daughter to sacrifice herself, her dreams, her love.

  But her husband so desperately wanted a son. Th
is mask carver was the perfect solution. That which they believed would fill in the missing pieces of their family. And when they heard that Etsuko was with child, oh, how they had rejoiced! Once again her husband and she had thought only of themselves. The child was to be a boy. They felt it in their veins. They believed that the gods would reward them for the losses they had endured.

  How gravely they were wrong.

  She could not help but consider herself responsible. The omens were there but she refused to see their fate. She feared upsetting her husband and, even worse, feared upsetting the fulfillment he gleaned from having another male in the household. Foolishly, she believed that if she supported the union of the mask carver and her daughter, her husband would no longer look at her as the wife who had failed to give him a son.

  Now, however, as she stared at my father, she came to realize the impact of her mistakes. She found her shoulders beginning to slope even lower and what black was left in her hair succumbing to gray. Yet from the distance of the corner six-mat room where she now slept, she was awakened by my cries.

  SEVEN

  I was my grandmother’s child for a time. Hers completely. The two males of the family coexisted under the blackened rafters of the old house, each in his own mind anxious for the day when I would be old enough to be initiated into the world of Noh. Grandfather imagined the day when I would be old enough to appreciate the theater and the craft of both him and his peers. Father, the day when I would pick up my first chisel and come to love the wood.

  But Grandmother loved me as if I were her own. Her own children lost to her, I became the only living connection she had with her daughter.

  So she raised me as if she were starting anew. In a world where she tried to shield me from the burden of my birth. To love me as she wished she had loved Mother. Without imposing the contagious notion of sacrifice.

  In my infant years I was treated like a young prince. I was weaned on ox milk and washed in water steeped in Manchurian violets and Chinese bell flower. My swaddling clothes were made from the threads of silkworms, harvested after weeks of feeding from a diet limited solely to mulberry leaves and yellow rape blossoms. Grandmother constructed my crib from thatched dried suzudama stalks and cushioned its interior with soft gauze pillows. And as if to ensure my safety, she pinned a tiny ornament of jizo, the god of protection, to my underclothes and embroidered a tiny version of the family crest to drape over the canopy of my cradle.

  She swore she would never offend the gods again.

  Thirty-one days after my birth, as dictated by tradition, I was placed in the center of my grandmother’s obi, tied in silk, and taken to the local temple. This ceremony, the Hatsumairi was my first journey outside the home. And as the custom specifies, the males of the family followed Grandmother as she carried me, the child, in front, secured ever so safely by the tightness of her sash.

  Both Grandfather and Father wore black and slid their sandals silently as they walked behind us. Neither wished to pay his respects to the Gods, as both were angered by their loss.

  Father had lost love, and Grandfather had lost his link with his last surviving child. And of these two great losses I dare not judge whose loss was greater.

  Grandmother dropped a few drops of water from a bamboo ladle onto my infant fists and then carried me up to the great altar where incense clouded the air. She stared at the flicker of candles; she bent her knees and bowed her head.

  And it was there she thought she saw a vision of Mother nestled under the swollen calves of Buddha. Cloaked in the white of a pilgrim, hooded like a bride, she slept.

  She turned to her husband, her face as pale as the robe of the priest who passed behind the altar, “Do you see anything at the base of the Buddha?” she asked.

  He looked at her strangely and shook his head to show he did not know what she saw. But as his gaze fell on that of his new grandson, he noticed how the small child extended his hands toward the bronze statue, how the child’s eyes widened, transfixed.

  “I do not see what you see, Chieko,” he told her, “but perhaps the child does.”

  Looking down at me, she saw the top of my forehead grow pale, cast by the light of the tall temple tapers, my small, plump hands reaching toward the sagging belly of the statue.

  He sees her too, she thought to herself as a warmth flowed through her body. It never occurred to her, however, that another person besides her husband might have seen her as well.

  For she did not see Father, or perhaps even think of him, as he stood there motionless behind her. But he saw more than either of us. Mother. The image of his lost love. Transparent as wet cotton. Floating toward him and then evaporating in midair.

  EIGHT

  One of the first things I learned from Grandmother was that when spirits of the dead wished to visit the mortal world, they often used the bodies of small children to reveal their lost souls. “Before the age of seven the spirits can enter and leave you at any time,” she said to me one night as she placed the coverlet beneath my chin. “So we must take care of you.” She looked down at me with her sad black eyes. “You are your mother’s shrine.”

  I grew up believing those words. That my mother lived inside me. That I was a vessel for her soul.

  My dreams, I believe, were unlike those of most young children. Colorful and rare. Mother would appear like poured liquid, suspended by air, her robes a blurred lavender. I would see her, and she would lean down and touch me with the sweep of her hand, create a cradle from the weaving of her thick black hair.

  When I awakened, I would tell Grandmother, “I have seen her! She has come,” and she would kneel by my futon and hold me so close that I could feel her ribs. Her small nose pressed into the sprout of my hair, her arms tightening with each of her breaths.

  I often wondered, as I grew older, if in his dreams Father saw her too. I never believed he dreamed wooden dreams cast forever in brown. But had he seen her, reached out in a half-awakened state to touch her, his fingers would merely have grasped the air. And he would certainly have have had no one there to hold him when he realized, as he collapsed in the shadows of those dark nights, how truly deep was his despair.

  NINE

  There were certain things that my grandmother knew she could not protect me from. Things that were chosen for me before I was born. For she had witnessed her husband’s declaration and my father’s reaffirmation: I was to be a son of Noh.

  Originally she did not think anything of the decision. She had expected such. That was how the Yamamoto family had lived for centuries. Emperors had strained their ears to hear my ancestors’ melodies, Shogunates had fought to be patrons of our troupes. She herself would have preferred that I grow to be an actor like Grandfather. Proud and stately. A man who commanded respect. The great patriarch to whom she was wed.

  But her husband had deferred, promising even before I had my first breath, that I be a mask carver like my father. It hadn’t pleased the gods as much as he had hoped. But at last he was given an heir.

  She confessed that she wondered in private what kind of child I would develop into. Which part of me was stronger, my mother’s “purity” or my father’s “wood.” She had vowed to make sure I would not become encased by the wood, as her son-in-law had sworn. She felt it was her duty to her daughter to ensure that, despite my future vocation, I would always know love.

  When she called me by name, she often dropped the last character of my name and just called me “Kiyo.” The character for ki would vanish at the tip of her tongue, and she would concentrate on the character that symbolized the image of my mother. For she secretly hoped that I’d be pure, like her. But when the time came, she would not expect me to sacrifice myself, as her daughter had done.

  For, in a Buddhist world, she believed, there were certain wrongs that must be righted. And that the wishes of the dead must always precede those of the living. Even if those who were living
were male.

  TEN

  I have always believed that it was my destiny to become a painter, as I have a tremendous talent for memorizing images, and less strength for remembering words. I can tell you with ease the first time I saw crimson, yet struggle to recall your name. I do know, however, that some of my first memories—the ones that come with ease and great vibrancy—are not the ones of my father and his masks but rather those of my grandfather and his stage.

  Although I was no more than a mere child at the time—perhaps I was five, as it was the year I began wearing a hakama—I can still recall walking through the forest, treading the carefully groomed pathway to the formidable Kanze theater. Its wooden hood loomed. The pine baseboards gleamed. I can remember with great clarity pointing to the twisting pine tree painted on the backboard of the stage and questioning my grandmother: “Who was responsible for putting it there?”

  “It has always been there,” Grandmother replied, indirectly trying to explain to me one of the cardinal principles of Noh philosophy.

  “Yes, Grandma,” I insisted, “but someone must have painted it.”

  “You are right, Kiyoki, but the name of the artist is not as important as the image that he has painted. In this case, the pine is a symbol of Noh’s eternity.”

  I remember being disappointed by her explanation. I remember wanting to know who was responsible for painting the enormous tree with its twisting boughs and flourishes of green. I thought to myself, If I know it is my Grandfather who is responsible for making the mask come alive, and it is my Father who is responsible for carving the mask, why should I not know whose hand was responsible for creating the great pine?

  The question haunted me, and had Grandmother’s explanation been more intriguing, perhaps my attitude toward Noh would have been different. Aside from the splendor of the costumes and the beating of the drums, Noh was incomprehensible to me.