The Mask Carver's Son

by Alyson Richman

  For as I sat there watching my grandfather perform the role of the shite, the haggard mountain woman, Yamamba, in the play of the same name, I was visually stirred by the richness of the costumes and the intensity of the masks, yet I remained completely unmoved by the poetry of the words. The loud and slow chanting booming from underneath Grandfather’s mask was difficult to understand and unpleasant to my ears. I detested the shrieking of the nokan flute, the incessant beating of the otsuzumi and taiko drums.

  In contrast, the painting of the great pine stirred me. I strained to discern each brushstroke, marveled at the enormous patches of green. Perhaps it was the first painting I saw in person. An image in the second dimension reaching out toward me, pulling me inside its sprays of leaves, clutching me in its thorny spindles. I can still see my restless hands reaching toward its luminous branches, eager to capture the sensation of paint underneath my infant nails.

  At a very early age, it seems, I recognized that I was moved by color and by paint. Sometimes, as was the case with me, we are incapable of changing these passions. They grow inside us like vines. Wrapping around veins and our heart. How much easier my life would have been had my destiny not been written before I was born. That I should love the wood. Had I not been born the mask carver’s son.

  * * *

  Three months prior to my sixth birthday, my grandfather gave to me my first set of chisels. Grandfather and Father sat at either end of the table, their legs carefully crossed, the fabric of their kimonos carefully veiling their knees. I can see my grandmother across from me, her hair lined with gray, her eyelids soft and draping. With great clarity I can see the lacquer plates from our night’s dinner stacked in a slender column and our empty rice bowls pushed to the side. The taste of our Kyoto miso, the sweet saltiness of the broth, tingles at the tip of my tongue. The deep fragrance of the roasted pumpkin and shiso leaves floats through the air. It is as though I can close my eyes and be there once again.

  “This is a special evening,” Grandfather announced proudly. His voice resonated with the confidence of a man accustomed to speaking and remaining unchallenged. The room swelled with each of his breaths. The soft lantern illuminated his whitened brow. Briefly he fastened his eyes on Grandmother, who acknowledged his gaze with a gentle nodding of her head, and then Father, who met the intense gaze of Grandfather, if only for a moment, before lowering his eyes. There was a hush in the room, a pending sense of ceremony.

  Grandfather reached underneath the cloth of his kimono and placed what appeared to be a rolled pouch of leather on the table. With his thick fingers, the knuckles cracked with age, he unfurled the long white cord that bound the supple ox-hide pouch and revealed five gleaming blades.

  “This is your first set of chisels, Kiyoki. They are a gift from your grandmother and me.” He placed his hands on the leather edges and bowed his head slightly. From the side of the table I caught sight of the blue-gray sparkle of the steel. I believe that this was my first memory of seeing the color silver, and I marveled at each of those edges as they sparkled in the moonlight like five radiant swords.

  “Would you like to see them, Kiyoki?” he questioned.

  I nodded my head bashfully and reached for the edge of the leather casing as Grandfather pushed the chisels toward me. I saw Father look at me, and I believe he smiled as I picked up the tsukinomi chisel and caught my reflection in the shining blade.

  Although Father was the carver of the family, he knew the honor of bestowing on me my first set of chisels was not his to give. Such ceremony was reserved for the patriarch, the man who gave him his name and his only semblance of family. Grandfather. As he had promised even before I was born.

  * * *

  Sitting quietly at the table, I remember thinking that, in comparison to Grandfather, Father seemed small.

  Certainly he could not compare in girth. Father’s concavity was foiled by Grandfather’s convexity. The hollow of Father’s cheeks hung whereas Grandfather’s swelled. His stomach retreated whereas Grandfather’s expanded. And then there was Father’s voice. Almost a whisper. A faint, gravelly murmur of words strung out over the smallest breath, forever channeled into the wood. A silent dialogue with his ghosts.

  He smiles and his lips are slightly cracked. With fixed eyes and sloping shoulders, he watches as my small hands grip the smooth wooden handles, blonde with youth. I am surprised at how warm they feel to the touch and how icy cold the steel tips are in comparison. I can barely lift the tools more than a few centimeters from the table. That is how heavy they are to me. Like slender weights, loaded with responsibility. With only one in my tiny palm, I feel as though I can hardly move.

  “Use them well, Grandson,” echoed the voice of Grandfather. Father and he exchange contented glances once more. The two of them need not speak. They have been looking forward to this day since my conception. To them, my destiny was sealed seven years before.

  * * *

  I wore my destiny like a too-tight robe in which I could not breathe. Each thread of fabric was woven by an ancestor, the color chosen by fingers not my own.

  Within weeks of receiving my chisels, I found myself in the forest. Father’s slender form in front of me, his delicately veined eyelids are closed, and he walks with his hands stretched outward, his palms facing the sky. Paper-thin butterflies flutter at his hem.

  He has awaited this time, his time, since the very day of my birth. He will teach me to love nothing but the wood.

  “Kiyoki,” he says, “someday you will be a mask carver like me, and you will be able to see all the world in a single block of wood.”

  His words fall like slices of cypress. Fragments that I learned to interpret since birth. He has taken me into the forest, an earthen stage for my initiation, a place where he too once learned the ways of Noh. I wonder if here he sees the ghost of Tamashii, the father figure who brought him into the world of Noh. Sees his face hovering over him like a mask swaddled in a wig of leaves.

  “Father,” I say, “what am I to do here?”

  He holds the single-sided saw, shimmering in the forest.

  “You will choose your first hinoki tree. From this tree I will teach you to carve.”

  Carve. The Japanese word is horu. And every time Father articulated the word his eyes closed, his lips slightly trembled. It was as though his world suddenly came to a standstill.

  “But, Father, how will I learn to carve? I will never be as fine a carver as you.”

  There is a flurry of leaves falling to the ground. Green. Brown. Yellow. Their edges have curled, and their veins have reddened. Leaves fall over our heads, crowning us. Shadows stretch over soil, like silk on felt. Father and I stand side by side, our reflection emblazoned in a saw.

  “You are my son, Kiyoki. Your hands will lead you, as mine have led me.”

  He extends his hands before him, white fingers as slender as icicles.

  “Choose your tree, Kiyoki,” he utters once more.

  All around me the forest looms vast as an ocean. I cannot distinguish a cypress from a cedar, a juniper from a spruce. I cannot differentiate between a fir tree and a cryptomeria. I am too young.

  Help me, Father, I am pleading. Help me to learn what you already see.

  For the first time in my memory we are the near-perfect image of father and son.

  “The leaves of a cypress tree are pale green in spring, dark brown by midsummer, and on the forest floor by the first week of the ninth month,” he tells me. “The bark, a cinnamon red.”

  My eyes survey the forest before me, and I still cannot find the tree that he describes. Yet I stand there listening, so unaccustomed to the sound of his voice.

  “You can trace its roots to the closest source of water,” he says as his fingers graze the earth. “Its smell is high and green.”

  We walk the forest floor until we arrive at a soft, marshy expanse. The cool water ripples in t
he afternoon light.

  With a light in his eyes, he points to a single tree. More imposing than a pine. More statuesque than a red maple. “That is the hinoki,” he says, “the cypress tree from which you will carve your first mask.”

  “The hinoki was the first wood in which you carved, Father?” I ask, my face turning up to him like a sunflower.

  The light in his eyes is fading, clouding over his pupils. A distance forms between us.

  “No, Kiyoki,” he says with a pause. “I learned to carve on a shard of plum wood.”

  The Japanese word for plum, ume, falls from his lips.

  “I have always hoped you would learn to carve the proper way,” he says gravely. “A way without sadness. The way that generations before you have always learned. The way that begins with the cutting of your first cypress tree.”

  We walk toward the tree. We kneel on the cold and damp soil. The silver saw rests between us. Father extends his hands and grasps the sides of the trunk like a husband grasping the waist of his bride. Tenderly. Passionately. Possessively.

  “She is yours, Kiyoki,” he says as he turns to me, his hands still firmly planted on the trunk. “Pick up the saw.”

  I bring him the saw, its very image heavy and dangerous, its glimmering teeth cutting the air. He takes the handle from me and places it to the right of the trunk’s lowest part.

  “Place your hands on mine,” he says quietly, as if he wishes not to awaken the spirits of the forest, “and follow me.”

  The Japanese saw is not like the Western saw. In the West you pull the instrument toward you and then push it away from you. You cut two ways. In Japan, however, our traditional saws cut only in one direction: toward the cutter.

  The saw becomes much like the sword.

  And so Father and I, with my childlike hands placed on top of his aged ones, my stomach placed on his back, begin to cut through the thick middle of the cypress tree with long, careful strokes. Strokes that, with every repeated movement, come closer and closer to us.

  The tree becomes weakened by our incision. We have severed it from its roots. Three quarters through, Father orders me to retreat.

  “The tree will soon fall, Kiyoki. You must step back!”

  I take two steps back.

  “Farther,” he says as he turns quickly to see how far I have gone.

  I take three steps back.

  “Farther,” he says once more.

  I take five steps back.

  “Farther, Kiyoki.” His voice this time is more impatient. I see him turn his head upward toward the highest peak of the tree.

  “Run!” he yells. He is running toward me. I see the back of his hair rising to the front like a small tsunami. The sleeves of his kimono billow like sails.

  Behind him, the tall, slender tree begins to creak, teetering to one side before it begins its fall.

  Father rushes toward me. He picks me up like a basket. Cradling me for the first time. Holding me in his arms.

  There is the sound of a crash. Splintering wood and tearing leaves. And then there is the sound of us. Echoing the sound of the tree. The two of us falling to the ground.

  Father rests for only a second on top of me, his rib cage sealed to my back. I taste the feral bitterness of soil on my lips. Smell the dampness of the earth.

  He rolls me out from underneath him and rises to his feet, dusting himself free from the blanket of soil and wet leaves.

  “It is always the most difficult the first time, Kiyoki,” he says with a faint smile. “One day you will be cutting trees for your masks all by yourself.”

  I stare at him blankly, wishing that his words were easier to believe. Craving for him always to be this warm.

  * * *

  The cypress tree lies on the forest floor like a slain warrior laid out in ceremony. Its proud, long expanses of branches jut from its exposed side; the others lie broken and smashed beneath its fallen form.

  I watch as Father begins sawing the trunk into small round wheels, the inner core radiating a paler shade.

  He removes a furoshiki from his sash and unfolds the cloth on the ground. Then, after several moments of pondering each wheel of wood, he picks up one from the tree’s middle and places it in the center of the cloth.

  He wraps it without thinking and secures it with a short, tight knot.

  “This is yours, Kiyoki,” he says while walking over to me. He places the heavy package of wood at my feet.

  “Thank you, Father,” I say blindly.

  He acknowledges me with a nod, then returns to the tree. He places the remaining wheels of cypress in a small pyramid, stacking each piece with care. He leaves three blocks of wood for himself and then lifts them simultaneously onto one bent knee.

  “We must return to the house; it’s beginning to get dark!” he says suddenly. “We should go now, for tomorrow is a big day, my son. It will be your first day learning to carve!”

  At that moment the forest seemed to echo my silence. Obediently I picked up my furoshiki. And yet the burden seemed almost too difficult to bear.

  ELEVEN

  The earlier one learns to carve, the better carver he is, my father believed. So I came upon my apprenticeship at the early age of six.

  Through his teachings, I learned that the block of cypress should be no thicker than seven thumbs prior to carving and that the wood should not be so dry that it begins to crack with the insertion of one’s chisel. As for the chisels, I learned that a beginner carver uses five, and an expert can manage with three. The blades are made from a special alloy of soft iron and steel. The handles are always made from pine.

  Although the chisels that Grandfather gave me rested by my side, I would not be allowed to use them until I turned seven the following year. And so, for twelve full months, all I did was sit and watch Father carve.

  I watched as he sawed off each corner until the rectangle of wood became an octagon. I watched as he carved with his chisel until two eyes, a nose, and a mouth rose from the wood in high relief. The features, rough and coarse, become finer, more refined as the thicker blades are exchanged for thinner ones. I learned the difference in chisels, those with a straight tip from those with an arched. I learned how with each tool one could round a corner and hollow out an underside. It was with my eyes that I first learned to carve.

  But it was with my heart that I first noticed that, without the connection of Noh or wood between us, I existed estranged from my father. He seemed to acknowledge me only as an extension of the wood. That which planked his heart and freed his creativity. That with which he hoped to link himself with me. So that we would both feel the sensation of wood beneath our fingers, the pulse of Noh in our barely beating hearts.

  You see, within the walls of his studio, I was not Yamamoto Kiyoki, the son of Ryusei and Etsuko. I was Yamamoto Kiyoki, the son of Noh. As he had been to Tamashii. The wood connecting them. Where wood absorbed pain.

  For me, however, wood caused only confusion. I did not understand why, outside the arena of Noh, Father ceased to reach out toward me. Why he limited our connection to the wood.

  Even as a child I made attempts to bridge our two worlds. As my schooling outside the home began, like my peers, I became excited by the information our teacher imparted to us. The new Meiji empire, which coincided with our birth, Omori sensei informed us, “was a time of great change.” The emperor was challenging all the youths of our generation to learn as much of Western technology as possible. My generation, I was told, was being cultivated to bring our nation into the new age.

  For years, Japan had grown within its own self-containing walls. But with the Meiji Restoration of 1868 this had begun to change. Now, over a decade later, we were free to travel abroad and learn of things that we had never even dreamed existed. We were opened to the West, and the West, with all its newness and foreignness, was open to us. Where we had
previously been taught that Japan was the center of the world and that our cultural and technological achievements were unsurpassed, we were now encouraged to learn everything that was Western. The emperor, in a program to Westernize the entire country as quickly and efficiently as possible, sent scholars of every kind to England, France, Germany, and the United States to study modern technology, political science, and languages. Even art, now considered a discipline of its own, found a place in Japan’s new agenda.

  The curriculum in our schools changed. No longer did our history classes teach exclusively Japanese history; we were also introduced to classical Western civilization. We saw prints of the Parthenon and drawings of the Pyramids. We saw the magnificent government buildings that housed the parliaments of England and France. Our own architects, upon returning from their studies abroad, would later create similar structures for our governmental buildings. The emperor’s wish incarnated in stone; our city and our people were transported into the new age.

  * * *

  Whereas Father ignored the futile attempts of a six-year-old to inform his family of the changes that were sweeping across our nation, Grandfather became angered by it.

  “No more of this chatter, Kiyoki!” he would boom, stopping me in midsentence. Grandmother would look up from her bowl of miso soup and try to soften the ire of her husband’s voice with the gentle shaking of her head.

  It did not take me long to realize that Grandfather, Father, and the rest of the Noh community regarded the Meiji reforms as a bad thing. To him, a man firmly rooted in tradition, the Meiji Restoration of 1868, carried out seven years before my birth, was only now beginning to penetrate his world.

  The artists and actors involved in the traditional Japanese art circles were clearly suffering as the Japanese government and people rejected the ancient parts of their nation’s culture in favor of the new Western elements. Noh theater became unfashionable. The audiences dwindled. The eyes that had watched Grandfather perform the dance of the demon queller looked no longer, and the ears that had once been moved by the age-old melody of the shamisen became deaf.