The Mask Carver's Son

by Alyson Richman

  All that had once been considered sacred by the community, by my family, was threatened by the influence of West. And to think that I, seized by those great images of European art and technology, was the greatest betrayer of all.

  * * *

  As my grandfather’s audience diminished, his anger grew. He felt he had been betrayed. His patrons had abandoned him and the government turned its back on its cultural support. His title no longer echoed with prestige, but rather seemed ridiculous and archaic.

  On December 4, 1881, when I was six years old, he performed for the last time. He left his home, sliding the latch of the gate into its lock, and walked by himself to his dressing room in the old wooden theater. He powdered his face and smoothed out his hair. He dressed himself in his robes and fastened his wig.

  Then, as ritual dictates, he sat alone with his mask. He meditated over it, breathed over it, and pondered his role over it. He rightfully acknowledged the power it would bring to him as an actor and the spirit it would bring to his performance. He believed, as all great Noh actors do, that his job as an actor was to free the spirit trapped within the mask.

  He raised the mask to his face and greeted it with a reverent nod. He tied the silk cords behind his head, rose to his feet, and tucked his fan into his sash.

  He had successfully become one with his character. There was nothing between him and his mask. He was now the red demon Shikami.

  He appeared on stage in his splendid robes, the insidious monster in the play Momijigari. He slid his tabi-bound feet across the stage; he pressed his soles hard against each of the floor beams and flexed his toes at the end of each step.

  He moved straight-backed, his head slightly forward. He was moving even when he was standing perfectly still.

  “Iya! Iya! a-ha! Ha!”

  The otsuzumi player extended his long, slender arm, anticipating the smacking of his hand against the drum skin.

  “Iya! Iya! Yoi! Yya! a-ha!” he cried.

  From behind the mask, Grandfather chanted his lines slowly, each word articulated in the song of a master. The drums played on as he danced, his body swaying and thumping, the pace quickening with every turn.

  He revealed his arm from beneath the karaginu, richly embroidered with red, yellow, and pale green maple leaves against a silver-threaded background. He pierced the air before him with the dagger of his fan, then pulled it back to the hollow of his sleeve; he performed the hataraki dance.

  “Namu-ya hachiman dai-bosatsu!” cried the waki.

  Grandfather stepped backward, then forward, then back again. He stomped one foot, then the other. He raised both arms, his elbows extending from his heavy robes like huge silver wings.

  His arms encircled the air in long, calligraphic sweeps. He punctuated the poetry of each movement with his gilded fan.

  Suddenly and unexpectedly, just seconds prior to his character’s impending slaying, my grandfather stepped to the edge of the stage. He posed, his hands stretched wide.

  And then he let out an enormous cry.

  The people in the audience covered their ears, and behind the mask, his wrinkled face turned bloodred.

  When his cry finally ended, he stiffened for a moment, his arms still stretched wide. The coronary took him quickly. He collapsed, falling dead into the awestruck audience.

  The theater, with a capacity of two hundred, contained an audience of five.

  TWELVE

  Grandfather’s death weighed heavily on all of us. But no one felt it more deeply than Grandmother. After the funeral had passed and the actors stopped coming to pay their respects, she decided she could no longer sleep in the house that for so many years she had called her own. She offered no explanation. She simply packed what few belongings she had and converted the old chashitsu, the tea shack on the border of our property, into her new quarters.

  Constructed shortly before her marriage to Grandfather, the tea hut had complied with the traditional architectural specifications of the tea master Sen-no Rikyu. Built using the lightest materials—bamboo, rice paper, and wood—the rustic structure existed between the ungroomed forest and our meticulously maintained garden.

  Inside, the room was Spartan, offering nothing more to its occupants than a straw floor, a charcoal brazier, a place for storing utensils, and a tokonoma, a small, narrow alcove for a hanging screen and a vase of flowers.

  It was a tranquil place that, since the death of my mother, had gone unused. The thatched roof was in fine condition, the brazier still had its coals. The plaster was peeling in places, “like an old skin,” she would say, “like me.” The round windows were in need of a new covering of rice paper, but other than that, the place remained intact. All that Grandmother had to do was sweep the straw floor of the years of dust that had accumulated since she and Mother had practiced the ancient tea ceremony within its walls.

  I missed Grandmother’s presence in the house deeply. The pressures of my apprenticeship weighed heavily on me. During my sessions of carving with Father after school, I could not help but feel as though I had been captured. I sat across from Father in the small three-mat room, our knees barely touching, our heads bowed in concentration.

  I took to carving easily, though I disliked the sensation of wood between my hands. Where Father carved to forget love, I carved to obtain it. And as a result, my relationship with the wood was undeniably strained. It became the symbol for that which encased my father and prevented him from displaying emotion. Yet it was the only world in which he allowed his passion to truly be unleashed.

  Sometimes as I sat there, the heavy handles of the chisels clasped in my hands, I would recall that day in the forest, when Father’s form had rushed foward to protect me.

  Now we carved side by side. I listened as he explained the attributes of each character in the plays, the process of a face being born.

  My masks were silent in comparison to his. How ironic, I thought to myself, that a man who avoids speech could create such emotive masks. And I, the child who craved conversation, created such two-dimensional blocks of wood.

  I would find myself compensating for the dearth of warmth in my life with my daily visits with Grandmother. After I returned from school and completed three hours of carving with Father, I would always end the day by going to the tea shack to pay her a visit. There she would be, hunched over a small lantern, on this day embroidering the family crest into the waistband of my extra hakama.

  “Hello, obasan,” I would say, as I slid open the shoji and entered the humble structure.

  “Hello, Kiyoki-chan,” she would respond while removing the hakama from her lap. “How kind of you to come and visit your old Grandmother.”

  “It was not a far journey, Grandma,” I would reply, and she would laugh with me, if only for a moment.

  She would look up at me, her neck stiff with age, her back curving under her kimono. “You have your mother’s laugh,” she would say.

  As she said the words “your mother,” her eyes would cloud over, as if she had suddenly entered a world now gone, a world where death had not made her prematurely gray and where ghosts did not wrestle her from her sleep.

  * * *

  In this world the images are timeless. She is not a widow, and she is not guilty of my mother’s death. She is the beautiful wife and mother of the Yamamoto family once more.

  Here the kitchen fire crackles cinnabar flames, the rice steams through the iron pot and perfumes her hair. She sings songs from her childhood while she works. “Kaki-tsu-bata, kaki-tsu-bata,” she hums, as her own mother once sang.

  She hears the gate unlocking. Her husband has returned safely from the theater. She hears him holler that he is home and she sees herself greeting him at the genkan, the first moonbeams of the evening radiating off his arriving form.

  He is red, the winter having breathed its icy gusts over his puffing face. He stands in the en
tranceway, appearing larger than a god, dropping his satchel to the floor and lifting his eyes to his wife.

  “Where is Etsuko?” he asks.

  “She is still at the mountain.”

  He shakes his head with mild disapproval. “She should be concentrating more on her tea ceremony than on those ink drawings,” he sighs.

  “Sometimes I do not think that I control her,” she tells him. “The mountain seems to possess all the power.”

  “That is ridiculous, Chieko,” he says while slipping into his straw slippers. “We are her parents.”

  “It is not we whom she draws day after day. It is the mountain.”

  She hesitates for a moment before she continues. She lowers her eyes and then says in a voice so hushed that it is barely a whisper, “Her drawings are actually quite good. It is a shame that she was born a girl.”

  Grandfather has the capacity to hear everything. He hears Grandmother’s words before she finishes speaking them.

  “How dare you, Chieko!” he booms. “If Etsuko had been born a boy, she would not be an artist, she would be an actor!”

  His eyes dart at her like those of an animal that has been threatened with its life. Again he chastises her. “I do not understand why you bemoan her silly sketches as wasted talent. It would be more of a waste if she had talent as an actor but could not perform because she is a girl.” He pauses and looks down at his wife. “Now that would be a shame, Chieko, would it not?”

  “Yes, yes,” she replies, again almost in a whisper. “I am sorry for my foolishness. You are absolutely right.”

  She decides to go and fetch her daughter, as darkness has already blackened the sky. Dinner has been ready for almost an hour, and she fears her daughter has lost track of the time.

  The path leading to the base of Mount Daigo is rough and winding. Like a thin black serpent, it slithers around the channels of the forest. Pointed branches whose leaves have long since fallen blanket the earth beneath her sandals and thrust their daggerlike boughs into her kimono. They mildly pierce the flesh of her shoulders, bend at the force of her movement, and snap to their death as she pushes onward with her rapeseed lantern dangling from her slender arm.

  She finds her daughter at the base of the Daigo, a piece of mulberry paper nailed to a wooden board propped on her knees. She has brought her own lantern, the flicker competing with the shining moon.

  “Etsuko,” Grandmother calls out. “Etsuko!”

  Mother turns her head, revealing her long neck and bewildered eyes. Had she been cloaked in a red blanket, she could have been mistaken for a fawn.

  Grandmother finally reaches her. The cold mountain air has weakened her voice and quickened her breath.

  “Your father and I have been worried. Do you not see that it is dark and that dinner is waiting?” she scolds.

  It has been several hours since Mother has spoken. Words feel strange and unfamiliar to her lips.

  “I am sorry, Mother,” she manages to say, her voice strained and tired.

  “At least show me your drawing, child,” Grandmother sighs.

  She pushes her lantern over her young daughter’s shoulder. The flame’s reflection splinters blue and yellow shadows across the page.

  Grandmother has known Daigo all her life. She has slept at its base; she has journeyed to its peak. She has walked its winding paths in the season of cherry blossoms and turning leaves. She has watched it from her window as it slept under a coverlet of white snow, and anticipated its thawing from the thick blankets of her bed.

  Her nose could discern its particular scent—smoky and green—on her daughter’s kimono, the dry earth her husband carries in on his sandals, and the flowers that she gathers for her urns.

  Still, until now, she has never seen all of these images captured in a drawing.

  She sees nothing but the drawing. She does not see her daughter’s hands quivering in the mountain air, shrunken from the cold, and clutching the thin twig that has been sharpened to a thin point and saturated in dark black ink.

  The drawing has rendered her speechless. It is as if the mountain has penetrated the paper and the sky has fallen onto the page.

  She places her lantern at her daughter’s side and kneels on the earth, her kimono getting soiled under her knees. She extends her hands to grasp the drawing, to seize it from her daughter’s lap and bring it closer to her eyes.

  She traces each tree with the side of her finger. She notices how each bough arches in the right direction, how the texture of the peeling bark has been masterfully executed, and how the edges of each leaf curl.

  The mountain seems to be breathing, coming to life off the very page, its soft roundness undulating, its hump curved and bowed to the sky.

  “Why do you not speak, Mother?” her daughter inquires.

  “Your drawing has brought a hush to my heart,” she whispers as she rises and lays her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and hurries her to her feet.

  There is quiet between them.

  “We must get back to Father,” her daughter reminds her.

  And so with the base of the mountain fading behind them, its charcoal image tightly rolled underneath a tiny arm sleeved in silk, mother and daughter hurry to return, their wooden sandals sinking into the soft, damp earth.

  * * *

  The mask carver’s son, that is who I am. But do not be mistaken. I may have been born by a shining silver blade, but I do not intend to live my life by it.

  I am filled with images that I cannot shake. They reveal themselves in color, they are born from the strokes of my inner mind. Shape and shadow. Form and line.

  In my heart I know that someday I will be a painter. My hands are not like those of my father. They are my mother’s. They cannot be restrained.

  * * *

  Throughout my early childhood, I tried to cultivate my talent in secret. Never allowing my father to know that my mind was elsewhere. That to me there was nothing less interesting than a block of wood.

  In my heart, I felt like a thief. I stole small pieces of charcoal from the hibachi and wore the face of a diligent son. I drew on old, discarded pieces of paper; I sketched from memory and from what I saw before me. All the while, I visited Father and carved hollow faces, my dedication to this ancient craft as empty as the underside of a mask.

  My grandmother’s confession of my mother’s talent was a revelation to me. The feeling of betraying my father was replaced with the notion that I was fulfilling the unaccomplished dreams of my mother. Suddenly I found myself impassioned as I had never been before. I drew my inspiration from Mount Daigo, just as my mother had. I made studies of each leaf, tracing the spidery vein with my finger and then re-creating it with my hand. I learned to make my own pigments using the juice found in smashed berries and the natural green stain of damp moss.

  I sketched the squirrels and colored in their fur with the brown of the earth. I formed the sky by rubbing the petals of irises across my page, the sun by the circling of mandarin rind.

  There was nothing that I did not challenge myself to draw. I drew the head of my teacher while listening to the lecture in class. I drew my sandals dangling beneath my desk.

  I could not control myself. I looked at the world not in emotional terms, but rather as a place filled with images, a menagerie of objects and subjects that I was to reproduce on paper.

  I saw the beauty of nature’s simplest things and studied them with such intensity and reverence that they became almost anatomical studies. The cracked skull of a pomegranate, smashed on the earth with its ruby pebbled seeds oozing from its broken seams, could consume me for hours. I remember drawing each kernel, each section of its inner casing. I colored the sketch of the pomegranate with the fruit’s own juice, piercing a handful of the red ovules with my fingernail. It was with this self-invented method of creating art that I believed I was bringing nature t
o my page.

  I cannot explain what drove me to seek such creative sources of supplies. It was as though I was born an animal, who hungered for color as though it were prey. I know only that, for me, fresh paper was a far more valuable treasure than a coffer brimming with gold, that the mountain was the god who offered me his bounty, and that the ghost of my mother had manifested itself deep within my soul.

  * * *

  I shared my modest creations with no one except Grandmother.

  “It was your grandfather’s hope that you would maintain the family line in the theater. He understood you would most likely follow in the footsteps of your father. That is why he bought you a set of chisels before he died.”

  “And what is your hope, Grandmother?”

  “It is also my hope that you maintain the Yamamoto line in the theater,” she said before pausing. “It is more important to me, however, that you be happy.” Looking down at me, she added, “I have learned with age that the sibling to sacrifice is pain.”

  “I want to be a painter, Grandma.”

  There was silence between us. But it was a comfortable silence. It was not the same silence that distanced me from my father. On the contrary, such silence bound me closer to her. Her eyes were soft and understanding as she listened to me. The words I spoke were difficult for her to hear, but she acknowledged them even before speaking.

  Her neck arched slightly forward, her head elegantly bowed, she absorbed my words and acknowledged my presence within her humble walls.

  Grandmother looked at me for a long time before she responded. Then, after several pensive minutes, she raised her head and opened her eyes. “Kiyoki,” she began, her voice reflecting the seriousness of her impending words, “always remember that it was your mother’s blood in which you were born.”