The Mask Carver's Son

by Alyson Richman

  “It is a shame that your father took his craft with him to his grave,” one of the actors said to me, his thick voice rising from a cup of steaming tea.

  “Ah, so, young man, you are at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. Do you do mask carving there?” the creaking voice of an actor’s wife pressed.

  Their words floated through the home like carving blades, but I did not answer them. I refused to make myself vulnerable, to make myself the scapegoat for their disappointment.

  I knew I had left many things with my father unresolved, and I regretted it. But these were issues between him and me. I refused to feel guilty for my dreams.

  So I remained steadfast in my mind. I would honor the customary fifty days of mourning before returning to Tokyo.

  * * *

  There was much to do before I could return to Tokyo. I had to clear the house and decide either to sell it or board it up until I could return.

  I had yet to enter my father’s studio. I knew it would be extremely difficult to see the place where he spent the majority of his time, the place where he created and dared to unleash his spirit, day after day.

  The steep, narrow flight of stairs that led to his sacred space had always intimidated me. I had never wanted to interfere with his process of creation. I was the disappointing child born from a split and weary womb. There, in contrast, he was surrounded by loyal children of his own creation, their wooden faces resting lovingly in his palms.

  When I entered the room, I knew I would discover that I had not been left an orphan. And as I expected, when I finally did enter the sanctuary of Father’s small studio, it was true; I had not been left alone. Father had left me over a dozen brothers and sisters, created by his own hand.

  The masks rested on the shelves. Some were completely finished and others barely started.

  Those uncompleted masks were the most disturbing to me, their faces like tiny embryos whose features were only half formed. They slept there, lonely and somewhat pathetic, born from a god who could no longer complete their missing features. And I, the traitor to their destiny, felt powerless to help them.

  I looked around the room for a long time before I held one. I recognized each mask, knew which character each one was intended to become. Despite our separation, my father’s world was still deeply rooted within me.

  I recognized the slightly downturned mouth and diamond-shaped eyes of Yase-Otoko, the mask worn by the ghost of Lord Fukakusa in Kayoi Komachi. I could see the hours of work it had taken my father to smooth the planes of its forehead, carve out the hollowed pockets of flesh over and beneath the eye sockets, and create the sunken cavities beneath its cheeks.

  I could see the aggression with which the old man must have attacked the wood when he began carving Aka-Hannya, the mask intended for the Snake Spirit in Dojoji. He had nearly completed this mask, having plowed with great power into the soft block of cypress wood and dug out the furrowed brow, the bulging eyes, and the enormous gaping mouth. He had masterfully whittled the demon’s large fangs and broad-surfaced teeth. He had smoothed out the sharpness of the chin and carved out the large cavernous ears. He had not begun the horns, however. He always saved that for last.

  But the masks that were the most haunting, and which terrified me the most, were those that my father had barely touched.

  From the mask that had only a mouth, I heard only screams. From the one that had only a broad, flat nose and the pierced holes meant for nostrils, I heard muffled breathing. But the most disturbing of all was the one that had only eyes.

  I believed that these eyes were intended for another Ishi-O-Jo mask. They were the eyes of an old spirit, the wizened, thinly incised eyes looking both downward and within at the same time. But because Father had already given one of these masks to the theater, I was puzzled why he would have begun another version. As the theater would have no need for another, I thought perhaps Father had intended it for me. The eyes burned with intensity as they met my gaze, the rest of the face empty and sad in its incompleteness.

  I packed up the collection of Father’s masks in its entirety with the exception of that one. That mask, the Ishi-O-Jo mask, I carried down to the room where I was sleeping and laid it next to the Semimaru mask he had sent to me in Tokyo.

  The Semimaru mask looked rather grave as it lay on the tatami. I thought of how Father had always told me it was cruel to deny a mask its true destiny on stage. For that was where the spirit, infused by the carver, was finally liberated. As I held the mask up to the light, it occurred to me that, in honor of my father and his lifework, I should give my father’s last masterpiece to the theater where it could live and breathe. Where its sadness, its pain, and its resignation could finally be released. To be played out on the stage. To appease the spirit of the troubled dead as only a Noh mask truly can.

  I would, however, keep the incomplete mask for myself. To remind me of him. Of our relationship, never reconciled and never completed. But also of my destiny, for now deferred. This mask was the only mask that I could not shake from my conscience. And it would be only this mask that I would take with me back to Tokyo.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I was sitting in the kitchen during my seventeenth day of mourning, having prepared myself a bowl of miso soup with boiled cabbage and some pickled radishes for my rice. The wind was howling and the wind chimes were rattling in song.

  I had forgotten how cold Kyoto could be in the winter. I ate my breakfast with the charcoal brazier underneath the low lacquer table, the futon over my shoulders, and remembered how I had eaten here with my father in the same unnerving silence.

  I looked into the basin of my soup bowl and hoped to see my mother emerging like a lotus flower from the dark swamp of liquid. When she failed to appear, I forced myself to remember her visage. I wanted to see her magnificent face, translucent as gossamer, looking at me. I needed to see her omniscient eyes, black as burned ginkgo nuts, comforting me in my struggle and beseeching me to find my way.

  The day before, I had visited Iwasaki at the theater. Shrouded in swatches of raw silk, I carried the Semimaru mask that Father had sent me close to my chest.

  “I would like to give this to the theater in honor of my father,” I told him as I bowed my head to the floor and pushed the covered mask in his direction.

  He unwrapped my offering and frowned.

  “Why do you give away something that is a reminder of your father and his craft?” he questioned, his voice betraying his disappointment in me.

  “Father always taught me that masks belong to the stage. To the theater,” I said softly. “I am sure that Father would have wanted it there.”

  And then in the painful silence between us, I added, “I believe Father wanted his masks to be his legacy.”

  “No, Yamamoto Kiyoki-san, I believe he wished you to be his legacy.” I looked away from him, to the corner where the stretch of stage began.

  This was the same room where I had first met Iwasaki and the other actors when I traveled with Father years earlier, when he came to offer his masks to the theater.

  “Go,” he told me, before I could answer in my defense. “Leave me this mask,” he said, and his voice was cold.

  “Return to your home and your own reflection,” the great patriarch said. He did not lift his eyes in my direction. He did not rise to see me out, nor did he offer me a bow.

  I did rise and, out of respect for him, my father’s mask, and the stage that supported the feet of my ancestors, I bowed deeply. I bowed to a place I believed I would never return to again.

  * * *

  In my heart, I also knew it was time to leave my childhood home. To finally put to rest my ghosts and my memories.

  The following morning I rose invigorated and refreshed. I folded the futons and cleaned the braziers. I wiped the lacquerware with a damp, soft cloth. I swept away the frozen leaves in the garden and emptied the tansu chest
of its years of stored memories.

  Grandmother had carefully placed tiny bundles of chrysanthemum leaves tied in miniature sachets of white gauze. She had hoped to ward off insects and tiny moths from feeding on the heavy silk brocade. As I went to withdraw my beloved mother’s wedding dress, one of the sachets came undone. I stood there with the cloth close to my cheek and marveled as a flurry of dried leaves, stored away so long ago by Grandmother, floated through the air and then fell to my feet. The pale green leaves, the color of dried sage, crackled beneath my sandals as I continued to withdraw my mother’s heirlooms from the shelves of the deep tansu chest. I removed her box of gilded combs, the tsuno-kakushi, the ceremonial wig, and the red petticoats.

  I remembered that Mother’s fan remained in the butsudan, placed there by Grandmother so many years before. I had not visited the family altar since I returned home, but I wished to include the fan with a few other treasured articles I would carry with me when I returned to Tokyo.

  The main tatami room seemed so empty, this room where Father’s corpse had lain only just a few days before, this room where the family butsudan was enshrined. On many occasions during my time in Tokyo, I had wondered what would become of the family altar, now that I had abandoned my responsibilities to the household. I had expected my father to ignore the old shrine, as he did most of the domestic chores that did not affect his carving. It was not his nature to remember things outside of the world of Noh. But when I walked and opened the heavy black doors of the shrine, I did not find the altar in a state of disrepair as I had always imagined. To the contrary, Father had painstakingly maintained it.

  Mother’s wedding fan had been spread out and leaned like a silver wing on a pyramid of Asian pears. Still golden. Perfectly round and only now beginning to show the first signs of blemishing. Father must have picked them the week before he died. Pale candle wax, its drippings permanently dried in the shape of tiny tears, formed at the base of three short, stubby tapers. Yellow chrysanthemum flowers, their many slender petals turning brown on the edges, stood tall in the hollow-bamboo vase. An inch of water remained.

  Before me, carefully placed on the shining altar, were all of those tiny fragments of my family’s past. I could not stop myself from trembling.

  With reverent hands extended, I picked up Mother’s fan. I opened the fragile spine and revealed the gilded sides, one silver, the other gold. The sun and the moon in their entirety. How Mother must have looked that day as her face peeked demurely from above the pleated folds. I carefully folded the fan and delicately set it down beside me.

  I noticed the familiar sight of the program from Grandfather’s last performance. Grandmother had placed that there years before. Now the paper was brittle and had turned a deep shade of ochre.

  I read the scrolled calligraphy and inhaled the musty smell of dried parchment. I moved my right hand to turn the page and felt something slide underneath my fingers. Out from the inner fold, another program, bright white in contrast, fell to the floor. I reached down to read it: “November 14, 1895, the twenty-ninth year of our most revered emperor’s reign. The Kanze troupe of Noh is most honored to perform Kanze Kojiro Nobumitsu’s masterful play, Dojoji . . . ”

  There could be no other reason why the two programs had been placed together. The symmetry was obvious and so beautiful. Father must have known that it would be the last performance he would ever attend at the Noh theater, and when it was over, he had brought the program home and placed it inside the one that had belonged to Grandfather.

  I immediately could envision him sitting in one of the front pews. I saw him staring up into the stage and containing his pride upon seeing one of his Hannya masks freed on the stage. And with all my heart I hoped that he felt joy that night. That when he went to sleep he did not think of me. That he did not allow himself to reflect that his connection with the theater would end with him.

  It was almost impossible for me to imagine Father kneeling beside the butsudan. I closed my eyes and tried to picture him in prayer, a position of reverence. My head battled with the memories contained in my heart, to visualize him in a way I could never see him before, without the company of a mask.

  I had stared into his face, white with death, as the priest chanted his rites. I had not seen any signs of sadness. No wrinkles of regret. Underneath the flesh, all that had once been contained, all that had been carefully restrained, had already left.

  Life is fleeting. Only Noh and wood are eternal.

  And as I kneeled in front of our family altar, I truly saw my father for the first time. I finally saw his tragedy. For he had buried his parents, his master, his beloved, and the dreams he held for his son.

  “Father,” I said aloud, “if only it were true that you loved only the wood.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  As I spent the next few days packing up the contents of the house, it was evident that my family owned few things of substantial value. Since my childhood, I had realized that the bulk of my family’s stature was in our name rather than any material wealth. Over a span of many generations and fruitful marital alliances, we had accumulated a modest amount of land, furniture, and lacquerware. But, as Father’s masks could no longer be sold for their true worth due to Noh’s decline, the gold and currency we once had in plenty had dwindled from our household.

  I knew it was wrong to sell to outsiders any of the masks that were carved by my father’s hand. Instead, I decided to donate the few that remained to the theater. In the evening, I bundled them in a large, broad furoshiki and dropped them at the base of the stage. I left no note and no explanation. In the honor of my father, I knew the masks would speak for themselves.

  You must believe me, it was not that I searched our house looking for something to fund my painting aspirations. I came across my father’s collection of ancient masks almost by accident. I had returned to his studio to sweep out the last curls of cypress and wipe the shelves clean. The day before, I had packed away what I believed to be all of his carving tools when I discovered that Father had placed my last two letters inside a small pine box with his most precious belongings: his chisels and his jars of dried pigment. They lay there carefully folded and tied in twine. The empty words from a son who returned too late to say good-bye.

  But now I was saying farewell to the man whose house I shared and whose craft I could not. It occurred to me, as I finished sweeping the last corners of the room, that I had forgotten the small storage compartment adjacent to the door. I knelt down and crawled into the tiny storage space, needing no candle or lantern to find the large cinnabar chest that lay inside. I could feel the intricately carved cover with my palms and the straight corners with my fingertips. Carefully and with effort, I managed to drag the carved container into the center of the room and remove the lid.

  There, deep in the hollow of the chest, Father’s coveted collection of ancient masks was revealed to me. They were priceless, having been carved by the great masters who had preceded him centuries ago.

  The carved seal on the inside of each mask identified the carver. I had seen him refer to these masks on occasion. Sometimes for a reference to a mask he was carving, sometimes for just a brief glance.

  He had a Ko-Beshimi mask by Yukan, a Yase-Otoko mask by Tosui, a Warai-Jo mask by Sankobo, a Sanko-Jo mask by Mitsunaga, a Yoroboshi mask by Jiunin, an Okina mask by Mitsunaga, a Kuro-Hige mask by Zekan, a Shintai mask by Mitsuteru, a Shiwa-Jo by Fukurai, a Ko-Omote mask by Tatsuemon, and a Ko-Jo mask by Mitsuzane.

  He had inherited several of these masks from my grandfather, who had inherited them from his father, who had received them from his father. They had been in the family for over three hundred years. The oldest mask in the collection was the Ko-Omote, carved in the early fifteenth century by Tatsuemon.

  I picked up Ko-Omote and imagined that this was what my mother had looked like as a young girl. I caressed the rounded cheeks, traced the half-parted lips, and rubbed t
he delicate teeth, blackened with the resin of burned eggplant. To blend into the shadows. To be unseen.

  I slipped the mask’s silk cord over my fingers and gently rocked it back and forth, revealing the mask’s magic. When I held her upright, her mouth curled upward into a demure smile. Then within seconds, when I tilted her downward, she succumbed to a deep sadness in which her eyes drooped and her mouth metamorphosed. She looked as though she was about to cry.

  Once I overheard my father speaking with an actor who had expressed an interest in studying carving. He had asked my father if Ko-Omote was the simplest mask to carve because it appeared to be so plain.

  “No,” my father said, his voice revealing his annoyance. “It is probably the most difficult. The planes must be done perfectly. They must be as smooth as a newborn’s flesh, and their roundness must be so subtle that the eye cannot discern where they plateau. The beauty of the Ko-Omote mask is that she is so young, so feminine, and so unmarred by the evils of the world. Thus the whiteness of her color and the smoothness of her face are the perfect canvas for shadows to play—to dance on her brow and to mysteriously change her laughter into cries.”

  My father’s explanation silenced the young actor. Humbled by my father’s knowledge, he never asked him about carving again.

  I looked at Ko-Omote once more before returning her to her silk pouch. I placed her back in the cinnabar box with the others and closed the lid. These were what my father had called retired masks, masks whose spirits had been released over a span of hundreds of years. And although they had grown even more beautiful, aging with a lustrous, inimitable patina, they had become treasures rather than viable pieces for the stage. “Therefore,” he had once confided to me, “one should not feel guilty for keeping them safe here in this box.”

  “Someday these will be yours,” he had said in one of those rare moments between us that I could virtually count. Now I looked at this box of treasures and realized that these were the most valuable piece of my inheritance.