The Mask Carver's Son

by Alyson Richman

  Takada’s mother was of noble birth. Her father and his father before him had both served the emperor in his court. But as the fifth daughter born to a mother who bore only girls, she had a wretched position. Her elder sisters informed her years later, as they combed each other’s hair, how her parents had failed to name her until two months after her birth. “What’s the use?” her mother had asked. “I have no more names left for yet another girl.”

  Ultimately her parents called her Shizuka, and hoped that she would grow up and mirror her name: silent one. And they loved her the least because she was clearly a burden. Tiny and weak, a constant reminder that she had not been born a son.

  “She is the last of my daughters to be married off,” her father had told the handsome young politician, “so you need not worry about her mother’s or my interference.”

  Takada’s father looked at his hands, now full with a large envelope containing her dowry, and felt extremely pleased.

  “Should we have a son, we would surely hope that you’d visit.”

  “Indeed,” said the old man coldly. His indifference chilled the air of the already cold room. “We will return after the birth of her firstborn.”

  They were married in a small Shinto ceremony. The young girl dressed in traditional garb, her gaze weighted to the floor. That night, after the bridegroom had lain with his new wife, he stood up and left her to sleep alone. So she lay there by herself. Behind walls of rice thread. Behind the mask of tear-streaked powder and long black hair. Like the Akashi Lady of the classic tale, the woman who is one of many. The woman who grows old waiting. The woman who is longing to be loved.

  Takada was born in the early days of winter. When frost formed an icy haze over the shutters. Where the breath froze from the lips of all who sighed in relief that the child produced was male.

  His story, like mine but different. In his story there is silence and there is sadness.

  But his ghosts are living.

  His mother, unlike mine, did not die the night of his birth. Instead, she died more slowly, living her death as slowly as she dragged her robe.

  “Males are always born to women of tears,” her mother told her as the child was taken away from her and swaddled in silk, all in accordance with the politician’s instructions. The old woman’s face, powdered in rice flour, hung over that of her daughter, her envy greening the talc.

  Tears spread like puddles over Takada’s mother’s face as her tiny son was carried away. Her breast heaving for his suck, her heart aching to be the one to comfort his cries. She looked into the darkness in search of her husband, her birthing bed illuminated only by thin burning tapers, but he had vanished from the room. She could hear in the distance his booming voice, his raucous and drunken laugh. The giggling of the women she foolishly believed were servants filling her ears.

  * * *

  “For sixteen weeks you may nurse him,” her husband informed her, as he watched his infant son sleep in his mother’s arms.

  He watched every time she nursed the boy. Watched with narrow eyes and furrowed brow. He saw how the child, with smooth pink skin and patches of soft black hair, joyfully nestled into her breast. He saw how she held him dear.

  But after sixteen weeks of having the child suckling at her side, so close that she could feel the tiny thump of his heart echoing inside her, the child was brought into her chambers no more.

  “You will see him when he is strong,” her husband told her while reaching to undo her hair. “Be patient and I will reward you,” he uttered through heated and furtive breaths.

  She arched her neck to give herself over to him entirely. The dutiful wife. So hollow that she felt concave. “No son of mine will grow weak from being coddled by the arms of his mother,” he said as his body sweated and shuddered over hers.

  And inside she felt herself dying. Floating up from underneath the weight of her husband’s body and his wicked words. Evaporating like a trail of extinguished steam. Years later she would return to the memory of that evening. Mark it into her memory. The first day that began her death.

  She felt him finish. Saw him as he paused and reached to snuff out the flame in the lantern beside her bed.

  “It’s that way, with the rearing of boys,” he added mindlessly. “You wouldn’t know that, wife,” he said as he closed his eyes.

  “After all, it’s your poor destiny to have been born a woman.”

  * * *

  As the weeks passed, Takada’s mother grew increasingly despondent. “Please,” she begged of her husband when he came to her on certain nights. “When might I be able to see my son?”

  “My son,” he said severely, with eyes that darted into her own.

  She looked up at him, noticing how his cruelty hung over him like a rank, damp robe.

  He crept up to her, and he smelled of imported tobacco and wine.

  “You must be patient, wife,” he told her again as she turned her head away and looked at the shadows behind the translucent wall, where her son slept just meters beyond. She saw the outline of his nursemaids. Heard his stifled cry. And as her arms stretched through those of her husband, she knotted her fists so that her nails might pierce her skin. Leeching herself of her own cries. Releasing the pain that had been choking her from within.

  * * *

  More time passed and Takada’s father still forbade his mother to see her son. Her chambers were structured so that she faced west. The only bit of scenery she saw in her carefully controlled view was a formal garden, designed by her husband, with small sculpted trees and a log of hollow bamboo that dripped water onto a perfectly round rock. But on her north wall, from where she heard her son’s weaning cries, her son’s room abutted hers. There, at night, she would watch his shadow and wonder if he was old enough yet to recognize her.

  In the second year of her son’s life, her husband informed her that she would periodically be permitted to see her child. But the visits would be limited to one hour a week. “Social obligations,” he called it. During such times, when he saw to it that everything was structured under his careful eye and suffocating control, he would order the child dressed in small silk outfits and request that his wife’s hair be plaited and arranged in the traditional style of a married woman of the day. He too would prepare for the pomp and artificiality of the engagement, dressed not in a kimono but in a suit, tie, and bowler. He would call for a carriage to bring his picture-perfect family to a staged public outing. He would request one of his favorite servant girls to hold a parasol over his wife and child, so that they seemed like a family stolen from an imported painting. Neatly arranged on the manicured lawn of a garden like the beautiful trees that were sculpted by razor, the scars from where they have been pruned hidden beneath the flashing of a flower.

  On these rare and strained occasions, Takada’s mother would always hold the child close to her, recall the time when she was able to hold him next to her heart, and tighten her face so that the tears could not fall. She would bury her small nose in the child’s sprouting locks of hair, smell the sweet scent left by his bathing powder, and try to rub some of it onto the collar of her robe, hoping she might smell it hours later, after he had been taken from her again. Afterward, she lay alone in her room, only to watch him as a shadow.

  She knew he would grow up fast. Like a sprout of sweet pea, tall and lean. She could not help but weep, knowing she would not be present to share his first teetering steps, to hear the first words he managed from his lips. But the memory of their first months together kept the candle of her faith aglow.

  “There is a bond between us,” she would whisper into her north wall, as if the porous paper would absorb her words and relay them into her infant son’s ears. She would lay her head next to the slats of bamboo and try to listen for his breaths. Hoping to be his silent protector. Hoping to be his mother, even if rarely seen or heard.

  In her heart she nurtu
red the idea that they had formed a bond between them, their fluids in each others veins. “My husband cannot break that,” she prayed over lit candles. “Let it be beyond his control.”

  As her son grew to be a toddler, their time together still limited and arranged, Shizuka could not help but see how the child was drawn toward her space. As if it was impossible for him to forget her. As if he too longed to be at her side.

  On the days in between their structured meetings, mother and child were never allowed a moment alone. The house, with its many narrow passageways, was constructed so that they could never use the same channels. A house woven with countless paper screens and hidden doors. A labyrinth created to prevent love.

  Denied daily contact with his mother, Takada was brought up by nursemaids who attended to his needs in the day and early afternoon, and to his father’s needs in the evening. They sweetened his milk with sugar cubes, hoping he would grow fat and would no longer cry. They fed him o-seki-han, the festive azuki rice, nearly every day rather than just on holidays, and scented his tea with chrysanthemum petals. But, as large as he grew, he remained forever empty.

  When he found himself alone at night, he would be accompanied by his mother’s muffled cries. Separated from her by a screen, his first unchaperoned contact with her was by spreading his fingers like a spider over the webbing of her shadow, cast in black over the shoji. Rice paper stretched in a sea of white.

  He learned to memorize the rhythm of her footsteps. Recognize the rustle of her heavy robe.

  But still he longed to spend even just a single moment with her alone.

  Month after month passed. With every night, he yearned to touch and feel something more than the cool black outline of her form.

  Slowly, the square of rice parchment, which Takada had grown accustomed to touching, began to grow thin from wear. And one night, when his nursemaids had tucked the futon underneath his chin and gone to busy themselves with their other more fulfilling duties, he found his fingers piercing the near-transparent skin. There, suddenly, in the middle of the shoji, was a hole.

  If he listened closely, he could hear his mother’s breathing. Partitioned from her only by a thin screen, her head rested where for so many years she had learned to sleep and wait.

  “Okasan, Okasan . . .” he whispered. Mother. Mother.

  Suddenly there was the soft illumination of her lantern. And for the first time, he heard her speak freely.

  “Yes . . .” It was the sound of her voice, murmured ever so faintly.

  And as she made out his first few words, she saw from her side—her side of the screen that had separated them for so many years—the small protrusion of a tiny pink finger needling through a hole as minute as a marble.

  She drew herself close to the shoji and knelt, her cotton robe dragging underneath her knees, her long, black hair trailing behind her. And for the first time she reached out and touched her son alone.

  The child behind the screen, the young Takada, grasped the finger of his mother. He held on to her so tightly that she thought she might just have to scream. But she bit her lip instead, preferring to taste the tiny droplets of blood rather than forgo this moment—the moment she had awaited for so long.

  The two of them could conjure up no words. The sensation of each other’s warmth silenced them for what seemed like hours. When the first hint of daylight approached, Takada heard the faint murmur of his mother.

  “Child,” she whispered, “should your father discover us, he will banish me. This is too great a risk. Should I be unable to watch over you, even if it is only your shadow, I will surely die. So you must allow me to cover this hole.”

  “Yes, Mama,” he whimpered, embarrassed that, should his mother hear his cries, she might not think him a man.

  As the sun began to rise, he listened as his mother furiously cut the paper from her now extinguished lantern. He heard her break its bamboo spine and carefully discard its remaining pieces in the stuffing of her pillow. He caught the sound of her fumbling through her lacquer boxes, searching for her needle and thread.

  In the moonlight he caught the glimmer of her face, beautiful like a doll’s, as she began to sew over the pierced square of torn parchment with a patch of the lantern skin, her eyes shining much like his own. But she looked away from him, his glance too painful to bear, the separation already weakening her soul.

  But he kept on watching her. Wanting to remember her as she looked without the weight of his father’s glaring eyes. As if to engrave her into his memory. Forever. Because even that didn’t seem long enough.

  So he watched her as she sewed over their little square window. Watched as her eyebrows furrowed and she fought back the tears. Watched as she replaced the square of parchment that had allowed her forbidden contact with her son. And he studied her two fingers, slender as reeds, as they grasped the spinning silver needle. Mending the parchment stitch by stitch till the envelope was sealed. Till slowly he could see her no more.

  * * *

  He grew from a sad small boy to a melancholy young man under the careful and cold guidance of tutors handpicked by his father. Still limited in seeing his mother, he saw her rarely and became accustomed to communicating with her shadow.

  Takada studied vigorously: Japanese classical literature, history, and abacus calculation, as well as intensive study of French and German. He loved the study of the French language most of all. His teacher, a young man from Osaka, had recently returned from studying abroad.

  “I’ll send you too!” his father promised in between clouds of smoke. “Before you’re married, before you begin your political career.” He looked at his father, slick in his Meiji-style suit, the pipe clasped between his yellowing teeth, and shuddered.

  “I would like to leave for France in my twentieth year.”

  And to his shock, his father agreed. Knowing that it would bode well for his son to have some foreign experience, he consented to have the boy go off to Europe for a few years. But only on the condition that he would return by his twenty-fourth year.

  The day Takada prepared for his departure, his father, to his surprise, called one of the maids to fetch his mother.

  “Let the old woman say good-bye to her son,” he said with the laugh of a wolf.

  And as Takada waited on the first floor, his neck arched to the banister, he saw her once more before he was to leave. Not as she had been the night they grasped fingers. Mother to son. Not as she had been as he watched her veiled by the sweep of her black hair as she sewed the tired parchment. But still beautiful to him.

  She stood at the top of the staircase, her hair neatly coiled on top of her head, streaked with gray. Her skin still smooth and white.

  She wore a heavy kimono that cloaked her thin arms, but she withdrew her hand to wish him farewell.

  She did not speak. But he sensed her thoughts: Yes, go far away from here, my son. He knew that she wished she could join him. Flee this prison that had kept her for so many years. As he watched the tears flooding her eyes, his too began to brim. He raised a handkerchief to his brow, covering his face with the cloth. By the time he returned it to his breast pocket, she was gone.

  * * *

  Takada’s twenty-fourth year approached. He had spent the past years joyfully reading French literature at the Sorbonne, rarely thinking that time would catch up to him so fast.

  But now the letter had arrived, calling him back.

  Dear son,

  Tokyo is filled with autumn leaves and the emperor has commissioned two more government buildings to be built in the Greco-Roman style. I am sure that you will not recognize our city when you return.

  I have enclosed the last installment of your living allowance. You should use this for your passage back to Yokohama. I have been busy securing a job in the lower part of the parliament for you. I have also sent your photograph to a matchmaker who will arrange several
o-miai meetings for you when you return. A good bride who will bring you a son someday, as well as maybe some more connections for your burgeoning political career.

  I look forward to your return.

  Your father.

  Many nights Takada lay awake, splayed over his sheets, his arms extended across his bed, his legs tucked tightly together. Like a cross. Like a man preparing for his execution.

  He thought of the world he had lived in for the past four years. Free of rules, regulations, and responsibility. Free of the oppressive weight of his father’s presence. Where he could read to his heart’s content and roam freely through the streets. For the first time he had friends of his own. Mostly Japanese, but Frenchmen as well. Here no one expected anything from him. No one demanded anything.

  But there, oh, how different things would be! He so dreaded his return.

  FORTY-FIVE

  My life in Paris began to take shape over the weeks that followed the start of my studies under Collin. Every morning I started out just as the sun was rising over the Seine. With my black hat pulled down over my ears and my paint box clutched in my hand, I would walk twenty minutes to Collin’s atelier.

  There the older students would already be preparing their easels, arranging the paint on their palettes, the model still wrapped in silk chiffon.

  The beginning students, myself included, worked in a smaller room off to the side. Our hands were yet to feel the splendor of a sable brush between our index finger and thumb. Instead, charcoal now blackened our palms and dusted our lungs. We sketched for hours, our necks stiff with pain, our wrists tired and sore.

  Collin would appear every hour, from behind the half-closed French doors that separated us. He would walk behind each of us, his careful breathing blowing on our necks as he examined our work. Occasionally he would walk to the center of the room and turn the marble statue that served as our model. “Now draw her from this side,” he would say before vanishing, and all of us would try our best to muffle our exasperated sighs.