The Mask Carver's Son

by Alyson Richman

I, Yamamoto Kiyoki, was now painting the great Yogo Pine, not as an original canvas but as tradition dictated. I would not betray this memory, this tradition, as I had betrayed Father and the others so many years before. I would probably betray them again, as a selfish man always seems to repeat his betrayals. But not today. Today was for them.

  I blended the malachite green with my knife and expelled every last one of my breaths before I had enough courage to place my first stroke on the wood.

  I layered green upon green. Gold upon gold. Until the green flourishes of the shrubbery swirled like verdant clouds and its brown trunk twisted and bowed, its gold knots tied in loops and its branches pierced and peaked. My body swayed and glided across the floorboards like a dancer. Like a Noh actor gripping a brush instead of a fan.

  Yamamoto Kiyoki, Pure Wood, had finally come home.

  Grandfather, I thought, can you see me here on your stage? Grandmother, it is I who paints the pine!

  And, Mother, do not worry, I will still paint my own paintings. But it was to Father, I yelled up to the heavens: “I have returned!”

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  I hoped to create an atelier of my own. I would rent the first floor of an old house and make it into a large studio where I could paint and instruct a few students. I envisioned myself as a Japanese Raphael Collin. I would grow a beard and wear a long blue smock over trousers. I would teach by day and do my own painting during the night.

  I needed money, of course. Five years before, I had sold all but one of my father’s masks. I had sold our ancestral home, its contents, and all its land, except three acres. Looking back now, I am surprised that, as hasty as I was as a young man, I had not sold everything that I had inherited. Wisely, I had kept three acres of the land that my grandfather’s family had maintained for centuries. It was almost adjacent to Mount Daigo and Sanpo-In, and it had originally been the site of my grandfather’s childhood home.

  There was nothing left of the old wooden house. According to Grandfather, it burned down during the first year of his marriage to my grandmother. The only thing that remained of the ancient structure was the kura, a storehouse that stood almost a hundred yards from the original house.

  The kura stood tall and lonely. Its exterior plaster walls were peeling, exposing its extremely crude insulation made from layers of dried mud and bits of rope. The roof was peaked and decorated with heavy black tiles. There was a bolted window on the second story that had been further sealed by the hammering of several wooden planks over it.

  I never believed that there was anything in the old storehouse. I believed that any valuables that had once been there had long since been recovered by either my grandfather or my father. I had kept the land only because I thought that one day I might need it. I was right.

  One night I dreamed that I lived inside its thick plaster walls and painted beneath its high vaulted ceilings. In my dream I could smell its damp wooden beams and feel its heavily rusted locks. I felt safe inside, impervious to the outside and its elements, nestled like a child in the womb.

  I awakened the next morning, bought a hammer and some candles from a local shop, and headed for the land that I could still call my own. I chopped at the outside door, breaking the locks with one heavy swing, and eagerly pried open the old dilapidated door.

  I was immediately hit by a piece of falling wood. I fumbled for a candle and a match and went deeper inside the crumbling structure. The room, now transformed from a dark cave into a glowing sanctuary, brimming with bales of brittle hay, seemed in need of repair, but was still filled with endless possibilities.

  Once I was inside, the structure seemed to be better preserved than I had initially thought. The roof had withstood the test of time, as the inside of the storehouse was surprisingly dry. Still, the air was cool and a bit stale. I walked a little farther and discovered a wooden staircase that led to the second story.

  The beams creaked under the weight of my body. I concentrated to keep my balance and not lose one of my sandals. To my amazement, six or seven cedar chests were neatly pushed against the far wall of the second floor. Each one was bound shut with yards of rope, but none of them had been secured by iron locks.

  * * *

  It took me nearly fourteen hours, almost two days’ work, to go through the contents of the chests in their entirety. But in the end, what I discovered was well worth it.

  The chests contained twenty-four costumes of the Noh theater. Some, I would later learn, were nearly three hundred years old. I can still recall the magnificent robes as I pulled each one from its cedar lair. Each had been carefully folded and meticulously placed on top of the other. They had remained unscathed, protected from the elements, for at least the duration of my lifetime.

  As I removed one robe after the other, each one seemed more splendid than the one that preceded it. There was a maiginu, a dancing robe, with an iridescent pattern of bamboo leaves that ran throughout the entire garment. There was the fragile and ethereal mizu-goromo. I held the transparent and gauzelike fabric between my fingers. I could see through the loosely woven threads and discern my hands beneath the robe’s cloth. The mizu-goromo, or water robe, was the costume typically worn by the old men of a play. It was soft and humble. It was ghostlike and, although there were so many robes in the chests that were far more dazzling, it was my favorite.

  Later on, when I finally took the collection to a dealer for an appraisal, I would see for the first time each robe laid out beside the others. I would learn that these were probably not the robes of my grandfather, but those of his father and his father before him.

  The robes were truly extraordinary. The collection contained at least three silk choken, the long silk kimonos worn by either male or female characters. One was decorated with a strong ishi-datani pattern, another with a sumptuous festoon of snow-covered camellias. Many were woven with threads of gold. Some had been dyed using the Edo-period katazone paste-relief technique.

  They were the costumes worn by my forefathers. They were the robes that draped their backs and heightened their performance. Perhaps some were gifts from generous shoguns, who stripped them from their own backs and flung them onto the stage to show their appreciation. Perhaps others were commissioned by them. I will never know their history. I will only know for how much I sold them. It was enough gold for me to live on for a very, very long time.

  FIFTY-NINE

  Had I not needed the money, I would have never have sold the robes. The dealer sold them for a price that few Japanese could have afforded at that time. The theaters did not have the money to purchase costumes of that quality. It was only the wealthy Western collectors who had developed an interest in esoterica and in the mystery of the artifacts.

  When my distant cousin Mitsutani Hiroyuki heard of the sale, he paid me a visit at the old kura. I was busy clearing out the second floor and was covered in dirt and sweat. I hardly recognized him, having not seen him since that day after the funeral when he helped me sell Father’s ancient masks.

  “Kiyoki!” he shouted up at me. “How could you sell those robes? They should never have left the country. They belonged to our blood! They belonged to the theater!” He was puffing, and his face was crimson and swollen.

  “You already sold your Father’s masks. We actors are reduced to wearing threadbare robes and everyday sashes! Do you not care?”

  “I needed to eat, cousin!” I shouted back.

  “So do I and so does my family. Do you think a Noh actor makes a decent living these days? I perform only once every two months at the Nishi Honganji. Do you think the other actors and I rip up the floor beams of the stage and sell them for firewood so that we can eat and stay warm in the winter?”

  He was shouting at me at the top of his lungs. His face was far redder now, and I feared he would die in front of me, just as Grandfather had.

  “I am sorry, Hiroyuki. I will do anything so that I can paint.”


  “You are not a painter,” he bellowed back. “You are nothing but a whore.”

  He turned his back on me, as I had thought about doing to the old man at the theater weeks before. But his words were bitter and hurtful all the same. And I didn’t have to look very deep into myself to recognize that there was a certain amount of truth to them.

  * * *

  Three months passed before I completely refurbished the storehouse as I had intended. The first floor would contain my studio and the area where I would instruct the students; the second floor would be the area where I would sleep. I built a crude kitchen and dug a well and installed a pump not too far from the structure. It was far from luxurious, but it was my own.

  I left word at the paper store and art stores near the university that I was offering classes to promising students who had an interest in Western-style painting. News of my atelier circulated slowly, as I had no fame or award to distinguish me from any other struggling painter of the time.

  As I waited for the students to come, I concentrated on my own painting. On bright days I would erect my easel outside of my studio and paint the mountain or the pagoda at Sanpo-In. Some days I would travel to the park outside Kiyomizudera and try to paint the prickly pines and the wide-leafed oaks.

  The sky in Japan began to depress me, however. If I adhered to the natural palette of the scenery, the colors on my canvas would inevitably become gray and muddy. If I chose the bright colors that I loved, my work seemed false and unrealistic. The natural shapes and foliage of Japan were inconsistent with the palette that I loved and had used so freely in France.

  The architecture here was somber. It was far from the confectionlike quality of the Parisian buildings, with their rolling curves and arabesque ironwork. I began to miss France terribly.

  The students came, but eventually they left. I became frustrated that they did not have the ability to spend hours in the Louvre and see the work of the old masters in person. I became angry that the sunlight here never seemed as golden as it did there. Unlike Collin, I was incapable of inspiring the few students who came through my door, and in the end, I drove them away.

  I could not paint here as I could when I was in France. I could not teach. I had no fame, and I had no distinction. As I walked down the streets, once so familiar to me in my childhood, I felt chills deep within my spine. People were staring at me, my own countrymen. Staring at me, as though I were a foreigner intruding in their sacred space.

  The old obasans with their hunched backs and crooked smiles glared at me through their cataracts. The village youngsters snickered as I walked past their school. Whether it was small children or elders who probably knew me as a young boy, all could sense that I was not like them. In the end, I believe that was what drove me back to France. For in France there were no expectations as to how I should be. I was undeniably different and would never be French. But I could do as I pleased and act as I wanted to without anyone ever condemning me for my oddness. Only my foreignness disturbed them. As an expatriate, I was free to do as I pleased.

  This time, however, I did not return to Paris. In 1903 I went south. I elected to paint in the small village just outside of Nice called Antibes. I bought a small apartment near the Mediterranean shore. Every morning, when I opened the windows, I was greeted by the blue of the sea and the light of the sun. I painted for solace and sold my work in both Cannes and Nice. I would have never left that beautiful village had the First World War not forced me to return to Japan.

  In the end, I would grow old here in Japan. Not in Kyoto, as I refused to return there, but in Tokyo. I would be too old to fight in either of the world wars. But they inevitably found their way onto my canvas. When paint became rationed, I found a way to make my own pigments. I used the yellow from ground chrysanthemums, the blue from berries, and the red and yellow from smashed plums.

  It was as if I were a child again.

  When the sirens sounded during the air raids, I often thought of my apartment in the south of France. I would imagine its terrace, and I would hold my hand to my face and try to recall the smell of the lavender bushes outside my door.

  * * *

  The walls that now enclose me are less forgiving. I live in a dusty grotto that refuses me any light. I have windows, but the sky here is not the sky of Europe, that blue-white color, the same frail color as a quail’s egg. The grass does not find its colony in meadows but in the prison between slabs of concrete, the artifice of parks. I don’t recall when it was that my body began to deteriorate, that my legs shriveled like dried strips of burdock, that my muscles atrophied and my skin was singed like burned rice paper.

  Sometimes, late at night, I see myself again as that young boy, holding my first set of watercolors before me, walking for hours like a diligent monk, delivering his treasure to the formidable mountain of Daigo. In my dream, the mountain forgives me for having abandoned her for those of another land. She blankets me in a thunderclap of falling cherry blossoms and washes away my sorrow with a soft, misting rain.

  And my dream always closes with the same image. Father, frozen on his deathbed, my fingers clasped tightly over his. Our hands forever entwined. But no longer can I make out that my palms are a fervid pink and his a pale, ghostly blue.

  In my dream they are now one and the same.

  And if I am feeling brave, when I rise, I allow myself to wonder. Wonder if my life has been in vain. That I might have made the wrong choices. For the Yamamoto line stops here. With me. The mask carver’s son.

  And still, all this time, I have carried with me my father’s mask. The one that has only eyes.

  I know my father carved this one especially for me. And so it is the only one that hangs on my wall. It stares at me with the same dark, bottomless eyes that only my father had. It stares at me without mercy. Those eyes, which see me for all I ever was and all that I am now. Those eyes, still pleading with me to uncover my chisels, those eyes that beseech me to complete its face.

  OBITUARY

  Asahi Shimbun

  November 16, 1967

  Yamamoto Kiyoki of Daigo, Kyoto, was found dead last week by city authorities in his apartment not far from Shinjuku station. The cause of death was apparently old age. Yamamoto Kiyoki, born 1875, was the son of Yamamoto Ryusei and Yamamoto Etsuko of Daigo, Kyoto, and the only offspring of the couple. His father, Yamamoto Ryusei, was the acclaimed mask carver of the Kanze Noh theater, and his maternal grandfather, Yamamoto Yuji, was the patriarch of the Daigo Kanze Theater from 1848 to 1881. The Daigo Kanze theater is no longer in existence.

  To the surprise of the authorities, discovered with the body of Yamamoto Kiyoki were nearly three hundred finished works of art attributed to the deceased, including approximately thirty unfinished canvases, as well as one Noh mask. According to the Department of Western Painting at the Tokyo Imperial Museum in Ueno, the works that Yamamoto Kiyoki left behind are of great interest to the museum and are being considered for the museum’s permanent collection. Also of interest to the museum are several volumes of diaries that Yamamoto Kiyoki inscribed documenting his travels to France, where he studied under the acclaimed French painter Raphael Collin (1850–1916), and detailed his experiences as an artist in Meiji Japan. The museum plans to examine all such material before releasing any further details to the public.

  Cremation services will be handled by the government and the ashes returned to the family grave in Daigo, as no existing family or friends could be located.

  As reported by Homori Naoki,

  reporter for the Asahi Shimbun

  Readers Guide

  The Mask Carver’s Son

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  The first part of the book, narrated by Kiyoki, describes events that happened before he was born. Why is this background information important for Kiyoki’s own story? How do you think Kiyoki learned so many details about his family’s history? Does hi
story repeat itself through the generations?

  Shattered by the deaths of his parents, his mentor, and his wife, Ryusei becomes silent, believing he should shut out emotion in favor of the wood. Kiyoki says, “I firmly believe that my father began carving only because he knew that whatever he created with the chisel could never die.” Does carving prevent Ryusei from feeling the pain of loss, or does it only cause more heartache by dividing him from the rest of the world?

  Does Ryusei blame Kiyoki for his wife’s death? Does he resent Kiyoki? Do you think he truly loves his son? What passages in the book indicate his feelings?

  Kiyoki discovers his late mother shared the same passion for art. How would Kiyoki’s life have been different if his mother had lived?

  Is the concept of wearing—and creating—masks symbolic to Kiyoki’s struggle to identify his own self? Is he ever able to rid himself of the identity of “the mask carver’s son”?

  Do you sympathize with Kiyoki’s struggle to carve his own path in life, separate from the duty and obligation he feels to his family? Or do you think he betrayed his father? Was selling his father’s masks a selfish act, or a necessary one?

  Compare and contrast Kiyoki and Ryusei. Does Kiyoki think he is similar to his father?

  When Kiyoki meets Norobu, he is surprised to feel romantic feelings for the first time in his life. Describe Kiyoki’s interpretation of his own sexuality.

  What role does each of Kiyoki’s acquaintances in Paris—Takada, Hashimoto, Isabelle, Collin—play in his development as an artist and as a person? Does he allow himself to get close to anyone there? Why or why not?

  What are the main differences in the art world in Japan and France as described by Kiyoki’s narrative? What are the differences in the culture of both places? How does the Westernization of Japan during this time period affect the story? Does Kiyoki “fit” into one better than the other?