Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater

by William T. Vollmann

Overview

“Intrepid journalist and novelist William T. Vollman’s colossal body of work stands unsurpassed for its range, moral imperative, and artistry.”
—Booklist

 

William T. Vollmann, the National Book Award–winning author of Europe Central, offers a charming, evocative, and piercing examination of the ancient Japanese tradition of Noh theatre and the keys it holds to our modern understanding of beauty.  Kissing the Mask is the first major book on Noh by an American writer since the 1916 publication the classic study Pisan Cantos and the Noh by Ezra Pound. But Kissing the Mask is pure Vollman—illustrated with photos by the author with provocative related side-discussions on femininity, transgender, kabuki, pornography, geishas, and more.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061985331
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/04/2010
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	840,571
File size:	804 KB

About the Author

William T. Vollmann is the author of seven novels, three collections of stories, and a seven-volume critique of violence, Rising Up and Rising Down. He is also the author of Poor People, a worldwide examination of poverty through the eyes of the impoverished themselves; Riding Toward Everywhere, an examination of the train-hopping hobo lifestyle; and Imperial, a panoramic look at one of the poorest areas in America. He has won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction, a Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and a Whiting Writers' Award. His journalism and fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, Spin and Granta. Vollmann lives in Sacramento, California.

Hometown:

Sacramento, California

Date of Birth:

July 28, 1959

Place of Birth:

Santa Monica, California

Education:

Attended Deep Springs College and Cornell University

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xv

0 Understatements About This String-Ball of Idle Thoughts 1

I Black Hair

1 "The Mask Is Most Important Always": The Noh Performances of Umewaka Rokuro 9

2 Schematics: Roles, Rules, Props 43

3 Malignance and Charm: A Catalogue of Female Masks 65

4 A Branch of Flowers: Steps to Ineffability 84

5 The Dragons of Kasuga: Texts, Places, Histories, Masks 91

6 Sunshine at Midnight: An Interview with Mr Mikata Shizuka 102

7 Perfect Faces: Maiden, Mask, Geisha, Wife, Princess 106

8 Aya Kudo and the Zo-onna: A Porn Model Compared with a Noh Goddess 117

9 Her Golden Lips Slightly Parted: An Image of Kannon 126

10 Crossing the Abyss: The Three Beings of Three Women 128

11 What Is Grace?: A List and a Possible Hermeneutic 141

12 Rainbow Skirts: The Loveliness of Lady Yang 166

13 Jewels in the Darkness: The Dances of Kofumi-san and Konomi-san 174

14 "She Cannot Do Anything Else": Compulsions, Costs, Achievements 202

15 Suzuka's Dressing Room: A Geisha Gets Ready 212

16 "They Just Want to Look in the Mirror": Yukiko Makes Me Over 222

17 "I Sit with My Legs Closed": Glimpses of Onnagatas 229

18 "There's No Ugly Lady Face": Katy Transforms 237

19 The Phallus of Tiresias: What Is a Woman? 244

II White Arms

20 A Curtain of Mist: Understatement and Concealment 255

21 In the Forest: An Apology 263

22 Sun-Bright Like Swords: The Beauty of Valkyries 264

23 Passing Light: Andrew Wyeth's Helga Pictures 282

24 Who Is the Willow Tree Goddess?: Snatches of a Play 292

III Beauty's Ghost

25 Snow in a Silver Bowl: An Epitaph for Radha's Grace 297

26 Beauty's Ghost: Ono No Komachi in Traditional Noh Plays 298

27 Urashima's Box: A Few Thoughts About Time 312

28 The Decay of the Angel: Komachi in the Noh Plays of Mishima Yukio 318

IV The Moon Maiden Goes Home

29 Sunshine on Silla: The Unknown 331

30 Pine Tree Constancy: "Takasago," "Izutsu" and "Matsukaze" 338

31 Kagekiyo's Daughter: "Semimaru" and the Plays of Separation 354

32 Behind the Rainbow Curtain: Going Home Beneath the Skin 367

Appendix A Descriptions of Feminine Beauty in The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon (ca. 1000-1010) 405

Appendix B Descriptions of Feminine Beauty in Some Old Norse Sources 408

Appendix C Descriptions of Feminine Beauty in Sappho and Miscellaneous Greek Lyric Sources 414

Appendix D Proportions of Feminine Beauty in Some Classical and Western European Sources 421

Appendix E Noh Play Groups, and Plays Mentioned 423

Glossary 425

Chronology 431

Notes 436

Bibliography 486

Note on the Illustrations 501

Note on the Orthography 502

Acknowledgments 503

What People are Saying About This

Pico Iyer

“[Vollmann’s] evocations of [Noh’s] death-haunted stories, its eerie masks, its male actors playing women...are so electric and strange, so enchanted, that they made me long for the very dramas that have often sent me toward the exit before the intermission.”

Editorial Reviews

Vollmann (Imperial; Europe Central), who has tackled an astonishing array of subjects in fiction and nonfiction, here explores female beauty—its creation and consumption—with a spotlight on highly stylized traditional Japanese Noh theater. Because male actors wearing strictly codified masks perform all Noh roles, men, ironically, are both the creators and purveyors of female beauty. From Noh, Vollmann explores other far-flung performances of feminine beauty, including revered geisha, L.A. transvestites, a porn model, Andrew Wyeth's Helga paintings, and legendary Norse women and even dons his own cross-gendered mask with the help of a makeup artist. While Vollmann's sprawling tome clearly contains committed research, it is a flawed hodgepodge of indulgent musings (or a "string-ball of idle thoughts," as he calls it). VERDICT Describing himself as "Deaf, dumb and illiterate in Japanese," Vollmann also admits, "This book cannot pretend to give anyone a working knowledge of Noh." Readers might instead try Japanese Nô Dramas, translated by Royall Tyler, or, for Japanese perspectives on beauty, the works of Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata.—Terry Hong, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program, Washington, DC

Library Journal

The performance of female characters by male Noh actors sparks a deeply researched, lovingly detailed, and obsessive discourse on the nature of feminine beauty by award-winning novelist and essayist Vollmann (Imperium). The book charts an increasingly peripatetic path through the meticulous yet ineffable art of Noh drama from the perspective of an enthusiast, all the while groping toward some definition of beauty and the feminine. But the feminine, and even the label “female,” is something widely claimed, and so the search takes him from a Tokyo transvestite bar to the feet of a master Noh actor—Umewaka Rokuro, scion of an ancient acting family—to the lips of the uncanny masks themselves, the kimonos of Kabuki geishas, and well beyond, traipsing far and wide across India, Babylon, the American fashion magazine industry, old Norse literature, the paintings of Andrew Wyeth, Yukio Mishima's Noh heroine Komachi, and a transgender community in Los Angeles, among other stops. The fervently reflective, probing narrative—replete with footnotes, glossary, illustrations, appendixes, and asides—demands patience, but rewards it on almost every page. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

The performance of female characters by male Noh actors sparks a deeply researched, lovingly detailed, and obsessive discourse on the nature of feminine beauty....[A] fervently reflective, probing narrative...[that] rewards it on almost every page.” — Publishers Weekly

“[A] provocative inquiry into beauty and desire... [Vollmann] is a passionate and penetrating observer ... a daring, brilliant, and idiosyncratic quest astonishing in its discernment, scope, and feeling.” — Booklist

“[Vollmann’s] evocations of [Noh’s] death-haunted stories, its eerie masks, its male actors playing women...are so electric and strange, so enchanted, that they made me long for the very dramas that have often sent me toward the exit before the intermission.” — Pico Iyer, New York Times Book Review

“Reward[s] the reader who stays with it for the long trip, the way a travel chronicle does.... Vollmann is not just a writer who admires. He is a writer who looks and touches.” — San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher

Reward[s] the reader who stays with it for the long trip, the way a travel chronicle does.... Vollmann is not just a writer who admires. He is a writer who looks and touches.

San Francisco Chronicle

[A] provocative inquiry into beauty and desire... [Vollmann] is a passionate and penetrating observer ... a daring, brilliant, and idiosyncratic quest astonishing in its discernment, scope, and feeling.

Booklist

[Vollmann’s] evocations of [Noh’s] death-haunted stories, its eerie masks, its male actors playing women...are so electric and strange, so enchanted, that they made me long for the very dramas that have often sent me toward the exit before the intermission.

Pico Iyer

[A] provocative inquiry into beauty and desire... [Vollmann] is a passionate and penetrating observer ... a daring, brilliant, and idiosyncratic quest astonishing in its discernment, scope, and feeling.

Booklist

Reward[s] the reader who stays with it for the long trip, the way a travel chronicle does.... Vollmann is not just a writer who admires. He is a writer who looks and touches.

San Francisco Chronicle

[Vollmann’s] evocations of [Noh’s] death-haunted stories, its eerie masks, its male actors playing women...are so electric and strange, so enchanted, that they made me long for the very dramas that have often sent me toward the exit before the intermission.

Pico Iyer