The Mask Carver's Son (12 page)

Iwasaki untied the cords and carefully returned the mask to my father. He was the oldest and most revered actor of the Kanze troupe. He had ascended to patriarch earlier that year.

“As you know, Yamamoto-san,” he began, his voice suddenly sounding grave and dispelling the former ease that had floated through the air, “for several years now the attendance at our performances has dwindled. It is no longer the glorious days of the Tokugawa when almost every seat was filled. At present we consider ourselves lucky if the first box has more than three people.

“Our treasury is almost empty, and we are not even sure we can afford coal for the braziers. You know that we have bought countless masks from you in the past, often during times when we should have saved the money that our forefathers had left for the survival of the theater. But we cannot help ourselves. Your masks have the power to seduce us. They dangle before our eyes, more precious than the rarest jewels.

“And so, Yamamoto-san, although I wish we could afford all three of your masks, I am afraid we can afford none of them. But as I see how my peers have reacted so strongly to the Ishi-O-Jo mask, I am willing to offer you three gold kobans for it. I understand, as you typically charge fifteen kobans, that this might be insulting to you. But, alas, it is all we can offer.”

The heads of the other two actors bowed humbly to their chests.

Father acknowledged their humility with the nodding of his head.

“Save your money, patriarch,” he said quietly. “I offer you these three masks for the sake and renewed prosperity of Noh.”

He wrapped the three masks back in the
furoshiki
and pushed them over the tatami till they rested in front of Iwasaki.

The patriarch pressed the tip of his forehead to the floor, his arms outstretched, his palms flat on the tatami. The other two actors followed, mimicking their patriarch’s motions of reverence.

“We will be indebted to you for several generations,” said Iwasaki. “I hope I will live to see the day when our sons purchase masks carved by your son, Kiyoki.”

The three actors turned and bowed their heads in my direction.

Father did not acknowledge Iwasaki’s last statement. “Kiyoki,” he said, “we must return home before it gets dark.”

We excused ourselves and returned the way we had entered, passing over the
hashigakari.
We slid into our sandals without speaking, and returned home through the forest without uttering a word.

Father would seem forever different to me after that afternoon. I had seen him offer his masks, his priceless treasures, for not even a single piece of gold. He offered them with outstretched hands, like a priest offering sacrifice to an ailing god.

That night I dreamed of my mother. I dreamed that she prayed to the great Buddha to give her brother back his life. I dreamed that, as she raised her eyes to the face of the great bronze deity, she could no longer see his face. Forever sealed from her gaze, the great image of Buddha, completely covered by a mask.

I
do not think I ever took notice that my family’s house had begun to decay. The five-room structure, which included the kitchen and three tatami rooms, as well as the small room on the second level that Father used as his studio, had been built by Grandfather before his marriage to Grandmother. Grandfather’s family owned almost all of the land by the mountain, living by its side for nearly five hundred years. They had journeyed on the same dirt roads by which my father and I still traveled. The senior actors rested in the cushioned seats of the carrying chairs, while the younger members walked alongside the horses, saddled with the precious costumes rolled up in carrying cloth.

The masks, however, for the day’s performance rested carefully in the lap of the patriarch. They were swaddled in a silk
furoshiki
, the Kanze crest embroidered on the outermost fabric, their comfort and safety considered even more precious than the actors themselves.

They had arrived at the imperial walls of the ancient court, where they performed for the emperor Go-Komatsu, they traveled to Kitayama where they performed for the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, one of the great Noh patrons. Four hundred eighty-one years ago, in the days when Zeami still lived, Noh was one of the most exalted art forms. And my ancestors were practitioners of the art.

The original house of my ancestors no longer existed. Grandfather’s father was the last to live in it before it was consumed by flames. The new Yamamoto structure, the home of my birth, had been built closer to the mountain, as Grandfather, much like the rest of my family, believed that the great Mount Daigo was a shield from evil.

Grandfather chose a thatched roof rather than a tiled one, for he was a man of great tradition and believed that he should honor the way in which his ancestors lived, rather than replace it with a symbol of modernity.

The inner sanctum of the house was dark, constructed from pine trees felled from the adjacent forest. The ceiling beams were left uncovered, exposing the latticework of interlacing planks. Years of the hearth’s flames had blackened the wood so now it appeared dark as ebony, the ancient soot thick and gleaming, the wood interred in its own stygian lacquer.

Light penetrated the house only through the rice-paper windows. When the sun served as illuminator, the threads floating in the parchment appeared like silkworms trapped in a flat white sea. I would often place my finger on the paper screen, taut as a drum skin, and trace the curl of each rice fiber. I would see myself in their entrapment and wonder if I would ever have enough courage to free myself from the prison of my destiny, or if I would succumb to my father’s wishes and carve as he had, encasing myself in wood.

Father, having removed himself from the perfunctory duties of life, had no spirit for maintaining our home. His instinct caused him to be a tidy man, who began clearing the dishes as soon as he finished eating and who swept up the shavings of cypress wood after he finished carving. But those actions were mere rituals for him, and they could not be separated from the act of eating or the art of carving. I do believe that he would have not eaten at all had the action not enabled him to fuel his body for his carving.

The house, however, had not been born from his hands, and thus he felt no connection to it. When the roof leaked and the rainwater soaked into the tatami, it was I, not my father, who rushed to capture the cascade of water in a ceramic bowl. Father neglected to oil the wooden facade of our home, which thus appeared increasingly weather-beaten with each passing year.

After the last of the ceramic plates we had used for years had broken, Father failed to replace them. We ate from mother’s lacquerware dishes as if they were bowls and plates for no special occasion. Once shining and scratch-free, they became dull and streaked with age. A patina formed from years of enduring our careless male mouths.

Father’s income dwindled drastically over the years due to the theater’s disastrous fiscal state. Given Father’s indifference to worldly goods, our expenses were few. We ate produce from the local farmers, and father obtained his carving wood from the forest.

Now, as I look back into my childhood, I realize that we lived quite modestly in a once splendid home that became increasingly older and shabbier. A shell of its former state, no longer proud, it suffered from the weight of our neglect. Weary and needy, the wooden structure sagged like the Noh actors standing on the edge of the stage chanting to an empty theater. Both existed as anachronisms, caught between the traditional world of the past and the increasingly modern days of the present. Like our house, once built on the pride and the popularity of the Noh tradition, the ancient ways had begun to decay. Alas, the reforms of Meiji had come to Mount Daigo and, much to the chagrin of Father and the men of the theater, all that had once been revered began to crumble.

W
here my father despised the wave of Westernization brought about by the Meiji, I embraced it. I loved the influence of European architecture that was reflected in all of the new structures being built in Japan, the new technology that was beginning to improve our way of life. Railroads were being constructed; stronger bridges were being engineered. Being a teenager at this time was one of the most exciting periods in my life. The government sponsored publishers to send texts to classrooms throughout Japan, to whet the eager appetites of the nation’s children, and encouraged the next generation of architects, engineers, and, yes, even artists.

Schooling came easy to me. I devoured texts with hungry eyes and memorized the world map after studying it for countless hours. For the first time in my life, I realized that the country of my birth was an island surrounded by vast dark waters, not an endless strip of land surrounded by unending patches of mountains.

Europe, the land that brought us the locomotive and the daguerreotype, was only a steamship voyage away. At night I would dream of an enormous ship, clouds of smoke billowing from its steel silos, the bell announcing the boarding of all passengers, I among them, dressed in woolen suit and cravat, with ticket in hand.

At sixteen, after acquiring a copy of
Hosun
, an arts magazine that reproduced the works of several European artists, I convinced myself of my future vocation. I was going to be a Western-style painter, for those were the paintings that I loved. The landscapes had depth, the figures had volume, and the palette was rich and varied. I would not be like my father, with his ashen masks, I secretly told myself. I was born on the cusp of a new age.

I can still remember the ricocheting pangs of excitement I felt as I studied those first reproduced images. The first painting remains branded into my memory, its image pressed into the stone palimpsest of my mind: Dürer’s
Self-portrait with a Thistle.
The artist’s semblance emerges through a skin as translucent as eggshells, his velvet robes a whale blue, piped in carmine ribbon. Carved away from the background of shadows, he turns to me. I meet his small dark eyes. His body is bound, like my own, with an inner dress of white cotton gathered by satin cords pulled across a pleated bodice, and I, a young boy, am dressed in my weekend kimono, with a broad cotton obi wrapped tightly around my waist.

What else did I share with this fair-skinned, yellow-haired painter whose arched nose and full lips rose from the second dimension and pierced the now ragged pages of my magazine? What was it that I recognized, that made me pause for so many hours? Almost four hundred years and an entire continent separated us, but still this image of the young artist reached out toward me.

Perhaps it was Dürer’s youth: he was only twenty-two when he painted his self-portrait, and I only sixteen when I first saw it. At such an impressionable age, seeing a painter who is already so masterful with the brush and whose countenance already glows with such intensity, I hoped that someday I would become the same.

I knew that I took easily to the brush; my sessions carving with Father had proven that. Whereas my carving of the masks was mediocre, my painting of the faces rivaled his.

Of the entire process, it was the painting of the masks that most enthralled me.

I learned much about pigments and the techniques of painting through my apprenticeship with Father. Like a canvas, a Noh mask before it is painted must first be primed in white. We call this gessolike pigment
gofun
, and it is created by blending a mixture of crushed seashells and a pale glue. Once the wooden face is painted white, natural paints—composed of various minerals such as powdered crystal, cinnabar, ultramarine, and rare and precious gilt and mica—are applied. Suddenly the face becomes alive. Through color. And I knew that was what I intended to pursue. But not the painting of masks. The painting of life.

Secretly I wished that my father would take notice of my talent with color and the painting of masks. I suppose I wished he had vocalized his disappointment when he discovered me crouched, secretly sketching his face. But, alas, he kept these thoughts contained.

I too was guilty of silence. I lowered my eyes in reverence when he stared at me. I held my robe close to my thighs when I tiptoed through the house so the cloth would not rustle and I would not make a sound. Silence, it seems, was our curse.

I
will remember it always, that fine day in April. The cherry blossoms had begun their season; big, beautiful pink buds fastened themselves to hundreds of heavy ancient boughs that bordered the entrance into Daigo. And the pathway that I walked almost every day was transformed into a magical road; merging branches, dressed in roping strands of pearls and tourmaline, formed a canopy, and sunlight was diffused through the soft skin of petals. I remember that day vividly and mourn its ephemerality: it was the day I bought my first set of paints.

After seeing the painting that Dürer did when he was only twenty-two, I had realized with absolute certainty that I must purchase the proper supplies and begin painting at once. Of course, my father had several brushes and dried pigments that he used when doing the final painting of his masks, but to ask him if I could use them for painting a surface other than a mask was inconceivable.

I could not ask my father for money. I saw my father go to his chest and remove his strands of silver and gold coins with less and less frequency. Although our family rested on the laurels of our name and the long line of actors who belonged to our ancestry, we existed as a family with title only, living in an increasingly decaying house.

Had my father known that I intended to squander money on paints, he would probably have opened our gate and thrown me into an early exile. So I harbored my dream in private. After school I would sketch the portraits of some of my classmates for one ryo and save each coin until I had enough for my first set of paints.

It took me nearly seven months to earn enough funds for the initial purchase. I decided to travel to Yamada’s stationery store, down by Shijo-dori, where a friend of mine informed me that the proprietor was importing paints from England. I was soon to learn my first lesson as an artist—that the materials were painfully expensive. I had barely enough money to buy a small set of watercolors and two oxtail brushes. Still, my entire boyhood savings seemed insignificant in comparison with the sheer ecstasy I received from the purchase.

The paints rested in their individual wells, discs of unblemished colors neatly arranged within the snug fittings of a wooden box. There were eight different shades—all of the primary colors and their complements—plus the essential black and white. I had never in my life seen such dense, rich color. I remember that, as I began the journey back to Daigo, I held the box at arm’s length in front of me; it was my newly bought treasure, and I let it guide me home.

*   *   *

During the years of my lonely adolescence, I discovered that it is not the hands of the artist that are important; it is his eyes. Years later I would reflect back on this discovery and recognize it as the turning point of my career—when I realized that my eyes were connected to my spirit and that they possessed their own vision. But as a young man, I knew them only as tools that enabled me to see, study, and replicate.

Like most Japanese, I taught myself something new by copying something old. In between my academics, I studied the copperplate prints and paintings in the magazine that the Meiji Fine Arts Society had begun circulating throughout Japan. I tried to reproduce some of their images in either a pencil sketch or with my watercolors. In particular, I nurtured an obsession with the human body, spending endless hours trying to obtain an anatomically correct figure. Without a live model, my efforts proved somewhat futile. In the evenings, after I had finished my homework, I would often try to draw parts of my own body—sometimes a leg or part of my hand. But I still found it difficult to construct an entire figure with the proper proportions.

I no longer shared sleeping quarters with my father but chose to sleep in the tatami room that my parents had once shared, where now only the
butsudan
remained. Under the cover of darkness, I would remove my body from the heavy layers of my blanket while the moonbeams penetrated the paper of my window. In these nights of adolescent insomnia, the length of my naked leg served as my study; in the dim light my eyes struggled to discern every sinew, anticipate every tendon, while my hand tried to re-create my own flesh on paper. And sometimes I stripped naked; the cotton weave of my
yukata
grazing my hairless flesh as it fell in folds to the floor.

I offered myself to the moonlight; the whiteness of the stars illuminated my skeleton, while the darkness shadowed my flesh. And in the chiaroscuro of these clandestine evenings, my image found itself on the former blankness of a page. The lines of my sketch struggled fiercely with the laws of anatomy, trying to re-create some semblance of the human form. But I was never able to achieve the appropriate distance or the appropriate angle. I became even more frustrated than when I had begun.

I hid my mountains of sketches inside the drawers of Grandmother’s old
tansu
chest. There my work was concealed, carefully shrouded by her neatly folded kimonos, her heavy brocaded obis. “She embraces my work,” I would whisper to myself as I wrapped the deep-colored bolts of cloth around the thick pieces of paper. I felt her spirit beside me. I imagined her alive and still living in the old
chashitsu
, her small head nodding, her eyes warm and understanding. “It is our secret, Grandma,” I would murmur as I slid the dark wooden drawers shut and silently folded the iron latch. “I will make you proud.”

When I was seventeen I entered a watercolor of Mount Daigo in autumn in a school art contest and was awarded first prize. I immediately used it to buy the famous
Kaitai Shinsho, the New Book of Anatomy
. It was one of the first books of its kind to be published in Japan. This medical book, translated from the original German, enabled me to study the body in greater detail and to better understand how the parts of the figure interrelated to the whole. Still, there was a limit to what I could teach myself through books; I knew I needed a more thorough art education if I was to become an accomplished painter.

Had I not thought that I had the potential for greatness, I would never have allowed myself to dream. But somewhere inside me, buried underneath several layers of cloth and skin, a voice called to me. It spoke to me not in Japanese but in a language of its own; it formed its vocabulary through colors and its sentences through images. Every morning as I awakened and every evening as I slept, it reminded me of my destiny. I savored the arrival of these images in my mind. They were in the form of paintings, and they reflected the work of an artist I had seen in a book or magazine. An apple might be snatched from a basket on a Dutch master’s table, a figure lifted from a Rubens landscape. And, much like the fragment of a dream one recalls hours later, they remained with me, almost as if they were a premonition of the paintings I had yet to paint.

*   *   *

In 1894, my last year in high school, aspiring artists had far fewer opportunities to study Western oil painting than their colleagues had ten years earlier. During those first years of the Meiji government, Western art was viewed as a science rather than an aesthetic, a science whose techniques should be appreciated, learned, and mastered. In the 1870s, the Meiji encouraged Western training for its artists so that Japan might compete in all realms of Western society. The government even went as far as to bring Europeans to Japan to instruct students from around the country. These were glorious and exciting times for Japanese artists who wished to study the Western style. Had I been born a few years earlier, I might have attended the Technical Art School in Tokyo and studied with Antonio Fontanesi, the Italian master of nineteenth-century landscape painting who had been sponsored by the Meiji government to teach at the school. But by 1883, long before I was even ready to enter high school, the government abruptly changed its position toward the arts and terminated this progressive institution. While our scientists and engineers continued to receive government support, we artists did not.

Perhaps the Meiji would have continued their support of Japanese artists interested in the Western style had they been more successful in the international competitions of that period. Unfortunately these artists repeatedly lost to those who painted in the traditional styles because Western art critics and judges wanted to see the Japanese continue to create in their native style: the subtle ink washes of the
kano-e
, the colorful and decorative tradition of the
korin
, the technically perfect woodblock prints.

Thus, our artists were encouraged to look back to the nation’s rich cultural past, as European and American artists suddenly showed an explosion of interest in all things Japanese. Fueled by a fascination with the exotica of the Orient, European artists found “the East” a well of inspiration. The great salon painters adorned their studios with folding screens painted in black, gold, and cinnabar. They dressed their models in silk kimonos, finely embroidered with colorful flower motifs, untied their sashes, and covered their coquettish smiles with hand-painted fans. The East was in vogue, a source of sexual fantasy and intrigue; Japan had become the land of a fireball sun, the giggling geisha, and the samurai sword.

In no time, collectors and scholars had arrived on our shores hoping to buy, or at least study, our many national treasures. Ernest Fenollosa and his Japanese protégé, Okakura Kakuzo, were two academics who crusaded throughout Japan crying for a return to the old traditions. Fenollosa and Okakura arrived in Japan with the goal of collecting the finest of our national works and taking them back to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Not only were these men successful in their journey, but they also secured positions as advisers to the Meiji bureaucrats and were placed on the Imperial Art Commission.

Blessed with great powers of persuasion, these two men convinced the government to dissolve the Technical School of Fine Arts and combine it with the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. As a result, an aspiring painter in 1894, someone like me, had little choice but to apply to the newly established Tokyo School of Fine Arts. The new school would be the complete opposite of the Technical School of Fine Arts, in which everything was Western. Okakura and Fenollosa, who oversaw the creation of the new school, concluded that it should be completely devoid of Western influence, thus strictly forbidding instruction in Western painting techniques. Its principal goal was to reestablish the traditional Japanese art forms that the nation had turned its back on only a few years before. Even the uniforms of the students, designed by Okakura Kakuzo himself, were to echo the traditional costume of the Nara period.

Since my record was excellent and my family background was equally impressive, my acceptance and subsequent scholarship to the school came as little surprise. As much as it was an honor to be admitted to the academy, however, I could not feign excitement.

Much to my dismay, the registration papers informed me that there were only three departments in the program: painting, sculpture, and crafts, all in the traditional Japanese techniques. The school offered no courses in
yoga
—what we call the Western style—or in oil painting or pencil drawing.

The prospect of an education in all things traditional made me miserable. I hungered for the West. The school that I had always anticipated attending, a place that I had perceived as my entranceway to a Western art education, had been radically transformed.

In my mind, I had already walked the streets of Paris, lost myself within the magnificent walls of the Louvre, and drunk coffee in a sidewalk café by the Seine. In Tokyo I feared that I would never learn the proper techniques for being a Western oil painter. The classes I was to take would surely not teach me the science of blending pigments, the laws of perspective, or the methods of modeling. I feared that I was not going forward at all; instead, I was leaving one house fiercely grounded in the ancient traditions for another.

I placated myself with the fact that I was at least going to study in Tokyo, where the wave toward modernization was strongest. As much as I loved the quiet and natural beauty of Kyoto, I knew that in the capital I would have bookstores, peers, and most importantly, the mouth to the West—the port in Yokohama.