The Mask Carver's Son (15 page)

“Do you mean that I appear to be as cold and as inanimate as the trunk of a fallen tree?” I asked, wounded that someone I held in such high esteem would think me similar to something from which I had spent my entire childhood hoping to escape.

“But why does this cause you so much concern, my friend?” he asked. “Such a beautiful name, such a beautiful face.” He paused and moved closer to me, his gaze reflecting his intensity.

“Your face is tranquil and still on the surface. The skin smooth and palpable. Young like a child. But behind your eyes, I see you are wizened,” he continued. “You are like an old spirit trapped behind a young boy’s mask.”

I remember that these words caused me to pull away from him, remove myself from his gaze. It had never occurred to me that I might carry so many traces of my father.

“I am attracted to your purity,” he said once more. “The wood makes you more intriguing, but it is the celestial quality to which I am drawn.”

I was no longer hearing his words. He had pushed me back into the grasp of those who brought me into this world: my mother’s purity, my father’s wood. Noboru had seen me as the fossil I truly was, and I shuddered to think he had seen me so clearly.

T
here is something to be said for the first person who can look at you and tell you who you truly are. In a way, that person becomes your first mirror, the one who sees your reflection and encourages you not to look away but rather to take a deeper look. Such was the case with Noboru.

*   *   *

After he had confessed why he had pursued a friendship with me, I found myself withdrawing from him and immersing myself in my work.

He came to me one day when I was reproducing a painting inspired by the tradition of Kano Eitoku. I had been working on the rendering of cranes for nearly three hours.

“Hello, friend,” he whispered from behind me, and I turned around to see him. “I have not seen you outside of class for several days.”

His eyes were gleaming like a mountain lion’s, and I turned away from him, unnerved by the intensity of his gaze.

“I have been busy,” I answered. “I have had little time for recreation.”

“Let’s get some tea,” he suggested playfully as he extended his sockless foot over the dry section of my painting.

“Not today,” I replied, and even I found myself bored by the tone of my voice.

“Aren’t we friends, Yamamoto-kun?” he tried once more.

I knew that if I looked at him again, I might crumble. His large wet eyes looked at me languidly, his silky hair dangled in front. But he knew so little of my past. Already he had seen a sliver of my life in Kyoto. He had read it in the markings of my face. But still I struggled there silently. I did not know if I was ready to reveal any more to him.

“I see you are painting cranes,” he said wistfully, interrupting my interior monologue.

He looked up at the ceiling, the flood of afternoon light penetrating the thin bamboo slats.

“Have I ever told you, Kiyoki, that I grew up by the sea?”

N
oboru hated nothing more than the smell of salt water, even though he was practically born at the sea’s foaming mouth. He told me that his father’s house was built on bamboo stilts and that it stood like a long-legged beggar whose feet were submerged in the sand and who pleaded every night with the raging waters not to be carried away.

Most of the men in the village earned their living by making fishing nets. But Noboru’s father made paper fans. While his father fashioned the split bamboo into smooth, tiny handles, his mother spent the day painting the rice paper with either the palest landscape or the calligraphic lines of a poem.

Noboru attributed his talent to his mother; she was the holder of the brush and the keeper of color in the family. She would take the half-moon circles of paper and, through her subtle washes of ink, give them life. His father gave them backing and structure. She gave them the pinkness of
sakura
, the orange of
momiji
, the blueness of the waves, and the height of the tsunami.

The ink and paper had been his guardians while his parents worked until dusk, leaving him alone. He learned to control the bleeding of the ink by holding his brush high, and to trace the movements of his brush by propelling each line by the force of his body. He learned that he should never be afraid of black, that he should always be bold.

But Noboru also had the gift of subtlety. He could paint a
sakura hubuki
, he could paint the fog, and he could paint the snow.

Every night he slept in darkness, to the sound of the water roaring and his parents’ muffled sighs. He tossed between their sleeping bodies, their shadows rising on the walls like the crashing waves beneath the house. In these nights, he would will himself to sleep and delve into the darkness to search for his dreams.

He had heard that there was a place on the other side of the ocean where men had pale skin and burned in the sun. But it was not until he was thirteen that he heard that these men also painted figures that were so real, it seemed they could walk off the page. Because they used thick and luminescent pigments, their pictures had such depth that one could be submerged in the architecture of the images.

He had learned all of this from his uncle, who returned to the village every April. Tall and wiry, his smile accentuated by the black mustache suspended between his nose and lip, he arrived, seeming as foreign as the prints he had rolled up in his suitcase.

He was Noboru’s father’s younger brother, who had left the village by the sea for the great capital. Now he worked as an importer of Western prints. He wrote and traveled and had been an editor for the art journal
Hosun.
Every time he returned to the house of his childhood, now the house of Noboru’s father, he would slide off his loafers, pull up the pleat of his trousers, and complain about the heat. Noboru’s mother said she was sorry, the best they could do for him was to give him a cold glass of
mugi-cha.

She would return from the kitchen with a tray of iced cups of wheat tea and slide open the shoji to where the men were sitting. There she would kneel and beg of him in her soft, melodious voice, beautiful in its distinct southern dialect, to take the cold drink, apologizing that they did not have anything more to give him on this hot evening. And then from the sash of her kimono, she offered him a freshly painted fan.

Pale white stretched over a bamboo spine. The flattened grains of rice floated in the parchment like sleeping worms.

Just as I had, Noboru wondered if he was like them. He wondered if he would ever be free.

*   *   *

The only person the uncle loved more than himself was his nephew. His love for Noboru was the only reason he returned to his village every year. The young Noboru was precocious, energetic, and displayed an incredible artistic sensibility.

The uncle claimed that he had discovered Noboru’s gift. But his mother had known of it for years.

Noboru painted everything he could imagine. He sketched the mountains and colored butterflies, and he created intricate battle scenes with sword-clashing, heavy-armored samurai and palanquins containing sleeping princesses.

When he entered high school and learned of the painters of the Kano and Tosa schools, Noboru displayed a prodigious talent for re-creating their landscapes. He experimented with black ink and with the ground pigment he found in his parents’ studio. Like that of a wizened calligrapher, his body turned with every movement of his brush; his painting became a dance, and his dancing gave birth to the painting.

Fully aware of his nephew’s talent, during one of his visits the uncle brought with him a book entitled
European Artists of the Nineteenth Century.
It was this book that propelled Noboru into his lifelong obsession.

Through the illustrations in this book Noboru tried to teach himself the laws of perspective. He practiced shadowing, drawing the same object during the early morning, late afternoon, and evening, until he understood how the light varied and how it affected the object of his study.

When he came of age, his uncle offered to pay his expenses, should the Tokyo School of Fine Arts accept him into its prestigious program.

When the school’s letter of acceptance arrived, his parents embraced their only son. They took what money they had saved over the years and told him to buy the finest set of paints Tokyo offered. The next month he left his tiny village, carrying little more than a small satchel and a homemade
o-bento
containing three salmon rolls made by his mother’s tiny and talented hands.

When he bade them his final farewell, they masked their tear-filled eyes by hiding behind their fans.

*   *   *

And so it was that I learned the story of my closest friend at the academy. He had told me of his life before Tokyo, so how could I not tell him mine? We left that night for a tea shop near Asakusa. There amid the light of red lanterns and the warmth of several cups of sake, I told him much of what I have written down here.

This time, after I had conveyed my story—for it was the first time it had been spoken from my lips—I welcomed the silence that came upon the room. For I believed that our friendship was forever sealed, that no matter what came between us, we shared an intrinsic and essential bond, one that I believed could never be broken. In the end, however, I would underestimate certain powers.

Powers such as the sheer force of the sea.

N
oboru’s friendship was the only glimmer of light in my otherwise bleak existence. The absence of color in the big city and within the walls of the school pained me. Having been blessed with a childhood that never lacked in autumn hue, snowfalls, or cherry blossom winds, my paper absorbed every color and every season. Here, within the city and within the classroom, I quickly detected a profound difference. Tokyo had long since begun to turn the wheels of change, whereas Kyoto had fought against it. And despite all of the energy and progressive undertakings surging through the city, the walls of the School of Fine Arts struggled to be impervious. Perhaps that was what caused me to be so especially unsettled; I had come from the eternal city of Kyoto to one deeply dedicated to progress. And yet I could not submerge myself in the revolution; I was cast into one of the last remaining strongholds in the city, a wooden fortress firmly rejecting any change.

During the first semester, Morita sensei assigned the class the task of studying the works of the great painter Sesshu Toyo. Struggling to reproduce Sesshu’s landscape, we worked silently under the watchful eye of Morita sensei.

Sesshu did not paint with his brush. Instead, he carved. The sixfold screen was not a plane of paper but a piece of stone in which he could unearth an entire terrain of mountains.

He coined the ax-cut brushstroke, slicing away the whiteness of the page to create cliffs. His shrubs looked more like vines, protruding and, in some cases, choking the mountains from which they grew. His mountains were not soft and sloping; they were rocky and jagged. They stood out like rugged towers against a soft, misting sky.

Noboru and I both found such assignments torturous. Although he excelled in them, I struggled to capture the strokes on the page. Both our minds were elsewhere. We both dreamed of someday being
yoga
painters—Japanese painters who used oil and canvas and whose works were executed in the European style. After our long sessions in class, we would walk to a small tea shop and pore over the images of the great painters from the West—Delacroix, Corot, Ingres. We imagined ourselves viewing the creation of
Liberty Leading the People.
We saw the artist blending his pigments on a slab of polished pine. We saw the swish of his brush in the clouds of tinted jars of turpentine; we saw the stretch of naked canvas bejeweled.

We would nearly cry with envy when we saw the first reproductions of the Impressionists—Manet, Monet, Morisot. We memorized their names until they fell from our ears like notes from a well-known symphony.

We closed our eyes and imagined ourselves stepping into Pissarro’s
Entering the Village of Voisins.
We saw the steel gray of the sky, the autumn-stripped branches, and the village shadowed by the approaching dusk. Horse-drawn carriage. Cathedral in the distance. If the magazine had provided a door, we would have gladly entered.

With our fingers extended, we traced the lines of their strokes as if it would help us learn the way these Europeans wielded their brushes. We imagined the wooden tray before us was a shining palette and we dipped our fingers into the cups of tea as if they were pots of warm pigment. And I, with the liquid running down my fingers, traced his profile on the glass.

*   *   *

During my first few months in Tokyo, I was conscious that I had begun to change. No longer did I think incessantly of Father and how I had left him behind. I began to enjoy myself and concentrate on my classes. Although I struggled with the curriculum, I was overjoyed to have found Noboru. When I was with him and when we were lost in discussions of Western painting, I was happier than I had ever been.

There were occasional reminders of Father, of course. Ones that I could not ignore. The plum tree outside my window. Its crooked boughs and ripening yellow fruit. The sight of Ariyoshi’s aging form.

I had started one or two letters to Father, although I never finished them. I always ended up crumpling the rice paper into tiny white balls and tossing them into the brazier.

I thought he would always be there. Forever in Kyoto. Eternal, like his masks. I had grown up believing love was transient and pain lasted forever.

So you must understand my surprise when around the third month of my studies in Tokyo, a letter was delivered to Ariyoshi’s house informing me that Iwasaki-sama, the patriarch of the Kanze theater, was coming to Tokyo. He would attend to some business associated with the Noh community, and in his letter requested to meet with me at a time suitable to my convenience.

I had not seen Iwasaki-sama in years. Not since that day I had traveled as a young boy with Father and his masks to the Kanze theater. I sat down on my tatami and tried to recall his face. I remembered his full cheeks and black hair. I saw him as he had been on that day: when he held Father’s masks in his hands and informed him with great embarrassment that the theater could no longer afford his masks.

I took out a sheet of rice paper and in long black strokes wrote that if it was convenient to him, I would meet him in front of the campus gates the following day at six o’clock.

*   *   *

The next day, after I had finished my classes, I walked out of the main building and saw him standing underneath the iron gates.

He stood with the stature of a proud actor, his posture learned since childhood, his feet firmly planted on the ground and his stomach puffing proudly over his sash. Immediately I was struck by his resemblance to Grandfather, who I saw in the face of Iwasaki-sama. He would have worn the scowl of the current patriarch, had he lived to see me take the path I had chosen. He would never have been able to accept that the great family tradition would die with Father. A man not even his son.

Iwasaki’s face had aged gravely. And had I not known better, I might have thought that he wore a mask. His skin had grown gray. His hair had been cast over in white. There was hardly a likeness to the man who had ascended to the rank of patriarch so many years before. “Kanze Iwasaki-sama,” I said as I greeted him reverently, my forehead straining to reach my sandals. “I am honored that you have called on me. I realize how busy you must be.”

He nodded solemnly. “Let us go someplace quiet, Yamamoto-kun. Let us go someplace where we can speak.”

As the sun descended into the clouds, the moon slowly became its shining replacement. I walked behind the patriarch, whose shadow enveloped me. And once again I felt swallowed. As if Father had sent a messenger, in the guise of Grandfather.

Only father had not sent him. And as a result, his silence was all the more powerful.