The Mask Carver's Son (19 page)

A
s I spent the next few days packing up the contents of the house, it was evident that my family owned few things of substantial value. Since my childhood, I had realized that the bulk of my family’s stature was in our name rather than any material wealth. Over a span of many generations and fruitful marital alliances, we had accumulated a modest amount of land, furniture, and lacquerware. But, as Father’s masks could no longer be sold for their true worth due to Noh’s decline, the gold and currency we once had in plenty had dwindled from our household.

I knew it was wrong to sell to outsiders any of the masks that were carved by my father’s hand. Instead, I decided to donate the few that remained to the theater. In the evening, I bundled them in a large, broad
furoshiki
and dropped them at the base of the stage. I left no note and no explanation. In the honor of my father, I knew the masks would speak for themselves.

You must believe me, it was not that I searched our house looking for something to fund my painting aspirations. I came across my father’s collection of ancient masks almost by accident. I had returned to his studio to sweep out the last curls of cypress and wipe the shelves clean. The day before, I had packed away what I believed to be all of his carving tools when I discovered that Father had placed my last two letters inside a small pine box with his most precious belongings: his chisels and his jars of dried pigment. They lay there carefully folded and tied in twine. The empty words from a son who returned too late to say good-bye.

But now I was saying farewell to the man whose house I shared and whose craft I could not. It occurred to me, as I finished sweeping the last corners of the room, that I had forgotten the small storage compartment adjacent to the door. I knelt down and crawled into the tiny storage space, needing no candle or lantern to find the large cinnabar chest that lay inside. I could feel the intricately carved cover with my palms and the straight corners with my fingertips. Carefully and with effort, I managed to drag the carved container into the center of the room and remove the lid.

There, deep in the hollow of the chest, Father’s coveted collection of ancient masks was revealed to me. They were priceless, having been carved by the great masters who had preceded him centuries ago.

The carved seal on the inside of each mask identified the carver. I had seen him refer to these masks on occasion. Sometimes for a reference to a mask he was carving, sometimes for just a brief glance.

He had a Ko-Beshimi mask by Yukan, a Yase-Otoko mask by Tosui, a Warai-Jo mask by Sankobo, a Sanko-Jo mask by Mitsunaga, a Yoroboshi mask by Jiunin, an Okina mask by Mitsunaga, a Kuro-Hige mask by Zekan, a Shintai mask by Mitsuteru, a Shiwa-Jo by Fukurai, a Ko-Omote mask by Tatsuemon, and a Ko-Jo mask by Mitsuzane.

He had inherited several of these masks from my grandfather, who had inherited them from his father, who had received them from his father. They had been in the family for over three hundred years. The oldest mask in the collection was the Ko-Omote, carved in the early fifteenth century by Tatsuemon.

I picked up Ko-Omote and imagined that this was what my mother had looked like as a young girl. I caressed the rounded cheeks, traced the half-parted lips, and rubbed the delicate teeth, blackened with the resin of burned eggplant. To blend into the shadows. To be unseen.

I slipped the mask’s silk cord over my fingers and gently rocked it back and forth, revealing the mask’s magic. When I held her upright, her mouth curled upward into a demure smile. Then within seconds, when I tilted her downward, she succumbed to a deep sadness in which her eyes drooped and her mouth metamorphosed. She looked as though she was about to cry.

Once I overheard my father speaking with an actor who had expressed an interest in studying carving. He had asked my father if Ko-Omote was the simplest mask to carve because it appeared to be so plain.

“No,” my father said, his voice revealing his annoyance. “It is probably the most difficult. The planes must be done perfectly. They must be as smooth as a newborn’s flesh, and their roundness must be so subtle that the eye cannot discern where they plateau. The beauty of the Ko-Omote mask is that she is so young, so feminine, and so unmarred by the evils of the world. Thus the whiteness of her color and the smoothness of her face are the perfect canvas for shadows to play—to dance on her brow and to mysteriously change her laughter into cries.”

My father’s explanation silenced the young actor. Humbled by my father’s knowledge, he never asked him about carving again.

I looked at Ko-Omote once more before returning her to her silk pouch. I placed her back in the cinnabar box with the others and closed the lid. These were what my father had called retired masks, masks whose spirits had been released over a span of hundreds of years. And although they had grown even more beautiful, aging with a lustrous, inimitable patina, they had become treasures rather than viable pieces for the stage. “Therefore,” he had once confided to me, “one should not feel guilty for keeping them safe here in this box.”

“Someday these will be yours,” he had said in one of those rare moments between us that I could virtually count. Now I looked at this box of treasures and realized that these were the most valuable piece of my inheritance.

I sat there in my father’s studio for what seemed like hours. The idea first crept into my mind like a small spider that slowly begins to weave an elaborate web. I could not stop thinking of the freedom these masks could afford me.

Unlike my father’s masks, these masks could bring me a large sum of gold. I knew that they were worthy of a collector’s eye and I had heard that Westerners were buying our antique treasures at unheard-of prices. It struck me as an exchange. I could learn their artistic traditions and, in return, they could learn from mine.

Indeed I was thinking with the complete selfishness that only the very young can truly have. I was not concerned with bitterness or regret or the complexities of conscience. I could not shake from my mind the idea of all the money these masks could bring! My self-absorption shames me now. My father’s ashes had barely been swept from the funeral pyre and I was planning to sell something my family had treasured for generations.

I tried to ease my mind by convincing myself of the sacrifices I had already made by giving the last mask my father carved and the remaining ones I discovered to Iwasaki-san. But these! No one knew of these masks, and with the money from the masks and the selling of the house, I could realize my dream. I could take control of my destiny.

The idea had been brewing inside me since I first discovered that I would not receive the education I hoped for in Tokyo. If I could only travel to France. There I would be able to study with a great master, just as Kuroda Seiki had done. There I would have the artistic freedom that I was denied in Tokyo. I could forget about learning the coloring techniques of the Tosa and Korin schools and, instead, focus on the techniques of the great Renaissance masters and the modern theories of the Impressionists. There I would be able to take advantage of the vast museum collections and the work displayed in the salons.

The excitement of my decision was overwhelming. I needed to open a shoji to let the crisp mountain air into the room.

How I wished that Mother or Grandmother were alive. Surely they would have understood my conflict. Noboru too. How I wished he could be here with me to ease my conscience, assuage my guilt, and share in my excitement. I wanted to pack my bags and rush back to Tokyo to be with him. To confide in him my plans. Would he join me if I went to Paris? Could we together realize our dreams and learn to paint from a true European master? All of this excitement rushed through my veins. But I had to control my urges; I still had almost three weeks left in the mourning period, and I had to find a buyer for both the mask collection and the house.

I promptly decided that the following morning I would contact someone outside the immediate circle of the theater to assist me in making the appropriate contacts. But I was back in Kyoto, and, once again, could not escape the circle into which I was born.

*   *   *

Mitsutani Hiroyuki met me at the tea shop near Yamamoto Dori. I had not spoken with him at the funeral, and we greeted each other with informal nods.

Mitsutani was the son of my mother’s cousin who had married an actor within the Kanze family. We were bound by shared blood from our mothers’ side and by the bond of Noh. He had lost both of his parents several years before and had carried on the family tradition of acting, even though there had hardly been much of a following since the beginning of the Meiji era. He was far lower in rank than Iwasaki or any of the other elders of the theater, but still I made him swear that he would not utter a word of my plans to a soul.

In between the sips of tea, I informed him of my intentions. He was the closest family member I had, and I wished to see if he was interested in purchasing the masks.

“I know their value, Kiyoki, but I do not have that kind of money now. Unfortunately, few people in the theater do anymore.”

I nodded my head, as I understood how the situation had been even when my grandfather was still alive.

“However,” he added, “there is a man named Shimakawa who deals with wealthy foreigners from the West. I have heard that they pay well for anything old and valuable from Japan.”

He promised to inquire about the value of my collection with Shimakawa and we agreed to meet later that week.

In the meantime, I negotiated with the neighbors next door about purchasing the house and a portion of the land.

The several stacks of pine boxes displayed just how sizable my mother’s dowry had truly been. Through their union, my father had gained a house, a household of furniture, lacquer, ceramics, several acres of farmable land, and a secure position in the Noh circle. In return, my mother had gained a husband.

I knew that I would not be able to keep all of these mementos. Aside from Mother’s wedding kimono, coverlet, and fan, and father’s chisels, I would have to sell the remaining objects along with the house. It pained me to know that these objects would soon belong to another. These were the priceless pieces of their dowries, now dusty with age and neglect. They were needy, as I had been. Longing for a touch, aching for words of appreciation. I wiped away the soot and saw my reflection. I remembered the story of how my mother had first laid eyes on Father, how she avoided his stare by gazing into the top of the lacquer table. How she finally saw him in the mask he had carved.

The few of mother’s treasures that did not find their way into pine boxes rested neatly in several bamboo baskets. The smooth blond weave contained all of the objects that for so long had made her tangible to me. But now, with the strength of her spirit infused in my bones, I knew that I no longer had to physically keep these objects to carry her. When I was lost in my drawings, splattered in ink, and damp with paint, she was with me stronger than ever before.

I knew that Mother would gladly have given all of her treasures away had it allowed her spirit to exist freely. To draw more than the belly of the mountain. I felt her protective spirit breathing over my shoulder and whispering to me to go, to travel the seas in order to pursue my dreams. I heard Grandmother’s deep sigh and saw the drooping of her lids, the elegant, resigned nodding of her head in the swaying of the pines. I could no longer linger within the constraining walls of the school in Tokyo. I knew that I must travel the waters that separated me from the art I wished to pursue. I must find myself and my talent in France. This was the path that I chose for myself, and I was certain that my mother would have encouraged me to do what was necessary to achieve it.

I convinced myself of this. So when our neighbor Otama came with sixty large silk purses brimming with gold coins in return for the house and all but three acres of our land, and when Shimakawa arrived with his leather-brown face and large-toothed smile, informing me of the foreign buyer’s interest in my father’s collection, I didn’t feel so guilty.

But in the end the guilt still came. Creeping and pervasive.

“I must examine the masks, Yamamoto-san,” he said, his yellow teeth glistening in the sun.

I went into Father’s studio and brought down the heavy cinnabar trunk. I removed the top and removed the masks from their silk pouches. Shimakawa’s face grew serious, and his nose trembled from the dust. In profile, he reminded me of a Sharaku woodblock print. He moved his face along the horizontal path in which the masks quietly lay. He seemed to sniff as he picked each one up in his hands. He grunted. After several minutes he raised his head to me and said, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, Yamamoto-san, but I believe this is the finest collection of masks that I have ever seen.”

He paused before continuing.

“The buyer has informed me I can offer you up to seventeen purses of gold, if the collection is of the finest quality. But as you have just suffered a death, perhaps I should urge you to reconsider. This is an outstanding group of masks, and even though I will make money from its sale, I must be honest with you and tell you that it would be a shame for it to leave Japan.”

His frankness surprised me.

“The Mitsuzane mask is particularly rare,” he continued. “I actually believe it was carved by one of his early apprentices, a carver by the name of Tamashii. Legend has it he carved for only two years under the great master Mitsuzane before vanishing. The seal is different.” Shimakawa pointed to the character
me
in the signature
Deme-Mitsuzane
.

I was unsure whether the mask had belonged originally to Grandfather or whether Father had brought it with him on that day when he arrived at Grandfather’s door. But I confirmed Shimakawa’s suspicion.

“It is indeed a Tamashii, and I expect its rarity should be considered when you offer me a price,” I said firmly. My boldness and lack of guilt surprised me, but all I could focus on was the money that would allow me to procure my ticket and sustain myself and my studies in France.