The Mask Carver's Son (25 page)

In the moonlight he caught the glimmer of her face, beautiful like a doll’s, as she began to sew over the pierced square of torn parchment with a patch of the lantern skin, her eyes shining much like his own. But she looked away from him, his glance too painful to bear, the separation already weakening her soul.

But he kept on watching her. Wanting to remember her as she looked without the weight of his father’s glaring eyes. As if to engrave her into his memory. Forever. Because even that didn’t seem long enough.

So he watched her as she sewed over their little square window. Watched as her eyebrows furrowed and she fought back the tears. Watched as she replaced the square of parchment that had allowed her forbidden contact with her son. And he studied her two fingers, slender as reeds, as they grasped the spinning silver needle. Mending the parchment stitch by stitch till the envelope was sealed. Till slowly he could see her no more.

*   *   *

He grew from a sad small boy to a melancholy young man under the careful and cold guidance of tutors handpicked by his father. Still limited in seeing his mother, he saw her rarely and became accustomed to communicating with her shadow.

Takada studied vigorously: Japanese classical literature, history, and abacus calculation, as well as intensive study of French and German. He loved the study of the French language most of all. His teacher, a young man from Osaka, had recently returned from studying abroad.

“I’ll send you too!” his father promised in between clouds of smoke. “Before you’re married, before you begin your political career.” He looked at his father, slick in his Meiji-style suit, the pipe clasped between his yellowing teeth, and shuddered.

“I would like to leave for France in my twentieth year.”

And to his shock, his father agreed. Knowing that it would bode well for his son to have some foreign experience, he consented to have the boy go off to Europe for a few years. But only on the condition that he would return by his twenty-fourth year.

The day Takada prepared for his departure, his father, to his surprise, called one of the maids to fetch his mother.

“Let the old woman say good-bye to her son,” he said with the laugh of a wolf.

And as Takada waited on the first floor, his neck arched to the banister, he saw her once more before he was to leave. Not as she had been the night they grasped fingers. Mother to son. Not as she had been as he watched her veiled by the sweep of her black hair as she sewed the tired parchment. But still beautiful to him.

She stood at the top of the staircase, her hair neatly coiled on top of her head, streaked with gray. Her skin still smooth and white.

She wore a heavy kimono that cloaked her thin arms, but she withdrew her hand to wish him farewell.

She did not speak. But he sensed her thoughts:
Yes, go far away from here, my son.
He knew that she wished she could join him. Flee this prison that had kept her for so many years. As he watched the tears flooding her eyes, his too began to brim. He raised a handkerchief to his brow, covering his face with the cloth. By the time he returned it to his breast pocket, she was gone.

*   *   *

Takada’s twenty-fourth year approached. He had spent the past years joyfully reading French literature at the Sorbonne, rarely thinking that time would catch up to him so fast.

But now the letter had arrived, calling him back.

Dear son,

Tokyo is filled with autumn leaves and the emperor has commissioned two more government buildings to be built in the Greco-Roman style. I am sure that you will not recognize our city when you return.

I have enclosed the last installment of your living allowance. You should use this for your passage back to Yokohama. I have been busy securing a job in the lower part of the parliament for you. I have also sent your photograph to a matchmaker who will arrange several
o-miai
meetings for you when you return. A good bride who will bring you a son someday, as well as maybe some more connections for your burgeoning political career.

I look forward to your return.

Your father.

Many nights Takada lay awake, splayed over his sheets, his arms extended across his bed, his legs tucked tightly together. Like a cross. Like a man preparing for his execution.

He thought of the world he had lived in for the past four years. Free of rules, regulations, and responsibility. Free of the oppressive weight of his father’s presence. Where he could read to his heart’s content and roam freely through the streets. For the first time he had friends of his own. Mostly Japanese, but Frenchmen as well. Here no one expected anything from him. No one demanded anything.

But there, oh, how different things would be! He so dreaded his return.

M
y life in Paris began to take shape over the weeks that followed the start of my studies under Collin. Every morning I started out just as the sun was rising over the Seine. With my black hat pulled down over my ears and my paint box clutched in my hand, I would walk twenty minutes to Collin’s atelier.

There the older students would already be preparing their easels, arranging the paint on their palettes, the model still wrapped in silk chiffon.

The beginning students, myself included, worked in a smaller room off to the side. Our hands were yet to feel the splendor of a sable brush between our index finger and thumb. Instead, charcoal now blackened our palms and dusted our lungs. We sketched for hours, our necks stiff with pain, our wrists tired and sore.

Collin would appear every hour, from behind the half-closed French doors that separated us. He would walk behind each of us, his careful breathing blowing on our necks as he examined our work. Occasionally he would walk to the center of the room and turn the marble statue that served as our model. “Now draw her from this side,” he would say before vanishing, and all of us would try our best to muffle our exasperated sighs.

Yet we all knew that, not until we were successful in reproducing these anatomically perfect creatures of stone, would we be able to work with a live model. Deeply frustrated, I recalled how I endured the same sort of struggle back in Tokyo.

For that first year with my mentor, my hands only clasped a stick of graphite or a lump of charcoal. We sketched in monochrome, and we were instructed in black and white. Only after class could we find color again.

We’d find it in a café. In a glass of claret. This red wine refilling our tired veins. William, the only other student who was not French, would tell us of his life in London. Where the English equivalent of the café was the pub. Where the maids were flushed and friendly. Where friends and brothers drank till dawn. I, of course, remained quiet and shy, my stories stored in my interior, the warmth of the drink never bringing them to the surface. I smiled when appropriate and learned to laugh with an open mouth and a hearty guffaw. But I never learned to reveal myself.

My brushes, in the meantime, remained in their jars at home, liberated from their glass cisterns only after I returned each evening. Then I would paint on my own, still somewhat clumsily. The color of paint was one of the few things that could alleviate my loneliness and keep my ghosts at bay.

My spirit nearly collapsed during my first year as a student with Collin. There was so much I struggled with; my confidence sagged, my belief in my talent nearly shattered, and my bouts of loneliness often debilitated me. I rarely saw anyone outside my class. I spent hours inside the atelier or at a museum working on figure drawings. Finally, the first year came to an end, and Collin announced that he would allow us to begin working with oils. I rejoiced at the opportunity to start experimenting with such silky, rich emulsions under the guidance of my teacher. There was so much to learn about handling the pigments properly. Soon I was learning how to mix certain proportions, layer the paint, scumble it so that all brushwork seemed to vanish, and even apply it in a thick impasto. Suddenly my canvases seemed to take on a new dimension. They finally began to reflect light and the figures appeared voluminous and fleshlike. I felt as though I had entered the canvas through the hairs of my brush. I felt as though I had finally begun to understand what Collin had spoken of, and for the first time all the sacrifices I had made to come to France appeared to have been worthwhile.

My surroundings began to inspire me. I looked at the sky and realized that it was full of colors other than blue. I gazed at the fields of grass and wondered how an artist could articulate each blade. Everything around me caused me to wonder how to portray it with paint.

Inevitably, I saw less and less of Takada and Hashimoto. Takada, however, appeared one rainy afternoon after I had finished class, standing outside the atelier.

“Why do you stand here without an umbrella?” I asked him, shocked to see him soaked through.

“I didn’t notice it,” he said absently. The black of his hair fell over his face like threads of seaweed, and his face was shiny like melted wax after it has cooled.

I was carrying a canvas wrapped in cheesecloth and I bent over it, trying to protect it from the rain.

“I thought we might get a cup of tea,” he muttered.

I stared up at him. First, at his white shirt, now transparent, his brown skin revealed through cloth. I noticed his lips were turning a purplish shade of blue.

“Sorry,” I uttered as apologetically as I could. “I have to finish this canvas by tomorrow. Even if I stay up to all hours of the night, I’ll be hard pressed to complete it.”

“I see,” he said, unable to mask his dejection.

“Perhaps, I could manage just a quick cup of tea,” I muttered. “But let us find a place not too far from here. My canvas is heavy and I have mountains of work to do before morning.”

*   *   *

In a café on the Rue de Sèvres, not far from the Jardin du Luxembourg, we ordered two cups of steaming tea and settled into two roped iron chairs. Several large Frenchmen had gathered in a nearby booth, their table noticeably littered with empty carafes of wine, their voices and peals of laughter annoyingly loud.

The rain had left Takada dripping. Like a snuffed candle, a thin veil of breath rose from his skin, and tiny droplets rolled down his cheeks. Had I not believed him to be such a formal Japanese, I could have mistaken them for tears.

“Father has insisted I return next week,” he said, as he pulled at his drenched shirt and ran a small handkerchief over his damp hair.

“You could stay, you know. You could try to get a job, or you could move into a smaller place to minimize your expenses.”

“It’s far more complicated than that, my friend.”

“Yes, of course it is, but you must try.”

Behind me, the noise of the crowd was growing increasingly distracting, and I tried with great effort to tune out their voices and the swirl of their tobacco smoke wafting through the air.

“Someday you will be in the same position as I,” he said, and I knew I would remember those words forever. As I do now, even as an old man.

“We belong to neither world now. We live here and revel in a freedom that before was unknown to us. You find your spirit in color and line. I, in a stanza of Molière or a verse of Rimbaud. But we are fools to think that they accept us.” He paused. “Look over there.” He pointed to the crowd. “They mimic us behind our backs. Tell jokes at our expense and consider us unutterably beneath them.”

I turned my head, as he urged me to do. To see what I so desperately did not want to see. There they sat in clusters. Wineglasses raised to their lips. Their cravats loosened around their necks, their white shirts billowing out from their wristbands.

“Voyez les Chinoises!”
one said as he pointed his crooked finger in our direction.
“Ils sont vraiment dégueulasses!”
another cried mockingly as he used his two forefingers to push up his eyes into tiny, thin slants.

“They think we are Chinese,” Takada said as his lips touched the rim of his nearly empty cup. “To them we are all the same.”

I sat there, my heart now sinking, my spirit nearly crushed.

“You are a bit naive, my friend,” he said with a half smile. “The walls around your house in Kyoto must have been incredibly high.”

I smiled, as I could feign no other reaction. I had hoped that those walls would crumble with this journey. But I knew that I still carried with me my own pain. My own guilt and my own hauntings. For Father would never leave me. I carried with me the unfinished Ishi-O-Jo mask as penitence. To wander forever with it as a reminder. A symbol of my betrayal, perhaps never to be reconciled.

“You have a canvas to complete,” he said. “I shouldn’t have kept you this long.”

“No, no,” I insisted. “It is fine.”

“Tonight has helped me with my decision,” and once again he took out his handkerchief and patted at his brow.

“Such a shame about the surroundings, though,” I said apologetically.

“It’s not your fault, Yamamoto-san,” he said, his voice once again sounding sad. “Things like this are beyond our control.”

I walked him outside, where we bowed to each other as we said farewell.

“Maybe we can get together again tomorrow,” I hollered out to him.

But he did not answer me. He had already turned to leave. And I watched as his rain-soaked form walked into the distance, his back strangely slumped forward and his shoulders sloping toward the ground.

The sound of his shoes tapped over the cobblestone, until all I could make out was the lower half of his shadow, his echo surrendering to the wind.

T
akada hanged himself on the fourth day of November 1897, when I was in my thirteenth month of studies with Collin. Hashimoto, in the same black clothes he was wearing the day I first met him, met me outside of Collin’s studio and informed me of the bad news.

I felt myself sinking as I stared back at him, felt as though my feet had suddenly succeeded in melting the stone. There was the initial ache I had experienced before. The sense of loss. The disbelief. But also a creeping feeling of anger.

Hashimoto began to retreat, sliding his feet backward over the cobbled street, bowing his head in departure. I listened, stunned, as he made an excuse for his departure—a figure-drawing class at the Beaux-Arts.

I found myself standing completely alone, rubbing my face furiously with the sweaty palm of my hand. I continued to do this absurd motion for what seemed like several minutes. I began at my forehead, running roughly over every one of my features until I reached my chin.

I wanted to convince myself that I wasn’t wearing the same look of vacancy that I had just seen on the face of Hashimoto. I wanted my face to look red, swollen, miserable, shocked. Angry.

Takada was dead.

The sunny yellow painting I had begun for him during my first few days in Paris was now complete. It had been lying for several weeks now in my room, and I was only waiting for a free moment to drop it off at Takada’s apartment. I stood outside, leaning against the cold stone of Collin’s building, and felt a swelling nausea flow from the pit of my stomach into every one of my veins. I banged my fist into the rock-hard surface of the outside walls, and wished for once that this city were built of paper and wood so that I might tear the whole thing down or set it ablaze with one strike of a match.

Takada had come to me for help and I had selfishly put my art before him. I had responded as I imagined Father would have, and I hated myself for it.

The day I discovered that Takada was dead, I cried. I cried from tear ducts that should have dried up long ago, in a way I could not cry for my father’s death. There no longer seemed to be any sense to my world. I did not care if anyone stared. I did not care if it was an act of weakness or cowardice.

So I wept. Wept like a child who never cried for the loss of his mother, the death of his father, who lived with him twenty-some years before he was buried at the base of a pine. As all Yamamotos are, the needled branches covering their tablets with broken yellow thatch.

That evening I went to Takada’s apartment and found that Hashimoto was already there, boxing his things. I began helping him pile the volumes of French literature and criticism into cardboard crates and address them to be sent home to his family. The room reflected the image of the dead man, restrained and monochromatic, with white walls and dark brown furniture.

“The police report said he hanged himself from the ceiling. He used a pair of brown leather suspenders,” Hashimoto reported dryly. As he spoke, he was rolling a poster from the ballet
Le Rev`e
that was printed in the style of a Japanese woodblock print. I had seen that poster plastered all over the streets—the image of the Western woman in a tutu with a kimono thrown over her shoulders and a chopstick in her hair. Hashimoto placed it in a box and sealed it tightly with tape.

“Supposedly they confiscated a small rapier.”

“Takada attempted
seppuku
as well?” I found all of this too much to comprehend.

“I don’t think so. He probably contemplated it and then decided that the suspenders would suffice.”

I thought of Takada’s brown trousers, the ones he always wore with his tweed. I pictured him stringing himself up to the ceiling. The suspender loops knotted, his yellow-brown head strung through the self-made noose. His jacket slipping from his shoulders. Falling to the floor. His feet finally dangling free.

And now the brown wooden boxes were all taped, stacked, and labeled in a room suffocating in its own silence. In that room in Paris, where two Japanese, in brown shadows and the setting sun, packed with few words between them what remained of their fallen friend.