The Mask Carver's Son (26 page)

H
e had been my closest friend in Paris, and although he was no substitute for Noboru, I had seen myself in him. The fact that he had chosen death as the only means of escaping his demons terrified me. It was not that suicide had never occurred to me, but my dream to achieve artistic excellence was always stronger. I needed to be pure to myself. To my father and in the memory of my mother. I could not rest until I had tried. After that, I did not know what would happen.

With Takada gone, my loneliness increased. The letter I received from Noboru intensified this.

January 4, 1898

Yamamoto-kun,

The days in Tokyo are cold. I have had to sleep with two hibachis next to my futon.

It is wonderful news to hear that you are now studying with Raphael Collin. I trust that you will be in good hands.

The Meiji Fine Arts Society has a few reproductions of Collin’s work, and I was greatly impressed. I especially like the 1886 painting
Floréal
. His rendering of the Western female figure seems to be executed with precision and an acute appreciation for detail. His choice of palette is soft, subdued, and elegant. It appears that he is experimenting with the Impressionists’ style of diffused light. Is this correct?

Things have begun to change for the better here at school. It was announced that Kuroda Seiki will head the school’s new Western Painting Section this year. We students had pressed hard for the creation of this department, and we are quite pleased with the results. There will be approximately twenty of us studying under him at the beginning of the fall semester, and some of his former students from his private atelier will be joining us.

I am confident that you are receiving a far better education in the techniques of Western painting than I am, however. You deserve such privilege. I am struggling to become an accomplished painter. It is difficult, as you know.

I will not be able to join you in Paris and this saddens me. I must wait here for your return.

Noboru

He feigned modesty in the letter. He also never mentioned missing me, as I so desperately missed him. It was all so difficult. I could not gauge the intimacy of his feelings through his letters. They were always somewhat formal, written in the traditional Japanese manner in which the weather is most sensitively described and the information that follows is relayed in a skeletal framework in which one must fill in the flesh to sense the true meaning of the words.

What I did learn was that he would not be coming. He had begun his life anew. The new program under Kuroda’s guidance would ensure his success in Japan and his absence from me.

His mind would be elsewhere now. Lost in the pigments, consumed by the canvas. Never struggling to search the sea, to find me.

If anyone knew of the obsessive relationship between an artist and his work, it was I. I had lived it for the first twenty years of my life.

There is little room in an artist’s life for anything but his work. Father had shown me that. I had been born the son of such a man, and my behavior toward Takada showed me that I was becoming such a man. Each day I fell deeper and deeper into my paintings. As if the brushstrokes I made could reach out and grasp me.

But still the memory of Noboru came to me. Most often at night, as I imagined Mother had come to Father.

I would see him in the fluttering of the curtains. The wind twisting them to create his form, the shadow of the lamplight playing tricks to create his face. And I would feel my heart swell with longing, because I knew that there was still a chance to love him. To hold him again. For Noboru was not yet a ghost.

My bed was cold and my body twisted in the damp white sheets. Where Noboru was, now it was already day. The sun was shining and surely he was already dressed in his kimono, his brushes gleaming in his polished hands. Did he think of me? Dream of me? Or had his passion for his painting replaced me, as Father had done with me. For love had abandoned Noboru when I left him at the gangplank. When I chose painting over him, when I opted to journey across the sea.

How I longed for him some nights. This night in particular. I had to believe he would remain true to me, as I would to him. My letters had become increasingly emotive. Perhaps the vivacity of France was rubbing off on me.

Dear friend,

I received your letter today. It seems the post is very slow and I wait impatiently for a letter each day.

Life here continues to be a struggle. Painting has become my life, my sustenance, and I miss you and our time together in Tokyo. How I still wish you could be here! To see all the beauty, the art, to meet Master Collin and become his pupil. I know he would be impressed with your talent. You would put me to shame!

There is no one here like you. Takada’s death has made me lonelier than ever. And I fear I am becoming like my father. All of my life siphoned into my craft.

It seems you have been working as obsessively as I have. Congratulations on being accepted into Kuroda’s program. You will be his favorite student, no doubt.

As much as I love the beauty of Paris, I look forward to the day when I can return to Tokyo. I can’t wait for you to look at my canvases. Your opinion means so much to me, as does your friendship.

Faithfully,

Yamamoto Kiyoki

I had not revealed the true extent of my loneliness and longing in my letter. It would have been inappropriate for me to be any more emotional.

Several times I picked up Noboru’s last letter and reread it. Each time it seemed more distant. Perhaps he was only distracted by the exciting news about Kuroda’s class. I desperately wanted to be happy for him, for he would finally receive the education he deserved. But my heart still mourned his absence—and even more so because of Takada’s suicide. Now I truly had no one in Paris, except Hashimoto, who was far too elusive to form a friendship.

Although Hashimoto had originally expressed excitement for a new Japanese arrival in Paris, his enthusiasm toward me had waned as my second year in Paris approached. I soon realized why Hashimoto had so little time for me. His interests lay in other areas besides the cloistered and serious walls of the Beaux-Arts.

E
va didn’t just walk; she rotated and swiveled. The balls and sockets of her hip bones seemed barely connected, as they managed to send her well-padded sides far into each corner of the sidewalk, propel her prominent pelvis into the foreground, and her two globular buttocks into the rising and swooshing of her rear. She was a more curvy version of the bodhisattva, a woman whose posture was permanently positioned in a seductive
S
curve. Her breasts were like two overripe mangoes, firm and exotic. Their color was unusual by Parisian standards because they were forever blushing a fervid pink, a burning shade of coral, which no amount of powder could hide.

In the middle of her heaving décolletage, framed by a plunging collar bordered in ribbon and lace, rested a small ivory amulet, strung on a black silk cord and squeezed between Eva’s breasts. It was a strange amulet for a Frenchwoman of that time to be wearing: a miniature carving of the Buddha with a rotund face and protruding belly. This small, fleshy talisman, whose image seemed to be repeated within every fold, every curve, of this gargantuan female entity, was indeed an unusual piece of jewelry to substitute for a cameo. But Eva was far from conventional, especially considering the man she chose to dangle from her arm.

Eva had left her small village just outside Le Havre for Paris a few weeks after her eighteenth birthday. The birth of a seventh sibling had sent this young maiden to look for work in the big city.

She found it quickly. The manager at La Bucherie hired her as a barmaid only seconds after her request for work floated off her perfectly puckered lips. Her lack of experience was a trifle compared to her other assets. She had no ivory amulet between her breasts during those first few weeks. Later on, when she would recall her early days in Paris as a young single woman, miserable in her long hours of work and her
pauvre vie
, she would always insist it was because she had not yet been blessed with her ivory Buddha.

*   *   *

Hashimoto met Eva at La Bucherie during her second week as a barmaid. According to both of them, it was love at first sight.

He had stopped in for a quick whiskey. The bitter cold of a winter in Paris could not be endured without the medicinal charms of strong alcohol. He had grown up on warm sake to combat the freezing temperatures of winter in Tokyo, and simply looked upon his daily shot of whiskey as nothing more than an aspirin.

Eva’s painted mouth and non-Parisian smile greeted Hashimoto’s Arctic-glazed eyes with immediate results: he soon began to thaw. He dissolved like a teaspoon of honey in a cauldron of boiling water even before the whiskey touched his lips. He immediately wanted to paint her. He saw her white and milky body sprawled over a divan in his studio. He saw her fiery red hair unpinned and flowing over her pale shoulders, falling over her rose-inflamed breasts. He saw that she was a woman who had all the possibilities of a flower: she would open up to him, his very own fleur-de-lis.

She was not cold and frigid, like the other women of Paris he had encountered. They never shed a glance of warmth from the icicles that served as their eyes. They looked at his tiny yellow body, the black crescents of his eyes, the lacquered ebony of his hair, and immediately chastised themselves for gazing too long, for letting their stares find a victory over their expressionless faces, all because he was a foreigner.

But Hashimoto realized, from the moment he entered the café, moving toward the shiny mahogany bar and the voluptuous caryatid who rose from behind its wood and brass barrier, that the woman who stood there was fantastically different.

Eva was indeed different. Anyone who had the opportunity to dine with the amorous couple could tell that she was far from ordinary. When she reclined against Hashimoto’s shoulder, her perfumed body smelling of vanilla and lime, she’d eagerly recall her first encounter with her Big Buddha, the man who had saved her from being a barmaid for the rest of her life, the man who had given her her talisman.

Eva insisted she sensed Hashimoto’s arrival even before he entered the café. According to this northern farm girl, the café that had been so poorly heated for several days suddenly became as hot as an island in Polynesia. When she noticed that her permanently flushed bosom was beginning to perspire, Eva knew that something wonderful was about to happen. Her mother had always told her that a woman never sheds an ounce of moisture from her breast unless she is either pregnant or in view of the eyes of her betrothed, and Eva knew she was not pregnant. By the time she had mopped up the spots of water that puddled the surface of the bar, her countenance beaming in the golden reflection of the brass, she noticed that a strange calm came over the café. There was a pause when Hashimoto entered, that profound silence which conversationalists have spent lifetimes trying to interpret.

Their love affair began the moment Eva’s eyes met Hashimoto’s, and soon Hashimoto’s yearning for Eva was so intense that he found himself incapable of attending his classes at the Beaux-Arts.

Eva, however, did not distract him from his painting. On the contrary, she drove him to unimaginable heights of artistic inspiration. Mornings, afternoons, evenings, at all hours except during interruptions for passionate lovemaking, Hashimoto sought to reproduce Eva’s image in his paintings. He painted her as her unadorned self, settling in to the comfort of a silken divan; he painted her as Venus rising from the waters and haloed by seashells; and he painted her as the Madonna, with a strangely Eurasian Christ Child.

There was no denying that Eva had replaced Hashimoto’s daily need for whiskey. It was she who warmed him now, fueled his painting, nourished his heart, and sent fireworks exploding through his soul. Together the two of them lived and feasted on each other, a curtain of finished canvases bordering their boudoir in a tiny studio on the Rue de Daviel in Paris.

*   *   *

Seeing Eva and Hashimoto together made me feel more alone than ever. I was uninterested in having an affair with a Frenchwoman. What I really desired was to retrieve that sense of fulfillment, that wonderful unconditional companionship that I’d had with Noboru in Tokyo. He understood me. He inspired me. In his own way, he loved me. I had grown up in a family where my father was silent, my siblings wooden masks, and my mother a ghost. Noboru had, without ever putting his mouth to mine, breathed life into the deflated chamber of my body. With him, I felt the closest I had ever felt to being in love.

Sometimes, in the evenings, when we stayed late at the studio and then found ourselves in the quiet sanctuary of my apartment, the evening sky studded with stars and exploding with the giant white cannonball of the moon, our gazes would linger in the recesses of each other’s eyes. Now I know that it was exactly the same quiet that Eva spoke about. I would try to remember that feeling when I was alone in my rented room in Paris. Try to recall his body after having soaked in the steaming waters of my
o-furo
. His skin, red and smooth, revealed from within the cotton packaging of his
yukata
. He had such tiny hands with such long, threadlike fingers. He loved to sit neatly against my wall, his head resting on the pedestal of his bent knees. And I, so unremarkable in comparison, a long mass of skin and bones, with large hands and sinewy fingers, yearning to be so daring as to penetrate the thin box of space that encased his body. I yearned to enter the sphere where he inhaled his air, exuded his natural perfume, positioned his legs. Just to smell the scent of his neck, the faint traces of sweet red bean paste on his breath, the chrysanthemum oil he used on his hair. To have the cilia of my eyelids sweep over the entirety of his body, and to have the ability to cling to him, as I do now to that memory.

I
t was a cold, blustery day in February when I ran into Eva and Hashimoto. Their black carriage pulled alongside me, and Hashimoto pushed his head outside the black satin top.

“Hello there!” he called out, and the very sound of his voice sent me recoiling. The horseman pulled over to the side of the street and pulled his bowler hat over his eyes while he waited for us to finish our conversation.

“We haven’t seen you in a bit,” said Hashimoto. His glasses were beginning to frost from the shocking cold outside his warm carriage.

Eva cocked her head to one side. Her flaming hair was tucked inside a frilly bonnet, and her large bosom was hidden under a heavy velvet cape.

“Yes, hello, dear Yamamoto. Why have you been keeping yourself so scarce?” Her voice was flirtatiously high.

“Work, work, and more work,” I mumbled. “Doesn’t the Beaux-Arts keep
you
busy, my friend?”

“Busy?” he asked in a mocking tone. “No, not at the moment, although I must admit I’ve been missing many a class lately.” He turned to Eva and placed a hand on her voluptuous thigh.

“We actually have an Art Students’ Ball this Saturday. I daresay we could get you an invitation if you wanted.”

Eva squealed with delight. “Yes, yes! He can take Isabelle as his guest.”

She leaned forward again so that I could see her, and miraculously her cape fell off her shoulders, exposing her radiant cleavage. “It’s a masquerade ball, Yamamoto,” she crooned. “You’ll have to wear a mask and costume. It will be great fun!”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to decline,” I mumbled. “Anyway, that horseman of yours is getting cold.”

“We will hear nothing of the sort,” Hashimoto insisted. “You are absolutely coming to this party. All the most talented art students of Paris will be there.”

“And Isabelle is quite a beauty!” Eva added, smiling. “You’ll thank me by the time the evening is over.”

I highly doubted that would ever happen. If I could have attended with Noboru, that would have been an entirely different matter. But why would I want to go to a ball where I knew no one and, worse than that, as the escort of a woman I had never met?

“No, no,” I insisted. “I absolutely cannot do it. I have several canvases to complete and I’m not much fun at social events. I assure you, I would be quite a bore.”

“Don’t be such a little boy,” Eva cried. “Won’t you try to persuade him, Buddha?” And with that, she nuzzled her round cheeks into his shoulder.

“There is no discussion, old friend,” Hashimoto insisted. “We will pick you up on Saturday.” The horseman cracked his whip and the carriage pulled out into the street. “Don’t forget, it’s a masquerade,” Hashimoto added, sticking his head momentarily outside the tarp and then, within seconds, retreating back into the carriage.

I was left standing beside a lantern post, the cold, damp wind stiffening my hair with frost.

*   *   *

The following Saturday morning, I awakened with absolutely no plans to attend the ball. I had several paintings I wanted to complete, and I had felt sluggish for weeks. My canvases were not turning out as I expected. The colors were muddy, and the nude I was trying to render seemed awkward and uninspired.

I silently blamed Noboru for my malaise. He had not yet responded to my latest letter, and his last correspondence still weighed heavily on my mind. I had become convinced that there was a distance to his words that surpassed the typical Japanese formality. Had I been a fool to nurse my affection for him as long as I did? Had he forgotten the intensity of our relationship in the two and a half years since I had left?

I was finally beginning to accept that he would never come. But I was unwilling to believe that he would forget me.

I would have come, had our situations been reversed. I would have swum the waters, floated through the Mediterranean, my kimono sleeves billowing like sails. I would have written every day, as I nearly had, answered each letter immediately, and finally sold my soul, if it meant I could have come.

But, perhaps in my old age I can see things more clearly. Now I realize that, like my father, I put my craft above love. And in the end, I was the one who left.

I wrapped myself in my kimono and sat down on my only chair. Outside, the sun was set against the church spires, and the bells of Notre-Dame were ringing in the hour.

I was surrounded by my work. I had somehow managed to sneak a part of myself into the composition of nearly every still life, every nude. Collin had thought the idea innovative, “As you are an artist, why should you not paint a faint reflection of yourself in the window, or over here?” he said, pointing to the toe of my brown shoe on the edge of my canvas. “Why should I tell you to take that out?” He smiled. “For the first time, Yamamoto, you are beginning to be original. Congratulations!”

I had not meant to be original. I was only painting what I saw. If I caught sight of my scalp in the windowpane, or the toe of my oxford on the tile beyond my easel, I thought it only right to paint myself into the canvas. As an artist, I recorded everything that I saw in front of me. I had always been an observer; participation was not my strength. I watched life. I relayed my vision in color and line. That was what separated me from others.

I wished Hashimoto had understood that, but obviously he did not. At half past eight, there was a furious knocking at my door.

“Let us in, Yamamoto dear!” cried Eva. “We will be late.”

“Yes, yes,” Hashimoto echoed. “The carriage is waiting for us downstairs.”

I opened up the door and saw that Eva and Hashimoto had arrived as Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. She was wearing a towering golden wig dripping in faux pearls and an elaborate brocade costume that made the best of her ample décolletage. He was wearing a matching brocade vest, tailcoat, and pantaloons in robin’s-egg blue and silver, an inexpertly powdered wig, white knee-high stockings, and high-heeled shoes. Their masks were studded with rhinestones; his made of felt, hers of ostrich plumes.

And behind them stood the most exquisite creature I had seen since Noboru. From where I stood, I could not tell if she was a man or a woman. She had come in costume as a faun. Her robes were made of fur, each hair as if touched by a brush drenched in a pot of raw sienna and burnt umber. Her long arms extended from her robes like delicate columns, her neck slender and her collarbone shining.

Her long red hair had been piled high. And tiny ears had been inserted on her headband of golden leaves.

“Let me present the lovely Isabelle, or the Fairy Faun for the evening,” Hashimoto said with a bow. She tipped her brown mask to reveal a beautiful face. High cheekbones. Skin as pale as alabaster. Green eyes and an orchid-bloom mouth. The three of them walked inside.

“I am afraid, if you have decided to go as a Japanese in his bathrobe, Yamamoto, you might just catch cold,” said Hashimoto with sarcasm. “Why don’t you change into a kimono and go as a Japanese? You’ll be the most authentic one there, I assure you.”

“Yes!” Eva chirped. “And we brought you a mask, just in case you had forgotten to buy one. One must always come prepared for these things.”

From behind her mask, I could see Isabelle trying to disguise her smile.

“If you will excuse me,” I said calmly, “I will change into a kimono, as my friend Hashimoto has suggested.” I gathered my navy robe from the closet and informed them I would only need a moment.

Inside the bathroom, I splashed cold water on myself and changed from my linen
yukata
into my silk robe. My reflection in the mirror revealed that the past few months had weathered me. My face was beginning to be lined, my once jet-black hair now showed the first sprouts of gray. I was almost gaunt; my cheekbones looked like large triangles swathed in a transparent stretch of skin. My lips were cracked, my eyes watery and unclear. What a sight I must have appeared to them! Had Noboru seen me, he would hardly have recognized the man before him, reduced to skin and bones. I had become quite the stereotype of the starving artist.

Suddenly I was Interrupted by Hashimoto’s impatient cries.

“Come on, old man, we really must be going.”

I opened the bathroom door and hurried to put on my sandals.

“Put on your mask,” Eva insisted. She handed me the small red covering with the eyes cut out and the ribbons to tie in the back. This is what they call a mask? I thought to myself. The flimsy piece of felt that I held in my hand was nothing like the masks of my childhood, nothing like the one that slept underneath my mattress here, its eyes inscribed by one man’s knife. This mask had no weight, no intensity, and no spirit. Its only purpose was to disguise.

“Let me help you with the ribbons,” Eva offered. She came over to me, her perfume rising off her flushed chest, and tied the mask strings in a bow. It was the first time I had ever worn such a thing, and there was so little thought behind it. It was not like Grandfather, who meditated over his mask for hours before raising it to his face.

“Are we finally ready?” Hashimoto’s voice was completely exasperated.

“Yes, yes, so sorry to have kept you waiting.” I motioned them to exit, and I fumbled to lock the door behind me.

As I watched Eva and Hashimoto descend the staircase, clouds of smoke rising from his wig, I was caught off guard by Isabelle’s slender arm sliding into mine.

Although I felt awkward, I allowed it. Because she was different and because she was so beautiful. This gazelle-like creature who—for the evening, at least—was mine.

*   *   *

The entrance to the Art Students’ Ball was marked by torchlight. Garlands of freesia and ivy were strung over the frieze. Bouquets of fruit, tiny champagne grapes and pale green quinces, filled Grecian urns. The sound of strings beckoned us. Violins and cellos. The smooth melody from the clarinet, and the flute’s fluid breath. Isabelle squeezed my arm as her deep red fur brushed over my silken robe.

“This is terribly exciting, isn’t it?” she said softly. Her French was smooth and melodious, blending like an instrument with the violins.

“Yes, yes,” I said, although I was feeling dizzy, overwhelmed by the sumptuous surroundings. Men and women swarmed around us, each costume more elaborate than the next. A Turkish Moor swathed in a turban sipped champagne next to women in long velvet robes, golden bracelets, and violet shoes. A sun-bronzed pharaoh stole a kiss from a raven-haired and turquoise-bejeweled Cleopatra, and a short, balding gentleman dressed as Napoleon drank champagne from a helmet whose exterior he had adorned with yellow feathers.

I spotted Hashimoto and Eva speaking to a man dressed as Caravaggio’s Bacchus. A garland of grapes encircled his head, his brown chest protruded from the white toga he had draped over his side, and a goblet of claret nestled in one of his chubby pink hands.

“Have you known Eva long?” I finally mustered the courage to ask my night’s companion.

“I met her when she first came to Paris. She bought a hat from me.” She was smiling from beneath her chestnut-colored mask. Behind the slits, her green eyes were dazzling.

“I’ve been making hats since I was a little girl.” But soon she had turned from me, her russet robes sweeping like a fox’s tail over my shins. The music filling my ears.

“Do you see the orchestra playing over there?” she mused. “How I wish you’d ask me to dance.”

I knew that Frenchwomen were far more forward than their Japanese counterparts. But still, her words froze me with fear. I had never danced with any woman before, Japanese or European. I knew not even the proper dance steps to attempt such a feat!

“Come, come,” she chided gently, “or we will miss this round!” She thrust her arm around mine and dragged me onto the dance floor.

She pulled herself close to me, her acorn-colored hair and gilded wreath aflame, the torchlight illuminating my perspiring brow. She smelled like the forest, deep and musky. I inhaled the sweet fragrance of the leaves she had fastened to her hair.

“Don’t be afraid, I will guide you,” she said from behind her mask. And it was true, she led me as the music swayed on. As celestial as a fairy, she moved over the notes of music, her body close to mine, so that I could continue to inhale her woodland perfume. Was it the high green of cypress, to match her cinnamon-red hair? My head bowed toward hers as she led me over the floor, the music filling my ears, my navy robe billowing with air. Indeed, I was lost in the winding curves, the dips, and the curtsies. For that brief moment, as the orchestra played on, I was hers.

The moon beamed ivory. Round, as if it were the sun cloaked in ermine, it shone on a sea of artists and their friends. It was only then that I felt slightly guilty that Noboru was not there with me.

Where was he now? I wondered as Isabelle and I removed ourselves from the dance floor. Was he asleep? Was he alone or with another, as I was? I had not betrayed him, I said to myself, even though this was the first time I had felt so intoxicated by another person besides my devoted Noboru.

When the night began to transform itself into dawn and Isabelle and I found ourselves separated from Eva and Hashimoto, the other guests departing, and the orchestra beginning to pack away the instruments, I did not protest when she suggested that we return together to my room.

She stood in my small chamber, the fading moonlight radiating off her doeskin form, the fur robe falling from her shoulders, and I could have wept from the sight of her golden limbs.

Was it the champagne that made me dizzy, or was it fear? I stood in the corner, watching as she remained steadfast in front of me, her mask still cloaking her face, her hair still bound with pearls.

She removed her robes first. The mask remained, the hair still piled high. And I gasped as she let the russet silk fall to the floor, like an autumn tree shedding its leaves, her nakedness revealed to me.

Her body glowed like amber. Translucent and deep yellow. Her thighs soft and round.

“If not for you, then for whom shall I undo my hair?” I said, remembering how Grandfather had used the ancient Heian poem to describe Grandmother.