The Mask Carver's Son (6 page)

Somewhere deep inside him he wished that she would not make a sound. Sounds increased his nervousness. Brought him out from the recesses of the workings of his inner mind, where he felt uneasy, where he felt unsure.

But he proceeded. He felt the smoothness of her breasts, the contrast of her nipples. He inhaled the sweetness of her perfume.

Underneath his body, he felt her initial tension rise and then release. And he heard the clenching of her teeth fade into soft moans. He wished to see her face, wondered if it too would be transformed like a mask on stage, and searched to find it, to uncover it from the shadows. Once he had discovered it, he held her head in between his palms like a boy who has finally grasped the moon.

His lips fell over hers and he inhaled, hoping to breathe her soul into his, so that perhaps he would release it again in the form of a mask. But the taste was not as he expected. Not the sweet floral scent of almond blossom, not the nutty smell of toasted ginkgo. Something unexpected, something terrible. The taste of plums.

He fell away from her like a slain man. The taste of plum was his forewarning. He had danced with the seductive sensation of emotion, and now he would be punished. The gods would take her too.

Mother turned to him, bewildered, not knowing what she could have done, humiliated by how she had failed. But he no longer saw her. There was no one but him in the room with his darkness and his ghosts. He did not feel her trembling hand on his back. He did not hear the repetition of her sobs.

She was the last thing that he would allow himself to love. And he knew in his heart he would never be able to kiss her again—for he knew now the destiny that awaited them.

And it was on this fated night, when the taste of plums slipped like poison between my parents’ lips, that I, their only son, was conceived.

I
firmly believe that my father began carving only because he knew that whatever he created with the chisel could never die.

Marriage, however, confused him. As he was a husband now, he would be responsible for his wife’s protection. This weighed heavily on him. On the night of their wedding, death had lurked in the shadows of their room. He had smelled it. Ripe as a plum. And now he had to either resign himself to fate or try to overcome it.

All of these sensations and feelings scared him. He had not known such fear since he was a child. This must be that which Tamashii had warned him of. That which threatened to weaken his craft. Emotion. Yet Etsuko was not what he imagined a woman to be. She was far lovelier. How could his heart not weaken to her? How could he not thaw when he was in her presence?

She reminded him so of his mother.

Now that they were married, she wore her hair long for him. Shiny as lacquer. Fragrant as camellia oil. He would graze her shoulder just so that he could inhale her intoxicating perfume.

Just as he believed it was his duty to protect her, she believed it was her duty to care for him. To love him. As no one had done in years.

In the morning she would rise before the house awakened, while her parents still slept and the night braziers still burned. She would slide from underneath their coverlet, careful not to disturb him, and gather herself and her robes. Then, with steps as light as a spirit, she would walk into the garden to scoop the miso paste from one of the earthen jars and pull two or three fish from their salty box. She would steep his rice in citron and rice wine. She would lay a branch of blossoms, to wait beside him and his bowl.

On the days when her early departure left a coldness and an aching emptiness in their bed, he would rise minutes after her. He would walk toward their small paper window and slide it ever so slightly to one side. Just to watch her, if only for a moment, as she glided through the garden as ethereal as a ghost.

He could hear the sound of the latch closing, the gentle whipping of her hair. To him nothing was more beautiful—not even a mask, dare he say it?—than his wife wrapped in her morning robe.

The black of her hair falling like the smooth feathers of a raven bird, the shine of her alabaster brow. He could anticipate the sound of her footsteps, he could watch her for hours and never tire of the sweet melody of her voice. With great voracity, he consumed his breakfast as if it were manna delivered to him by the gods. He saw her image in the cloudy broth of miso, and her tenderness in the wilted greens.

*   *   *

As much as his superstitious mind hated to admit it, the first month of their marriage was nothing short of blissful. Every morning she prepared his meal for him, and his afternoons were free so that he could carve. His father-in-law converted the small room on the second floor into a studio so that he could work uninterrupted on his masks. When he had imagined himself adopted into a household, he never dreamed that one as prestigious as the Yamamoto family would be as kind and as warm as he discovered them to be.

Since their first meeting at the
o-miai
, Father had known that Etsuko felt no love for him. He knew that he was not beautiful and that the years spent in isolation had prevented him from cultivating any charm. He only hoped that she would learn to love him, as his father-in-law promised she would.

“I believe it is far easier for a woman to learn to love her husband than it is for a man to learn to love his wife,” Grandfather had told him before his wedding day. “I know my daughter, Ryusei, and I know that she will learn to love you.” Father remained skeptical, convincing himself that their marriage was acceptable because it fulfilled desires within both parties outside the world of love. But as much as he knew he should avoid all feeling for the material world—one of his master’s strictest rules—he could not help being captivated by its enticing powers.

He knew his wife was particularly fond of the love poems of Ono no Komachi. Those words of a woman who cannot sleep, whose love burns inside her like an inextinguishable flame, how they captivated him too! Only in his most fanciful dreams could he imagine his wife ever feeling that way toward him.

He recognized in himself that he appeared staid, almost passionless. Yet he had been told that his masks had the capacity to move audiences to tears and the finest actors to cries of awe. His spirit was in each and every one of those masks, infused with what he could never convey with words. He worried that his wife could not recognize that. Would she always think of him as just a man of the wood?

*   *   *

Despite her initial resignation, Mother did learn to love the man who was chosen for her. And perhaps that made the remainder of Father’s life all the more painful. For eventually she grew to love him deeply.

As no one else ever did.

Her love for him grew slowly, beginning almost as an abstraction. Undoubtedly, Mother loved that which gave joy to her family. In the beginning, her feelings toward her husband were defined by a sense of duty. For now she had given her parents a sense of completion in their old age. Her father seemed to breathe a new zest for life now that he had a male companion in the house. The family dinners were now convivial, unlike the quiet meals of her childhood, which had become the norm after the death of her brother. Grandfather’s eyes sparkled, as they hadn’t in years, enjoying the entirely new set of ears to which he could tell his colorful stories. Grandmother’s body began to relax slightly as her daughter assumed the chores of head female of the household. With great anticipation and happiness they began the next stages of their life.

When Mother announced that she had forgone two consecutive monthly defilements, the response to the news was overwhelming. She had never seen her parents more filled with joy.

Grandmother walked over to her daughter’s side and gently kissed her blushing cheek. “Your father and I are so happy for you,” she whispered. In her heart she prayed that the child would be healthy and male—the two things that had evaded her own family.

Grandfather raised his cup of sake and toasted my health, the heir to the Yamamoto name.

“Soon I will have a grandson,” he declared, upon rising from the low table. He seemed to believe that since the gods had denied him a son, they would smile on his good deed of having adopted the lonely mask carver, and now bestow on him the grandson he so passionately craved. He knew it would be selfish for him to insist that the boy be raised to be an actor, and so, to appease the gods with one more selfless act, he added to his toast: “And as it is with so much pride and joy that I look upon this day, I hope that my grandson will live to become as great a mask carver as his father!” He lowered his gaze to Father and raised his cup. “With great anticipation do I look forward to the day that Mother and I can bestow on him his first set of chisels.”

Father, slightly overwhelmed by all of the emotion that was flowing through the room, managed to awkwardly raise his cup and acknowledge Grandfather’s toast. His wife had told him the night before that she suspected she was with child and he had received the news with mixed emotions. Certainly he was thrilled with the thought of creating his own family, perhaps he truly was no longer bound to the wood. It had never occurred to him that he might have the power to create a human life. For the past thirty years of his life he had felt almost nonhuman. Neither a man nor a ghost. Perhaps something in between, a man made of wood.

Now there was a life growing inside the womb of his wife that he was partly responsible for. Another person to protect. Another person who must be sheltered from the clawing vines of death.

He allowed his wife to place his hands on her stomach. So that he might feel the heartbeat, my heartbeat. So that he might feel the difference between flesh and wood.

Her stomach was still as flat as a tablet. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine their child being formed from each of the fibers in my mother’s womb, a process so different from his craft. Within that warm, carefully cushioned shrine that contained the cells of generations of tradition and talent, I would be created.

He remembered the eyes of his father and how his life had seemed to begin at the hour when he arrived home. When his eyes fell upon those of his wife and those of his sons. His family.

With each passing day Father found it easier to imagine himself in his newfound role. His masks became less interesting to him compared to his family. Perhaps Tamashii had never known such joy, I believe Father thought to himself as he searched for reasons why his master so strongly advised against an emotional life. Perhaps his life was filled only with sadness. But perhaps Father believed, for the first time, that he could triumph where his master had failed. Over sadness. Over death.

The first thing he did after Mother announced her pregnancy was forbid her to eat plums. “They are no good for you or the baby,” he told her, gently sweeping one from her hand as she sat in the garden one day, her hair loosely tied in a bun.

“But why, Ryusei?” she asked, puzzled.

“Hasn’t your father told you?” he asked, equally perplexed that his father-in-law had never divulged the story of his past. “No good can come from them. You must trust me. Promise me your lips will never touch one,” he pleaded. Not wishing to scare his wife with his former misery, he pretended his superstition was grounded in an old wives’ tale he had heard long ago.

“I promise,” she whispered, looking down at his kneeling form. “I would do anything to ensure our son’s arrival into this world.
Anything
.”

As she watched him return to the house, it occurred to her that she had eaten a plum on their wedding day. The night of the child’s conception. She considered whether she should divulge this to her husband. “No need to worry him,” she decided. “It is only a silly old wives’ tale.”

*   *   *

Father’s interest in carving waned over the months of my mother’s pregnancy. It seems she was the only one in the world who had the power to distract him from the wood. The orders for his masks continued to pile up even though the number of performances the theater was producing began to decrease. His masks became almost rarities, limited editions that demanded far higher prices than the theaters could afford.

“Don’t forget your carving,” Grandfather began reminding him after the family dinners. “The actors in the theater are beginning to wonder if you have given up on your craft.”

“Don’t worry,” Grandmother comforted him. “It is just the baby’s impending arrival. Once he is born, all will return to normal.”

“I hope you are right, Chieko,” he sighed with the day’s exhaustion. “It would be a shame to let a talent like his go to waste.”

*   *   *

Mother, however, enjoyed the attention that her husband lavished upon her. Never in her most colorful dreams had she imagined that he would be so attentive to her. Although he seemed uninterested in lovemaking, his hands would find themselves on her expanding belly. Like a blind man, he would trace the gentle rounding, the sloping that began beneath her breasts and then gently merged with her thighs. At night he would thread his fingers through her hair, gently caress her cheekbones, her eyelids, the soft line of her lips. As if to memorize her.

Indeed, she began to believe he truly loved her, and subsequently her love for him blossomed. No longer did she feel that she was preparing his meals or attending to his needs only out of a wifely duty. Now she truly desired to make him happy.

His sweetness grew. He spent less time carving and more time at her side. When he did carve, he often called for her to come and see something he had just completed.

On one day in particular, he asked her to come to his studio. When she arrived, an exquisite female mask rested on a piece of silk cloth.

“It is you, Etsuko,” he whispered to her as she knelt beside him, the strips of cypress curling under her knees.

She recognized the mask as the beautiful Ko Omote mask. White as rice powder. Lips as demure as a doll’s.

He placed the mask in her outstretched palms.

“I have made her for you, my wife,” he said, almost shyly.

Mother remained silent. She knew that if anyone could interpret her lack of words, it would be her husband.

“She is
you
and you are
she
,” he said, pointing to the mask.

Deeply moved, tears beginning, she turned the mask over to examine the lines of the carver. Her husband.

The strokes were deep. Lines like furrows. Channels that wound in a pattern almost too complex to convey. It was now she truly saw him for the first time, not as she had seen him when they first met, when she was limited to the masklike quality of his face. Now she saw beyond it.

“You have shown me your soul, my darling,” she said, her words almost lost in her sobs.

He placed his hand on her shoulder and he knew that he probably appeared clumsy. But, for the first time in their marriage, that did not bother him. He knew she now saw him for what he was. A man far deeper than the wood.

*   *   *

According to Grandmother, by her seventh month, Mother’s stomach was as large as a small bear. She carried all of her weight in the front, which grew so large that, when she walked, her back seemed lost in its perpetual arching and her shoulders pushed even farther behind.

Every morning, however, she continued to rise to prepare her husband’s breakfast. She never tired of heating the pails of water for his bath, no matter how great the strain. It seemed as though each of them had finally discovered what the other needed.

In the last month of my mother’s pregnancy, she announced that she would like to make a trip to Kiyomizu-dera in order to pray for my entrance into the world and buy a blessed
anzan o-mamori
charm from one of the priests. Grandmother insisted that the three-hour journey from Daigo to the temple would be too exhausting.

“I must go,” she said obstinately. “Ryusei will accompany me. We will visit the inner shrine, Jishu Jinya, the shrine of the love rocks. We will pray together and ask Ubugami to look over our child. It is the only way.”