The Mask Carver's Son (7 page)

Her parents lowered their eyes, knowing they could not argue.

“Are you sure you feel up to such an arduous journey, Etsuko?” Father asked with concern.

“I am sure. Please do not worry. Seeing the temple and praying to the birth deity will calm my nerves.”

The three of them looked at her, swollen with my unborn form, and nodded in weak consent.

The next day Mother, too fragile to be carried by chair men, was placed in the palanquin that had carried her as a bride. Her parents, still concerned that she might damage the child, made one last attempt to dissuade her from making the trip.

“Thank you, Mother and Father, for your concern, but I will be fine,” she insisted. “My husband and I want to pray for our child together.”

Grandfather shook his head, and Grandmother clutched her wooden prayer beads. The two of them watched as the carriage took them away.

*   *   *

When they arrived home late that evening, Mother was as pale as the inside of a Chinese guava. Her lips, no longer the pink of lotus blossoms, suddenly white as ash.

The rains had begun late that afternoon, after they had departed, and they could find no shelter along the way. The roof of the palanquin had collapsed, and Mother lay drenched and covered in thatched straw.

Wiping her brow with his soaking wet sleeve, Father helped Mother from the carriage. When she proved too weak to stand, he hoisted her weary body in his arms. He cradled her like a child, the
anzan o-mamori
charm dangling from her hand.

Grandmother and Grandfather stood in the rain transfixed. They did not flinch even as their silver hair fell like wet grass over their scalps, as their kimonos became so drenched one could see the outlines of their forms. How could it be, they thought, in only eighteen hours’ time, their beautiful child had paled to nothing more than a ghost?

“Bring her into the center room,” Grandmother ordered. “The braziers are warmest in there.”

Suddenly, from where she stood, Grandmother noticed a bloodstain expanding from underneath her daughter’s loosened sash. That stain, as bright as fire, spread within seconds over the entire front placket of her kimono. Streaking like bolts of red lightning.

“I will run for a doctor,” cried Grandfather. “Ryusei, bring her inside!”

He laid her down on the tatami and brought the brazier closer to her side. He lowered the flame of the lantern, untying the sash of his own kimono, covering her belly so she would not see her clothes saturated with blood.

In the few moments that transpired before the quilts were brought to him, he held her face in the gentle basin of his palms. He pushed back the damp locks of her hair. He whispered into her ear all the ancient love poems she had held so dear.

My face white as Fujiyama betrays my red, red heart.

On my way to Edo, I found your face in the weave of my sleeve.

When the blankets arrived, he removed her wet robes, like a mother changing the soiled clothes of her baby. He dabbed her sweating brow with a cloth soaked in fragrant tea. He wound his fingers tightly into hers and looked deep into her frightened eyes, never flinching all the while as Grandmother pressed strips of boiled cotton between Mother’s bleeding thighs.

When his mother-in-law appeared finished, he stood up to retrieve the stack of blankets. Hoping to appear helpful, he placed each warm layer over his ailing bride.

“Take the
fourth
off, Ryusei,” Grandmother told him before the blanket had even reached my mother’s chin. “You, if anyone, should know better.”

He grew pale, realizing his near mistake. “You are right, Mother,” he said wearily. “Indeed, I should.”

*   *   *

When the doctor arrived, my mother had already lost consciousness.

She had spent her last hours of memory pleading with my father to save their child’s life before her own.

“Please,” she had begged him. “Save our son.”

He had not wanted to hear her. She was the one he most wanted in this world. He did not need an heir. He did not need a disciple. All he truly needed was her.

*   *   *

He held her hand even when she no longer had the strength to grasp his fingers. He pressed her smooth wrist to his cheek, inhaled the sweetness of her lips, even when the breaths no longer seemed to come.

*   *   *

When the doctor arrived, he tried to pry the mask carver’s fingers free. My father would not budge.

“Yamamoto Ryusei-sama,” the doctor insisted. “You must let me attend to your wife.”

My father lay next to her, his forehead lowered to her brow.

He heard the doctor’s words, but no more would come from his lips. He only stared.

It was finally Grandmother who pried his fingers from hers. She never forgot the sight of those two interlocked hands. Laced like two tendrils. Clutching until icy white.

M
y father’s greatest betrayal was caused by neither his wife nor his former patrons but by me, his son.

Had my father not believed in magic, perhaps the reality of my birth would not have been as painful. But he was no ordinary man; he created faces that lived on the stage, and he did this all with the sheer sorcery of his hands. He believed that happiness was owed him for his suffering. But he should have known that the gods do not reward those who believe themselves owed.

Journeying to Kiyomizu, they had each prayed separately for a son. They rang the temple bell, clapped their hands, bowed their heads, and prayed for my health. But unfortunately they forgot to pray for my mother’s.

Yes, I was born from the waters of my mother’s blood and in the blue-black darkness of her death.

“I am not sure we can save her,” the doctor had informed them as he walked to the adjacent room lit with coal. “Her placenta has disengaged.”

“And the child too?” Grandmother asked.

“The only chance for survival is if I cut,” he said with resignation.

All eyes fell onto Father, already collapsed in anguish.

“Do what you can, Doctor,” said Grandfather.

And so the doctor did. Carved me out from my mother’s belly, with a small knife, not with a chisel.

My mother, nothing but an empty gourd, resting on a blood-soaked tatami, her eyes as vacant as two black stones. Her greatest duty fulfilled, she departed without a sound.

The three of them stood in silence. Grandmother whispered to herself: “I have killed her.” Father thought to himself, Death follows me wherever I go. Neither could speak the thoughts aloud. It was only I, screeching my newborn cries, and Grandfather, who thrust his fist into the bamboo pole of the
tokonoma
, and cursed the Gods for taking his children, who refused to be muzzled.

Grandmother looked at me and then at the room where mother lay, her womb ripped to shreds. She remembered the four tortoiseshell hairpins with a shiver. She recalled her last words to her daughter on the day of her
o-miai
: “When you give your husband a son, you will be free . . . I hope you know a freedom that I have been denied.” And the pain inside her was overwhelming.

Her daughter lay in the same room where Grandmother had given birth to her stillborn son years before. The room was dark and rank with death, “a cursed room,” as she would later describe it to me. It was there within the claws of the timber that she had first lost her son and now her daughter. She crumpled to the floor.

But now, crying in the arms of the man my mother was forced to marry, was I, the grandson. The much anticipated heir who had arrived under the greatest sacrifice.

Father held me in his arms, but no warmth could be detected in his embrace. He looked at my newborn head: my features shriveled, my skin a mottled mixture of pink and blue, my eyes and mouth oozing with newborn wetness, and at that moment, all his fears and anxieties were confirmed. He believed that all he touched and hoped to love was cursed, for even my image in infancy echoed his haunting memories; I was another poison plum.

He should have given me up. I am sure he thought that often during the earlier years of my childhood. He should have left me to my grandparents. They had wanted a son so desperately that they had taken my father as their own. He slept in their house, ate at their table, and adopted their name. But, later, it was I who they considered their own. To my grandfather I was a true Yamamoto; the blood that flowed through my veins was his, red and strong.

But, to everyone’s surprise, Father insisted on raising me.

“Let us take him,” Grandfather implored. “You are still young enough to remarry.”

“I will never remarry,” he replied, almost taking offense at Grandfather’s suggestion.

Father had taught himself to carve on the
ume-ki
, the very plum wood whose fruit had killed his parents. The fruit had brought him misery; the wood had brought him fame. He did not know what his son would bring him. But he believed that I was his burden to bear.

Perhaps my father’s actions were admirable; perhaps they were plainly selfish. Of this, I am still unsure. I am, however, certain of this: it was
I
who fought for eighteen hours not to be born, not to be given to a father whose expectations I could never fulfill. For my birth coincided with the birth of a new era, and as I would later discover, my artistic calling was in sharp contrast to those of my ancestors.

*   *   *

I have heard that my mother’s death nearly destroyed my father. Grandmother once told me: “Had your father not had the support of the wood, he surely would have died. It was the only thing that could heal his wounds. The only thing that could absorb his silent, bleeding heart.”

But much like a tourniquet, it stopped all feeling.

After Mother’s burial, he walked up to his studio and shut the door. No longer did he sleep in the room he had shared with her; now he slept on the sawdust floor, beside the masks he carved by blade. He refused to eat his meals with his in-laws, requesting that they leave only a bowl of rice and a jug of water outside his door.

They did not know what faces he carved. They did not know how many masks cluttered his shelves. They only knew that he carved from dawn to dusk. I, the newborn babe, was put to sleep in the room where my grandparents slept, and according to Grandmother the hum of my father’s saw was the only sound that lulled me to sleep.

*   *   *

Nearly fourteen days after my mother’s death, my father walked down the stairs.

“Forgive me,” he muttered. “I am in need of a cup of tea.”

Grandmother stood in shock for what seemed like minutes, she told me. The man who stood before her now was as gray as a ghost, his skin ashen.

Clutched tight to his side he held in his right hand a shard of wood. Had he been thirty years younger, he would have appeared identical to the image of himself as a young boy after the death of his parents.

She told me he grasped the wood so firmly that the skin around his knuckles betrayed his bones. The flesh under his eyes had slackened, his cheeks sunken like two valleys. He stood there, a man deflated. That which had existed underneath his skin had been consumed.

When Grandmother asked him if he would like to hold his child, his first instinct was to decline. His son, his heir, lay in a long basket lined with white cloth, crying for an embrace.

“He is your son,” she told him, her voice suddenly firm, “and, Ryusei, you have told us that you wish to raise him. How, may I ask, do you intend to rear a child you are incapable of holding?” For the first time in her life she seemed to reveal her anger.

“I do not wish to betray my son with an embrace,” he replied vacantly.

“What ever do you mean?”

“Should I raise him to depend on me, to love me, as I let myself love his mother, when I die he will only feel betrayed. Should I raise him to love nothing but the wood, that which he will know will never leave him.”

He paused. His body felt heavy and dead around him. He would now live his life and rear me as his master Tamashii had urged him.

“Your son needs to know that he has a family that cares for him!” she cried.

He looked at her, his eyes suddenly aflame. “My child needs only to know that he is a son of Noh!”

With those words, Grandmother fell silent. There were certain boundaries that she knew were forbidden to trespass. This was one.

“But, Ryusei,” she said, her frustration curling inside her like a snake, “your son has no name.”

“I’m so tired, I can hardly think of such things.” He brought his long white hand over his brow and sought the support of the banister.

“I am afraid that you have little time. By law, we must name him by the fourteenth day after his birth.”

He stood there for several moments.

“Call him Kiyoki,” he told her finally. “Use the Chinese characters
kiyo
meaning ‘pure’ and
ki
meaning ‘wood.’”

“Yamamoto Kiyoki?” she asked, trying to disguise her disapproval. In her mind she had always hoped that he would let her choose my name. She would have chosen something stronger and more lyrical like Shotaro, with the characters meaning “shining first,” or Zenkichi, meaning “the very luckiest of names.”

“Kiyoki is a fine name!” he said. “He should have a name that evokes the strength of wood and the purity of his mother! Those are the two forces from which he was born.”

Grandmother fell silent again. The son-in-law who had become her adopted son by law was a difficult man to comprehend. There were so many opposing forces enshrined within him. She had seen him fall in love with her daughter right before her very eyes. He had arrived at their house as stiff as a wooden doll, but over the months spanning her daughter’s pregnancy, he appeared to have been transformed. His gaze softened, his touch no longer sounded like the dropping of lumber. She believed he had changed. That love had penetrated a heart that had petrified long ago.

She had not anticipated that death would propel him back to his original state. She would have never guessed that a young man could grow ancient in a day. But here he was, standing before her. Had she never met him before, she would have mistaken him for a mountain pilgrim, hoary as the snow.

Undoubtedly, her daughter’s passing had a severe impact on her, too. She held herself personally responsible for her death. Had the gods been so vengeful that they would not overlook her mistake with the hairpins? Had her own criteria for a husband been so strict that she could not have divulged to her husband that she suspected Etsuko had burgeoning affections for another?

Guilt consumed her. Now that my mother was gone, Grandmother could no longer escape the realization of how selfish she had been.

She could not deny her self-loathing. She knew on the surface that she appeared the dutiful wife. She spoke to her husband only when he addressed her, she maintained a large and beautiful home and ensured that she, her husband, and Etsuko were always dressed appropriately. The death of her son, however, had affected her deeply, and perhaps that had been the turning point in her life, when she realized that there were some obligations for which she was responsible and others that she could never control. Etsuko had become her extension. Perhaps, even before her daughter’s death, Grandmother knew in her heart that it wasn’t fair to expect her daughter to sacrifice herself, her dreams, her love.

But her husband so desperately wanted a son. This mask carver was the perfect solution. That which they believed would fill in the missing pieces of their family. And when they heard that Etsuko was with child, oh, how they had rejoiced! Once again her husband and she had thought only of themselves. The child was to be a boy. They felt it in their veins. They believed that the gods would reward them for the losses they had endured.

How gravely they were wrong.

She could not help but consider herself responsible. The omens were there but she refused to see their fate. She feared upsetting her husband and, even worse, feared upsetting the fulfillment he gleaned from having another male in the household. Foolishly, she believed that if she supported the union of the mask carver and her daughter, her husband would no longer look at her as the wife who had failed to give him a son.

Now, however, as she stared at my father, she came to realize the impact of her mistakes. She found her shoulders beginning to slope even lower and what black was left in her hair succumbing to gray. Yet from the distance of the corner six-mat room where she now slept, she was awakened by my cries.