The Mask Carver's Son (8 page)

I
was my grandmother’s child for a time. Hers completely. The two males of the family coexisted under the blackened rafters of the old house, each in his own mind anxious for the day when I would be old enough to be initiated into the world of Noh. Grandfather imagined the day when I would be old enough to appreciate the theater and the craft of both him and his peers. Father, the day when I would pick up my first chisel and come to love the wood.

But Grandmother loved me as if I were her own. Her own children lost to her, I became the only living connection she had with her daughter.

So she raised me as if she were starting anew. In a world where she tried to shield me from the burden of my birth. To love me as she wished she had loved Mother. Without imposing the contagious notion of sacrifice.

In my infant years I was treated like a young prince. I was weaned on ox milk and washed in water steeped in Manchurian violets and Chinese bell flower. My swaddling clothes were made from the threads of silkworms, harvested after weeks of feeding from a diet limited solely to mulberry leaves and yellow rape blossoms. Grandmother constructed my crib from thatched dried
suzudama
stalks and cushioned its interior with soft gauze pillows. And as if to ensure my safety, she pinned a tiny ornament of
jizo
, the god of protection, to my underclothes and embroidered a tiny version of the family crest to drape over the canopy of my cradle.

She swore she would never offend the gods again.

Thirty-one days after my birth, as dictated by tradition, I was placed in the center of my grandmother’s obi, tied in silk, and taken to the local temple. This ceremony, the Hatsumairi was my first journey outside the home. And as the custom specifies, the males of the family followed Grandmother as she carried me, the child, in front, secured ever so safely by the tightness of her sash.

Both Grandfather and Father wore black and slid their sandals silently as they walked behind us. Neither wished to pay his respects to the Gods, as both were angered by their loss.

Father had lost love, and Grandfather had lost his link with his last surviving child. And of these two great losses I dare not judge whose loss was greater.

Grandmother dropped a few drops of water from a bamboo ladle onto my infant fists and then carried me up to the great altar where incense clouded the air. She stared at the flicker of candles; she bent her knees and bowed her head.

And it was there she thought she saw a vision of Mother nestled under the swollen calves of Buddha. Cloaked in the white of a pilgrim, hooded like a bride, she slept.

She turned to her husband, her face as pale as the robe of the priest who passed behind the altar, “Do you see anything at the base of the Buddha?” she asked.

He looked at her strangely and shook his head to show he did not know what she saw. But as his gaze fell on that of his new grandson, he noticed how the small child extended his hands toward the bronze statue, how the child’s eyes widened, transfixed.

“I do not see what you see, Chieko,” he told her, “but perhaps the child does.”

Looking down at me, she saw the top of my forehead grow pale, cast by the light of the tall temple tapers, my small, plump hands reaching toward the sagging belly of the statue.

He sees her too, she thought to herself as a warmth flowed through her body. It never occurred to her, however, that another person besides her husband might have seen her as well.

For she did not see Father, or perhaps even think of him, as he stood there motionless behind her. But he saw more than either of us. Mother. The image of his lost love. Transparent as wet cotton. Floating toward him and then evaporating in midair.

O
ne of the first things I learned from Grandmother was that when spirits of the dead wished to visit the mortal world, they often used the bodies of small children to reveal their lost souls. “Before the age of seven the spirits can enter and leave you at any time,” she said to me one night as she placed the coverlet beneath my chin. “So we must take care of you.” She looked down at me with her sad black eyes. “You are your mother’s shrine.”

I grew up believing those words. That my mother lived inside me. That I was a vessel for her soul.

My dreams, I believe, were unlike those of most young children. Colorful and rare. Mother would appear like poured liquid, suspended by air, her robes a blurred lavender. I would see her, and she would lean down and touch me with the sweep of her hand, create a cradle from the weaving of her thick black hair.

When I awakened, I would tell Grandmother, “I have seen her! She has come,” and she would kneel by my futon and hold me so close that I could feel her ribs. Her small nose pressed into the sprout of my hair, her arms tightening with each of her breaths.

I often wondered, as I grew older, if in his dreams Father saw her too. I never believed he dreamed wooden dreams cast forever in brown. But had he seen her, reached out in a half-awakened state to touch her, his fingers would merely have grasped the air. And he would certainly have have had no one there to hold him when he realized, as he collapsed in the shadows of those dark nights, how truly deep was his despair.

T
here were certain things that my grandmother knew she could not protect me from. Things that were chosen for me before I was born. For she had witnessed her husband’s declaration and my father’s reaffirmation: I was to be a son of Noh.

Originally she did not think anything of the decision. She had expected such. That was how the Yamamoto family had lived for centuries. Emperors had strained their ears to hear my ancestors’ melodies, Shogunates had fought to be patrons of our troupes. She herself would have preferred that I grow to be an actor like Grandfather. Proud and stately. A man who commanded respect. The great patriarch to whom she was wed.

But her husband had deferred, promising even before I had my first breath, that I be a mask carver like my father. It hadn’t pleased the gods as much as he had hoped. But at last he was given an heir.

She confessed that she wondered in private what kind of child I would develop into. Which part of me was stronger, my mother’s “purity” or my father’s “wood.” She had vowed to make sure I would not become encased by the wood, as her son-in-law had sworn. She felt it was her duty to her daughter to ensure that, despite my future vocation, I would always know love.

When she called me by name, she often dropped the last character of my name and just called me “Kiyo.” The character for
ki
would vanish at the tip of her tongue, and she would concentrate on the character that symbolized the image of my mother. For she secretly hoped that I’d be pure, like her. But when the time came, she would not expect me to sacrifice myself, as her daughter had done.

For, in a Buddhist world, she believed, there were certain wrongs that must be righted. And that the wishes of the dead must always precede those of the living. Even if those who were living were male.

I
have always believed that it was my destiny to become a painter, as I have a tremendous talent for memorizing images, and less strength for remembering words. I can tell you with ease the first time I saw crimson, yet struggle to recall your name. I do know, however, that some of my first memories—the ones that come with ease and great vibrancy—are not the ones of my father and his masks but rather those of my grandfather and his stage.

Although I was no more than a mere child at the time—perhaps I was five, as it was the year I began wearing a
hakama
—I can still recall walking through the forest, treading the carefully groomed pathway to the formidable Kanze theater. Its wooden hood loomed. The pine baseboards gleamed. I can remember with great clarity pointing to the twisting pine tree painted on the backboard of the stage and questioning my grandmother: “Who was responsible for putting it there?”

“It has always been there,” Grandmother replied, indirectly trying to explain to me one of the cardinal principles of Noh philosophy.

“Yes, Grandma,” I insisted, “but someone must have painted it.”

“You are right, Kiyoki, but the name of the artist is not as important as the image that he has painted. In this case, the pine is a symbol of Noh’s eternity.”

I remember being disappointed by her explanation. I remember wanting to know who was responsible for painting the enormous tree with its twisting boughs and flourishes of green. I thought to myself, If I know it is my Grandfather who is responsible for making the mask come alive, and it is my Father who is responsible for carving the mask, why should I not know whose hand was responsible for creating the great pine?

The question haunted me, and had Grandmother’s explanation been more intriguing, perhaps my attitude toward Noh would have been different. Aside from the splendor of the costumes and the beating of the drums, Noh was incomprehensible to me.

For as I sat there watching my grandfather perform the role of the
shite
, the haggard mountain woman, Yamamba, in the play of the same name, I was visually stirred by the richness of the costumes and the intensity of the masks, yet I remained completely unmoved by the poetry of the words. The loud and slow chanting booming from underneath Grandfather’s mask was difficult to understand and unpleasant to my ears. I detested the shrieking of the
nokan
flute, the incessant beating of the
otsuzumi
and
taiko
drums.

In contrast, the painting of the great pine stirred me. I strained to discern each brushstroke, marveled at the enormous patches of green. Perhaps it was the first painting I saw in person. An image in the second dimension reaching out toward me, pulling me inside its sprays of leaves, clutching me in its thorny spindles. I can still see my restless hands reaching toward its luminous branches, eager to capture the sensation of paint underneath my infant nails.

At a very early age, it seems, I recognized that I was moved by color and by paint. Sometimes, as was the case with me, we are incapable of changing these passions. They grow inside us like vines. Wrapping around veins and our heart. How much easier my life would have been had my destiny not been written before I was born. That I should love the wood. Had I not been born the mask carver’s son.

*   *   *

Three months prior to my sixth birthday, my grandfather gave to me my first set of chisels. Grandfather and Father sat at either end of the table, their legs carefully crossed, the fabric of their kimonos carefully veiling their knees. I can see my grandmother across from me, her hair lined with gray, her eyelids soft and draping. With great clarity I can see the lacquer plates from our night’s dinner stacked in a slender column and our empty rice bowls pushed to the side. The taste of our Kyoto miso, the sweet saltiness of the broth, tingles at the tip of my tongue. The deep fragrance of the roasted pumpkin and
shiso
leaves floats through the air. It is as though I can close my eyes and be there once again.

“This is a special evening,” Grandfather announced proudly. His voice resonated with the confidence of a man accustomed to speaking and remaining unchallenged. The room swelled with each of his breaths. The soft lantern illuminated his whitened brow. Briefly he fastened his eyes on Grandmother, who acknowledged his gaze with a gentle nodding of her head, and then Father, who met the intense gaze of Grandfather, if only for a moment, before lowering his eyes. There was a hush in the room, a pending sense of ceremony.

Grandfather reached underneath the cloth of his kimono and placed what appeared to be a rolled pouch of leather on the table. With his thick fingers, the knuckles cracked with age, he unfurled the long white cord that bound the supple ox-hide pouch and revealed five gleaming blades.

“This is your first set of chisels, Kiyoki. They are a gift from your grandmother and me.” He placed his hands on the leather edges and bowed his head slightly. From the side of the table I caught sight of the blue-gray sparkle of the steel. I believe that this was my first memory of seeing the color silver, and I marveled at each of those edges as they sparkled in the moonlight like five radiant swords.

“Would you like to see them, Kiyoki?” he questioned.

I nodded my head bashfully and reached for the edge of the leather casing as Grandfather pushed the chisels toward me. I saw Father look at me, and I believe he smiled as I picked up the
tsukinomi
chisel and caught my reflection in the shining blade.

Although Father was the carver of the family, he knew the honor of bestowing on me my first set of chisels was not his to give. Such ceremony was reserved for the patriarch, the man who gave him his name and his only semblance of family. Grandfather. As he had promised even before I was born.

*   *   *

Sitting quietly at the table, I remember thinking that, in comparison to Grandfather, Father seemed small.

Certainly he could not compare in girth. Father’s concavity was foiled by Grandfather’s convexity. The hollow of Father’s cheeks hung whereas Grandfather’s swelled. His stomach retreated whereas Grandfather’s expanded. And then there was Father’s voice. Almost a whisper. A faint, gravelly murmur of words strung out over the smallest breath, forever channeled into the wood. A silent dialogue with his ghosts.

He smiles and his lips are slightly cracked. With fixed eyes and sloping shoulders, he watches as my small hands grip the smooth wooden handles, blonde with youth. I am surprised at how warm they feel to the touch and how icy cold the steel tips are in comparison. I can barely lift the tools more than a few centimeters from the table. That is how heavy they are to me. Like slender weights, loaded with responsibility. With only one in my tiny palm, I feel as though I can hardly move.

“Use them well, Grandson,” echoed the voice of Grandfather. Father and he exchange contented glances once more. The two of them need not speak. They have been looking forward to this day since my conception. To them, my destiny was sealed seven years before.

*   *   *

I wore my destiny like a too-tight robe in which I could not breathe. Each thread of fabric was woven by an ancestor, the color chosen by fingers not my own.

Within weeks of receiving my chisels, I found myself in the forest. Father’s slender form in front of me, his delicately veined eyelids are closed, and he walks with his hands stretched outward, his palms facing the sky. Paper-thin butterflies flutter at his hem.

He has awaited this time,
his time
, since the very day of my birth. He will teach me to love nothing but the wood.

“Kiyoki,” he says, “someday you will be a mask carver like me, and you will be able to see all the world in a single block of wood.”

His words fall like slices of cypress. Fragments that I learned to interpret since birth. He has taken me into the forest, an earthen stage for my initiation, a place where he too once learned the ways of Noh. I wonder if here he sees the ghost of Tamashii, the father figure who brought him into the world of Noh. Sees his face hovering over him like a mask swaddled in a wig of leaves.

“Father,” I say, “what am I to do here?”

He holds the single-sided saw, shimmering in the forest.

“You will choose your first
hinoki
tree. From this tree I will teach you to carve.”

Carve. The Japanese word is
horu
. And every time Father articulated the word his eyes closed, his lips slightly trembled. It was as though his world suddenly came to a standstill.

“But, Father, how will I learn to carve? I will never be as fine a carver as you.”

There is a flurry of leaves falling to the ground. Green. Brown. Yellow. Their edges have curled, and their veins have reddened. Leaves fall over our heads, crowning us. Shadows stretch over soil, like silk on felt. Father and I stand side by side, our reflection emblazoned in a saw.

“You are my son, Kiyoki. Your hands will lead you, as mine have led me.”

He extends his hands before him, white fingers as slender as icicles.

“Choose your tree, Kiyoki,” he utters once more.

All around me the forest looms vast as an ocean. I cannot distinguish a cypress from a cedar, a juniper from a spruce. I cannot differentiate between a fir tree and a cryptomeria. I am too young.

Help me, Father,
I am pleading.
Help me to learn what you already see.

For the first time in my memory we are the near-perfect image of father and son.

“The leaves of a cypress tree are pale green in spring, dark brown by midsummer, and on the forest floor by the first week of the ninth month,” he tells me. “The bark, a cinnamon red.”

My eyes survey the forest before me, and I still cannot find the tree that he describes. Yet I stand there listening, so unaccustomed to the sound of his voice.

“You can trace its roots to the closest source of water,” he says as his fingers graze the earth. “Its smell is high and green.”

We walk the forest floor until we arrive at a soft, marshy expanse. The cool water ripples in the afternoon light.

With a light in his eyes, he points to a single tree. More imposing than a pine. More statuesque than a red maple. “That is the
hinoki
,” he says, “the cypress tree from which you will carve your first mask.”

“The
hinoki
was the first wood in which you carved, Father?” I ask, my face turning up to him like a sunflower.

The light in his eyes is fading, clouding over his pupils. A distance forms between us.

“No, Kiyoki,” he says with a pause. “I learned to carve on a shard of plum wood.”

The Japanese word for plum,
ume
, falls from his lips.

“I have always hoped you would learn to carve the proper way,” he says gravely. “A way without sadness. The way that generations before you have always learned. The way that begins with the cutting of your first cypress tree.”

We walk toward the tree. We kneel on the cold and damp soil. The silver saw rests between us. Father extends his hands and grasps the sides of the trunk like a husband grasping the waist of his bride. Tenderly. Passionately. Possessively.

“She is yours, Kiyoki,” he says as he turns to me, his hands still firmly planted on the trunk. “Pick up the saw.”

I bring him the saw, its very image heavy and dangerous, its glimmering teeth cutting the air. He takes the handle from me and places it to the right of the trunk’s lowest part.

“Place your hands on mine,” he says quietly, as if he wishes not to awaken the spirits of the forest, “and follow me.”

The Japanese saw is not like the Western saw. In the West you pull the instrument toward you and then push it away from you. You cut two ways. In Japan, however, our traditional saws cut only in one direction: toward the cutter.

The saw becomes much like the sword.

And so Father and I, with my childlike hands placed on top of his aged ones, my stomach placed on his back, begin to cut through the thick middle of the cypress tree with long, careful strokes. Strokes that, with every repeated movement, come closer and closer to us.

The tree becomes weakened by our incision. We have severed it from its roots. Three quarters through, Father orders me to retreat.

“The tree will soon fall, Kiyoki. You must step back!”

I take two steps back.

“Farther,” he says as he turns quickly to see how far I have gone.

I take three steps back.

“Farther,” he says once more.

I take five steps back.

“Farther, Kiyoki.” His voice this time is more impatient. I see him turn his head upward toward the highest peak of the tree.

“Run!” he yells. He is running toward me. I see the back of his hair rising to the front like a small tsunami. The sleeves of his kimono billow like sails.

Behind him, the tall, slender tree begins to creak, teetering to one side before it begins its fall.

Father rushes toward me. He picks me up like a basket. Cradling me for the first time. Holding me in his arms.

There is the sound of a crash. Splintering wood and tearing leaves. And then there is the sound of us. Echoing the sound of the tree. The two of us falling to the ground.

Father rests for only a second on top of me, his rib cage sealed to my back. I taste the feral bitterness of soil on my lips. Smell the dampness of the earth.

He rolls me out from underneath him and rises to his feet, dusting himself free from the blanket of soil and wet leaves.

“It is always the most difficult the first time, Kiyoki,” he says with a faint smile. “One day you will be cutting trees for your masks all by yourself.”

I stare at him blankly, wishing that his words were easier to believe. Craving for him always to be this warm.

*   *   *

The cypress tree lies on the forest floor like a slain warrior laid out in ceremony. Its proud, long expanses of branches jut from its exposed side; the others lie broken and smashed beneath its fallen form.

I watch as Father begins sawing the trunk into small round wheels, the inner core radiating a paler shade.