The Mask Carver's Son (9 page)

He removes a
furoshiki
from his sash and unfolds the cloth on the ground. Then, after several moments of pondering each wheel of wood, he picks up one from the tree’s middle and places it in the center of the cloth.

He wraps it without thinking and secures it with a short, tight knot.

“This is yours, Kiyoki,” he says while walking over to me. He places the heavy package of wood at my feet.

“Thank you, Father,” I say blindly.

He acknowledges me with a nod, then returns to the tree. He places the remaining wheels of cypress in a small pyramid, stacking each piece with care. He leaves three blocks of wood for himself and then lifts them simultaneously onto one bent knee.

“We must return to the house; it’s beginning to get dark!” he says suddenly. “We should go now, for tomorrow is a big day, my son. It will be your first day learning to carve!”

At that moment the forest seemed to echo my silence. Obediently I picked up my
furoshiki
. And yet the burden seemed almost too difficult to bear.

T
he earlier one learns to carve, the better carver he is, my father believed. So I came upon my apprenticeship at the early age of six.

Through his teachings, I learned that the block of cypress should be no thicker than seven thumbs prior to carving and that the wood should not be so dry that it begins to crack with the insertion of one’s chisel. As for the chisels, I learned that a beginner carver uses five, and an expert can manage with three. The blades are made from a special alloy of soft iron and steel. The handles are always made from pine.

Although the chisels that Grandfather gave me rested by my side, I would not be allowed to use them until I turned seven the following year. And so, for twelve full months, all I did was sit and watch Father carve.

I watched as he sawed off each corner until the rectangle of wood became an octagon. I watched as he carved with his chisel until two eyes, a nose, and a mouth rose from the wood in high relief. The features, rough and coarse, become finer, more refined as the thicker blades are exchanged for thinner ones. I learned the difference in chisels, those with a straight tip from those with an arched. I learned how with each tool one could round a corner and hollow out an underside. It was with my eyes that I first learned to carve.

But it was with my heart that I first noticed that, without the connection of Noh or wood between us, I existed estranged from my father. He seemed to acknowledge me only as an extension of the wood. That which planked his heart and freed his creativity. That with which he hoped to link himself with me. So that we would both feel the sensation of wood beneath our fingers, the pulse of Noh in our barely beating hearts.

You see, within the walls of his studio, I was not Yamamoto Kiyoki, the son of Ryusei and Etsuko. I was Yamamoto Kiyoki, the son of Noh. As he had been to Tamashii. The wood connecting them. Where wood absorbed pain.

For me, however, wood caused only confusion. I did not understand why, outside the arena of Noh, Father ceased to reach out toward me. Why he limited our connection to the wood.

Even as a child I made attempts to bridge our two worlds. As my schooling outside the home began, like my peers, I became excited by the information our teacher imparted to us. The new Meiji empire, which coincided with our birth, Omori sensei informed us, “was a time of great change.” The emperor was challenging all the youths of our generation to learn as much of Western technology as possible. My generation, I was told, was being cultivated to bring our nation into the new age.

For years, Japan had grown within its own self-containing walls. But with the Meiji Restoration of 1868 this had begun to change. Now, over a decade later, we were free to travel abroad and learn of things that we had never even dreamed existed. We were opened to the West, and the West, with all its newness and foreignness, was open to us. Where we had previously been taught that Japan was the center of the world and that our cultural and technological achievements were unsurpassed, we were now encouraged to learn everything that was Western. The emperor, in a program to Westernize the entire country as quickly and efficiently as possible, sent scholars of every kind to England, France, Germany, and the United States to study modern technology, political science, and languages. Even art, now considered a discipline of its own, found a place in Japan’s new agenda.

The curriculum in our schools changed. No longer did our history classes teach exclusively Japanese history; we were also introduced to classical Western civilization. We saw prints of the Parthenon and drawings of the Pyramids. We saw the magnificent government buildings that housed the parliaments of England and France. Our own architects, upon returning from their studies abroad, would later create similar structures for our governmental buildings. The emperor’s wish incarnated in stone; our city and our people were transported into the new age.

*   *   *

Whereas Father ignored the futile attempts of a six-year-old to inform his family of the changes that were sweeping across our nation, Grandfather became angered by it.

“No more of this chatter, Kiyoki!” he would boom, stopping me in midsentence. Grandmother would look up from her bowl of miso soup and try to soften the ire of her husband’s voice with the gentle shaking of her head.

It did not take me long to realize that Grandfather, Father, and the rest of the Noh community regarded the Meiji reforms as a bad thing. To him, a man firmly rooted in tradition, the Meiji Restoration of 1868, carried out seven years before my birth, was only now beginning to penetrate his world.

The artists and actors involved in the traditional Japanese art circles were clearly suffering as the Japanese government and people rejected the ancient parts of their nation’s culture in favor of the new Western elements. Noh theater became unfashionable. The audiences dwindled. The eyes that had watched Grandfather perform the dance of the demon queller looked no longer, and the ears that had once been moved by the age-old melody of the
shamisen
became deaf.

All that had once been considered sacred by the community, by my family, was threatened by the influence of West. And to think that I, seized by those great images of European art and technology, was the greatest betrayer of all.

*   *   *

As my grandfather’s audience diminished, his anger grew. He felt he had been betrayed. His patrons had abandoned him and the government turned its back on its cultural support. His title no longer echoed with prestige, but rather seemed ridiculous and archaic.

On December 4, 1881, when I was six years old, he performed for the last time. He left his home, sliding the latch of the gate into its lock, and walked by himself to his dressing room in the old wooden theater. He powdered his face and smoothed out his hair. He dressed himself in his robes and fastened his wig.

Then, as ritual dictates, he sat alone with his mask. He meditated over it, breathed over it, and pondered his role over it. He rightfully acknowledged the power it would bring to him as an actor and the spirit it would bring to his performance. He believed, as all great Noh actors do, that his job as an actor was to free the spirit trapped within the mask.

He raised the mask to his face and greeted it with a reverent nod. He tied the silk cords behind his head, rose to his feet, and tucked his fan into his sash.

He had successfully become one with his character. There was nothing between him and his mask. He was now the red demon Shikami.

He appeared on stage in his splendid robes, the insidious monster in the play
Momijigari
. He slid his
tabi
-bound feet across the stage; he pressed his soles hard against each of the floor beams and flexed his toes at the end of each step.

He moved straight-backed, his head slightly forward. He was moving even when he was standing perfectly still.

“Iya! Iya! a-ha! Ha!”

The
otsuzumi
player extended his long, slender arm, anticipating the smacking of his hand against the drum skin.

“Iya! Iya! Yoi! Yya! a-ha!”
he cried.

From behind the mask, Grandfather chanted his lines slowly, each word articulated in the song of a master. The drums played on as he danced, his body swaying and thumping, the pace quickening with every turn.

He revealed his arm from beneath the
karaginu
, richly embroidered with red, yellow, and pale green maple leaves against a silver-threaded background. He pierced the air before him with the dagger of his fan, then pulled it back to the hollow of his sleeve; he performed the
hataraki
dance.

“Namu-ya hachiman dai-bosatsu!”
cried the
waki
.

Grandfather stepped backward, then forward, then back again. He stomped one foot, then the other. He raised both arms, his elbows extending from his heavy robes like huge silver wings.

His arms encircled the air in long, calligraphic sweeps. He punctuated the poetry of each movement with his gilded fan.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, just seconds prior to his character’s impending slaying, my grandfather stepped to the edge of the stage. He posed, his hands stretched wide.

And then he let out an enormous cry.

The people in the audience covered their ears, and behind the mask, his wrinkled face turned bloodred.

When his cry finally ended, he stiffened for a moment, his arms still stretched wide. The coronary took him quickly. He collapsed, falling dead into the awestruck audience.

The theater, with a capacity of two hundred, contained an audience of five.

G
randfather’s death weighed heavily on all of us. But no one felt it more deeply than Grandmother. After the funeral had passed and the actors stopped coming to pay their respects, she decided she could no longer sleep in the house that for so many years she had called her own. She offered no explanation. She simply packed what few belongings she had and converted the old
chashitsu
, the tea shack on the border of our property, into her new quarters.

Constructed shortly before her marriage to Grandfather, the tea hut had complied with the traditional architectural specifications of the tea master Sen-no Rikyu. Built using the lightest materials—bamboo, rice paper, and wood—the rustic structure existed between the ungroomed forest and our meticulously maintained garden.

Inside, the room was Spartan, offering nothing more to its occupants than a straw floor, a charcoal brazier, a place for storing utensils, and a
tokonoma
, a small, narrow alcove for a hanging screen and a vase of flowers.

It was a tranquil place that, since the death of my mother, had gone unused. The thatched roof was in fine condition, the brazier still had its coals. The plaster was peeling in places, “like an old skin,” she would say, “like me.” The round windows were in need of a new covering of rice paper, but other than that, the place remained intact. All that Grandmother had to do was sweep the straw floor of the years of dust that had accumulated since she and Mother had practiced the ancient tea ceremony within its walls.

I missed Grandmother’s presence in the house deeply. The pressures of my apprenticeship weighed heavily on me. During my sessions of carving with Father after school, I could not help but feel as though I had been captured. I sat across from Father in the small three-mat room, our knees barely touching, our heads bowed in concentration.

I took to carving easily, though I disliked the sensation of wood between my hands. Where Father carved to forget love, I carved to obtain it. And as a result, my relationship with the wood was undeniably strained. It became the symbol for that which encased my father and prevented him from displaying emotion. Yet it was the only world in which he allowed his passion to truly be unleashed.

Sometimes as I sat there, the heavy handles of the chisels clasped in my hands, I would recall that day in the forest, when Father’s form had rushed foward to protect me.

Now we carved side by side. I listened as he explained the attributes of each character in the plays, the process of a face being born.

My masks were silent in comparison to his. How ironic, I thought to myself, that a man who avoids speech could create such emotive masks. And I, the child who craved conversation, created such two-dimensional blocks of wood.

I would find myself compensating for the dearth of warmth in my life with my daily visits with Grandmother. After I returned from school and completed three hours of carving with Father, I would always end the day by going to the tea shack to pay her a visit. There she would be, hunched over a small lantern, on this day embroidering the family crest into the waistband of my extra
hakama
.

“Hello,
obasan
,” I would say, as I slid open the shoji and entered the humble structure.

“Hello, Kiyoki-chan,” she would respond while removing the
hakama
from her lap. “How kind of you to come and visit your old Grandmother.”

“It was not a far journey, Grandma,” I would reply, and she would laugh with me, if only for a moment.

She would look up at me, her neck stiff with age, her back curving under her kimono. “You have your mother’s laugh,” she would say.

As she said the words “your mother,” her eyes would cloud over, as if she had suddenly entered a world now gone, a world where death had not made her prematurely gray and where ghosts did not wrestle her from her sleep.

*   *   *

In this world the images are timeless. She is not a widow, and she is not guilty of my mother’s death. She is the beautiful wife and mother of the Yamamoto family once more.

Here the kitchen fire crackles cinnabar flames, the rice steams through the iron pot and perfumes her hair. She sings songs from her childhood while she works.
“Kaki-tsu-bata, kaki-tsu-bata,”
she hums, as her own mother once sang.

She hears the gate unlocking. Her husband has returned safely from the theater. She hears him holler that he is home and she sees herself greeting him at the
genkan
, the first moonbeams of the evening radiating off his arriving form.

He is red, the winter having breathed its icy gusts over his puffing face. He stands in the entranceway, appearing larger than a god, dropping his satchel to the floor and lifting his eyes to his wife.

“Where is Etsuko?” he asks.

“She is still at the mountain.”

He shakes his head with mild disapproval. “She should be concentrating more on her tea ceremony than on those ink drawings,” he sighs.

“Sometimes I do not think that I control her,” she tells him. “The mountain seems to possess all the power.”

“That is ridiculous, Chieko,” he says while slipping into his straw slippers. “We are her parents.”

“It is not we whom she draws day after day. It is the mountain.”

She hesitates for a moment before she continues. She lowers her eyes and then says in a voice so hushed that it is barely a whisper, “Her drawings are actually quite good. It is a shame that she was born a girl.”

Grandfather has the capacity to hear everything. He hears Grandmother’s words before she finishes speaking them.

“How dare you, Chieko!” he booms. “If Etsuko had been born a boy, she would not be an artist, she would be an actor!”

His eyes dart at her like those of an animal that has been threatened with its life. Again he chastises her. “I do not understand why you bemoan her silly sketches as wasted talent. It would be more of a waste if she had talent as an actor but could not perform because she is a girl.” He pauses and looks down at his wife. “Now that would be a shame, Chieko, would it not?”

“Yes, yes,” she replies, again almost in a whisper. “I am sorry for my foolishness. You are absolutely right.”

She decides to go and fetch her daughter, as darkness has already blackened the sky. Dinner has been ready for almost an hour, and she fears her daughter has lost track of the time.

The path leading to the base of Mount Daigo is rough and winding. Like a thin black serpent, it slithers around the channels of the forest. Pointed branches whose leaves have long since fallen blanket the earth beneath her sandals and thrust their daggerlike boughs into her kimono. They mildly pierce the flesh of her shoulders, bend at the force of her movement, and snap to their death as she pushes onward with her rapeseed lantern dangling from her slender arm.

She finds her daughter at the base of the Daigo, a piece of mulberry paper nailed to a wooden board propped on her knees. She has brought her own lantern, the flicker competing with the shining moon.

“Etsuko,” Grandmother calls out. “Etsuko!”

Mother turns her head, revealing her long neck and bewildered eyes. Had she been cloaked in a red blanket, she could have been mistaken for a fawn.

Grandmother finally reaches her. The cold mountain air has weakened her voice and quickened her breath.

“Your father and I have been worried. Do you not see that it is dark and that dinner is waiting?” she scolds.

It has been several hours since Mother has spoken. Words feel strange and unfamiliar to her lips.

“I am sorry, Mother,” she manages to say, her voice strained and tired.

“At least show me your drawing, child,” Grandmother sighs.

She pushes her lantern over her young daughter’s shoulder. The flame’s reflection splinters blue and yellow shadows across the page.

Grandmother has known Daigo all her life. She has slept at its base; she has journeyed to its peak. She has walked its winding paths in the season of cherry blossoms and turning leaves. She has watched it from her window as it slept under a coverlet of white snow, and anticipated its thawing from the thick blankets of her bed.

Her nose could discern its particular scent—smoky and green—on her daughter’s kimono, the dry earth her husband carries in on his sandals, and the flowers that she gathers for her urns.

Still, until now, she has never seen all of these images captured in a drawing.

She sees nothing but the drawing. She does not see her daughter’s hands quivering in the mountain air, shrunken from the cold, and clutching the thin twig that has been sharpened to a thin point and saturated in dark black ink.

The drawing has rendered her speechless. It is as if the mountain has penetrated the paper and the sky has fallen onto the page.

She places her lantern at her daughter’s side and kneels on the earth, her kimono getting soiled under her knees. She extends her hands to grasp the drawing, to seize it from her daughter’s lap and bring it closer to her eyes.

She traces each tree with the side of her finger. She notices how each bough arches in the right direction, how the texture of the peeling bark has been masterfully executed, and how the edges of each leaf curl.

The mountain seems to be breathing, coming to life off the very page, its soft roundness undulating, its hump curved and bowed to the sky.

“Why do you not speak, Mother?” her daughter inquires.

“Your drawing has brought a hush to my heart,” she whispers as she rises and lays her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and hurries her to her feet.

There is quiet between them.

“We must get back to Father,” her daughter reminds her.

And so with the base of the mountain fading behind them, its charcoal image tightly rolled underneath a tiny arm sleeved in silk, mother and daughter hurry to return, their wooden sandals sinking into the soft, damp earth.

*   *   *

The mask carver’s son, that is who I am. But do not be mistaken. I may have been born by a shining silver blade, but I do not intend to live my life by it.

I am filled with images that I cannot shake. They reveal themselves in color, they are born from the strokes of my inner mind. Shape and shadow. Form and line.

In my heart I know that someday I will be a painter. My hands are not like those of my father. They are my mother’s. They cannot be restrained.

*   *   *

Throughout my early childhood, I tried to cultivate my talent in secret. Never allowing my father to know that my mind was elsewhere. That to me there was nothing less interesting than a block of wood.

In my heart, I felt like a thief. I stole small pieces of charcoal from the hibachi and wore the face of a diligent son. I drew on old, discarded pieces of paper; I sketched from memory and from what I saw before me. All the while, I visited Father and carved hollow faces, my dedication to this ancient craft as empty as the underside of a mask.

My grandmother’s confession of my mother’s talent was a revelation to me. The feeling of betraying my father was replaced with the notion that I was fulfilling the unaccomplished dreams of my mother. Suddenly I found myself impassioned as I had never been before. I drew my inspiration from Mount Daigo, just as my mother had. I made studies of each leaf, tracing the spidery vein with my finger and then re-creating it with my hand. I learned to make my own pigments using the juice found in smashed berries and the natural green stain of damp moss.

I sketched the squirrels and colored in their fur with the brown of the earth. I formed the sky by rubbing the petals of irises across my page, the sun by the circling of mandarin rind.

There was nothing that I did not challenge myself to draw. I drew the head of my teacher while listening to the lecture in class. I drew my sandals dangling beneath my desk.

I could not control myself. I looked at the world not in emotional terms, but rather as a place filled with images, a menagerie of objects and subjects that I was to reproduce on paper.

I saw the beauty of nature’s simplest things and studied them with such intensity and reverence that they became almost anatomical studies. The cracked skull of a pomegranate, smashed on the earth with its ruby pebbled seeds oozing from its broken seams, could consume me for hours. I remember drawing each kernel, each section of its inner casing. I colored the sketch of the pomegranate with the fruit’s own juice, piercing a handful of the red ovules with my fingernail. It was with this self-invented method of creating art that I believed I was bringing nature to my page.

I cannot explain what drove me to seek such creative sources of supplies. It was as though I was born an animal, who hungered for color as though it were prey. I know only that, for me, fresh paper was a far more valuable treasure than a coffer brimming with gold, that the mountain was the god who offered me his bounty, and that the ghost of my mother had manifested itself deep within my soul.

*   *   *

I shared my modest creations with no one except Grandmother.

“It was your grandfather’s hope that you would maintain the family line in the theater. He understood you would most likely follow in the footsteps of your father. That is why he bought you a set of chisels before he died.”

“And what is your hope, Grandmother?”

“It is also my hope that you maintain the Yamamoto line in the theater,” she said before pausing. “It is more important to me, however, that you be happy.” Looking down at me, she added, “I have learned with age that the sibling to sacrifice is pain.”

“I want to be a painter, Grandma.”

There was silence between us. But it was a comfortable silence. It was not the same silence that distanced me from my father. On the contrary, such silence bound me closer to her. Her eyes were soft and understanding as she listened to me. The words I spoke were difficult for her to hear, but she acknowledged them even before speaking.

Her neck arched slightly forward, her head elegantly bowed, she absorbed my words and acknowledged my presence within her humble walls.

Grandmother looked at me for a long time before she responded. Then, after several pensive minutes, she raised her head and opened her eyes. “Kiyoki,” she began, her voice reflecting the seriousness of her impending words, “always remember that it was your mother’s blood in which you were born.”