masks in threes
‘I am not in the least sorry to have loved you’, Mieko’s dead lover.[i]
dramatis personae
Mieko – poet, mother to twins Akio and Harumé
Yasuko – widow to Akio
Mikamé, Ibuki – friends, suitors to Yasuko
Yorihito Yakushuji – Nō masks gathering host
Ryō no onna
Many roads lead towards a great entwinement. The ‘strange’ thing about a mask is its guise of passivity, like a map promising multiple destinations and delivering none. Red or black markings may indicate the road we’re on, but a literary text inveigles blood and black type. In Fumiko Enchi’s Masks, ‘a flame-red shadow’, passing the frosted glass window outside the booth within which her two suitors chatter together about her, foreshadows Yasuko’s actual ‘scarlet coat[ed]’ arrival. We consider it a presentiment of Hawthorne’s afflicted heroine bearing her own scarlet letter. It turns out that Yasuko, as well
as a ‘red-striped nightdress’, shares with her mother-in-law, Mieko, a preoccupation with ‘spirit possession’. Like a map, masks tacitly reveal what remains hidden. The smear of a woman’s lipstick or her red attire or mentions of spilled blood provide both clues and a decoy to a perennial capacity to lure and seduce others. In elite Japanese cultural echelons, cautions
our author Enchi, ‘perspective has nothing to do with it’. With their dissembling ‘small lips, round and pink’ and ‘glowing, flawless, silken skin’, women conspire in the mien of dark-mouthed, decrepit Ryō no onna. In the event Yasuko, having secured the suitor Mikamé as her likely future husband, takes from the fingers of his friend—and soon to be her lover, Ibuki—a half-smoked cigarette and places it between her own ‘small lips, round and pink’. Sensing ‘some outside form has taken over my mind and my body’, she replaces the ‘lipstick-stained end in his mouth’.[ii] The men are cardboard cutout characters, repeatedly out-manoeuvred, especially by the mother and daughter pair I mention, quintessential Nō figurines. One or other of the males wonders aloud, more than once, whether the female couple ‘weren’t in [carnal] love’. In this manner the table of intrigue is set, an arrangement of insideness and outsideness, comingling them. Adding to the intrigue, mentally impaired (‘destined forever to be a little girl’) Harumé mysteriously first appears before us early on at her mother Mieko’s firefly celebration, where light from a stone lantern softly illumines Harumé’s face the same way that the fireflies do the beautiful and alluring Tamakazura in Lady Murasaki’s famous The Tale of Genji. It is another decidedly minor character in that novel, the Rokujō lady,[iii] who had inspired Mieko’s essay ‘An Account of the Shrine of the Fields’ based on her, which appeared in 1937 in Clear Stream.[iv] The Rokujō lady, jealously obsessed with the unpossessable Genji, continues to haunt Mieko and the entirety of our short novel.
Masugami
It is four years since Akio was killed in an avalanche. Yasuko re-enters adorned in a ‘red-striped nightdress’. Awakening from a terrible dream in which she witnesses ‘one side of the deceased Akio’s face preserved intact like a wood carving, the flesh on the other side entirely torn away [by her prodding the deep snow with a rod in an attempt to find the body]’, she seeks sanctuary in Mieko’s mother-sister-love, their legs entwined, whereby Yasuko ‘became as tender and childlike as […] a contented babe at its mother’s breast’. In this novel, bodies have a ‘peculiar smell’ and claims made on them are
fraught and disput-atious. Unmasking reveals no original cause or point of departure. We are forever on the road. As in a novel by Kawabata, doyen of Japanese novelists, there are the usual deaths (three), unfulfilled marriages (two), and fraught relationships (several). Beyond a longing for it, true love is elusive.
‘What sinful things words are’, Mieko remarks regarding her ‘Shrine’ composition, ‘coming to life again just when I’d forgotten them’, and regrettably unmasking her love affair with ’someone else, someone young’.[v] Soon afterward, Harumé reappears reciting a traditional children’s snow song about loss, and for Yasuko Harumé’s face merges into Akio’s.[vi] She is now also to be used as an unwitting ‘shamaness’, akin to Lady Rokujō, who, in Genji, casts a ‘living’ spell over Aoi, his young wife.[vii] Enchi drives the point home, referring to another ‘shamaness’ in Tales of Ise, whose good fortune declines as ‘she falls into a mixture of eroticism and psychic power’. The same ‘red rose’ on the ‘withered tendril’ image reifies the climactic seduction scene, wherein unsuspecting and freshly bathed Harumé, who ‘glowed faintly’ with ’a moist seductiveness [and] pliant softness of a baby’s skin’, is painstakingly prepared by her devious mother. Mieko ‘painted the slack lips a rich red’, applying the ‘glossy tip of a tube of lipstick from the vanity drawer’. It transpires that a similarly unsuspecting Ibuki, invited by Yasuko to a surreptitious rendezvous in her dead husband’s disused study, is drugged, and Harumé is substituted for Yasuko herself.[viii] ‘Strangely spellbound’ as he steps ‘upon the thick mat of a dark red Persian rug’, Ibuki is ‘transported into another realm’. It is as if in embracing Yasuko he (or she) became Mieko: ‘The sensation was strangely agreeable, as if she were waiting on him, as if he had taken Mieko’s place’. Meanwhile, the next morning he wakes beside Harumé whose ‘heavily rouged, camellia-bright lips were ripe with sensuality, and her face was the face of Masugami—the mask of the young madwoman which he had seen at the home of Yorikata Yakushiji [host at the Nō stage display which opens the novel]’. Ibuki has, in effect, had sex with three women: an innocent waif, a mistress and their mother, a confabulation most devious. The middle section of the book ends on a note of Keatsian bewilderment for Ibuki, taken from an Ise poem: ‘Did you come, I wonder, or was it I who went? I scarcely know—was it dream or reality, did I sleep or wake?’
Fukai
Plot machinery, the moving parts, really matters, outshining moral imperative. To be sure, the mother-daughter malfeasance towards others and themselves sets in motion a rampant perversity, especially their casting their daughter-sister as seductress. People lose the security that makes them themselves. The same perversity extends to Ibuki’s aggrieved and oddly peripheral wife, Sadako, who employs a private investigator (another ‘third’) to unwrangle her own domestic angst. It gets complicated; they’re Japanese, and they’re all in bed with one another. Even the daughter, Ruriko, gets into the act.
Spying a smear on Ibuki’s uppermost rib (on his return following the Harumé-Yasuko tryst), she exclaims ‘Daddy! Red, red!’ ‘Red’, inevitably, is the incriminating remnant of Harumé’s lip colour, ‘like a camellia petal’. In this peculiar novel about ‘deep and turbid female strength’, its exercise remains clandestine. Later, Yasuko, on learning of her sister-in-law’s pregnancy to Ibuki, confesses to Mieko:
‘I’m as excited as you by the prospect of a baby with Akio’s blood in its veins’. I say, yuk. Strength is revered as furtive, an oozing treasure, banking up against its surface features—not unlike the unwitting Christabel’s invitation of the ‘shamaness’ Geraldine, on having rescued her, into her bed: ‘But we will move as if in stealth, / And I beseech your courtesy, / This night, to share your couch with me’. Mieko’s long-serving maid Yū rebukes her mistress’s endless shenanigans causing ‘an endless river of blood’, like menstrual flow.[ix] And so it goes. Poor instigator Mieko, now a self-declared ‘counterfeit’ poet, whose ‘spirit alternated constantly between spells of lyricism and spirit possession’. The poet as detritus. The youth undone by a ‘dead beauty’, in Peony Lantern, is matched by these emasculated men who welcome ‘playing the part of the fool unintentionally’, as what love ‘must be’. Ibuki now endeavours to resolve the import of the Rokujō lady. Visiting the still-existing Shrine in the Fields in Kyoto—somewhere I have also by chance had the personal good fortune to visit—crestfallen Ibuki wanders to nearby Jikōji Temple, where he overhears the same plaintive ‘Snow is falling / snow is falling’: Harumé is present. Her beauty turns ‘fear into pity’; yet ‘peril’ and a feeling of ‘uncleanness’ fills his mind. Now we are back where we began, with Toé Yakushiji (on the anniversary of the Nō viewing at Kyoto), attending the regular poetry circle meeting at Mieko Toganō’s home in Meguro, Tokyo. Announcing the passing of her father, Toé presents Mieko with his parting gift. It is the admired Fukai death mask, which Yakushiji’d worn in performances of Sumida River and Mie Temple, a mask of anguish. Thus Mieko, whom we’d met at the outset mourning the loss of a young lover and their son, at the end sacrifices an only daughter in childbirth, for the sake of perpetuating the Toganō bloodline. Of the Fukai mask, which she holds in her hands, it is remarked: ‘the melancholy, sunken cheeks, and the subdued red of the mouth with its blackened teeth—all conveyed the sombre and grief-laden look of a woman long past the age of sensuality’. A mask is an inert representation and represents death. The novel collapses into this reflection: the very appearance of life’s urge is its defeat.
moralitas
Her spirit alternated constantly between spells of lyricism and self-possession, making no philosophical distinction between the self alone and in relation to others, and unable to achieve the solace of a religious indifference.
notes
[i] Fumiko Enchi, Masks, Tuttle Books, 1958/1983. The present text distils the novel into a three-act morality play. The words in the epigraph are taken from a letter written to her by Mieko’s deceased lover.
[ii] At this moment, the train they are travelling on passes Mount Fuji, where her husband Akio had been ‘swallowed’ in an avalanche four years earlier. The cigarette, the chill, Akio, the ‘stain’ of lipstick, serve as an analogue for the later episode when Yasuko,
frightened, recounts to Mieko the nightmare in which she dreamed of prodding a rod into the side of buried Akio’s face.
[iii] The Rokujō lady is characterised by Mieko as a Ryō no onna ‘who chafes at her inability to sublimate her strong ego in deference to any man, but who can carry out her will only by forcing it upon others—and that indirectly, through the possessive capacity of her spirit’.
[iv] Mieko is a ’tanka poet of the romantic school, with roots in the Shinkokinshū aesthetic of “mystery and depth”’. Her Clear Stream piece is ‘in a style that lay somewhere between a discursive essay and a memoir’.
[v] The lover and father to her children who had been conscripted and sent to China, where he died.
[vi] A strange kind of divine retribution is at play: the dream in which Yasuko had disfigured Akio’s face corresponds to the revelation made here that it was the pressure of his feet in the womb that damaged his twin sister Harumé’s brain.
[vii] ‘No reader of The Tale of Genji can forget the terrifying scenes in which Lady Rokujō’s “living ghost” (ikiryō) belabours one after another of Genji’s mistresses even while the lady herself is still alive; after Rokujō is dead, her implacable spirit, still shackled to this world by her jealous hatred, continues to attack her unfortunate rivals’, Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan (Tuttle: Tokyo, 1964) 132.
[viii] Lovemaking, potions and duplicity enjoy an extensive deus ex machina relationship in literature. Appositely, one recalls Gerladine’s doping and undoing of her benefactress Christabel, in Coleridge’s poem of that name. Here the reference is to a mysterious ‘philter’, a potion or charm intended to excite the passion of love.
[ix] When Harumé menstruated, ‘leaving a trail of crimson drops in the bathroom or on the veranda or arriving at the dinner table accompanied by a pungent odour’, it was Mieko who ‘insisted on laundering the soiled undergarments herself’.
john geraets 