masks in threes
‘I am not in the least sorry to have loved you’, he insisted.[i]
dramatis personae
Mieko – poet, mother to twins Akio and Harumé
Yasuko – widow to Akio
Ibuki, Mikamé – friends, suitors to Yasuko
Yakushuji – Nō masks exhibition host
1. Ryō no onna
All roads lead to an imbroglio. The strange thing about masks is their impassivity, like a map that promises multiple destinations yet delivers none. Red and black markings may indicate the road we’re on, whereas our literary text inveigles in blood and black type, a tale of misdirected desire. In Fumiko Enchi’s Masks, the initial ‘flame-red shadow’ that passes the frosted glass window of the booth containing her two eager suitors, Mikamé and Ibuki, converse belongs to the scarlet
coat worn by scheming Yasuko, their love object. It’s a presentiment: like Hawthorne’s heroine, Yasuko is made to display an outward sign of dishonour. She sleeps in a ‘red-striped nightdress’ and hankers after ‘spirit possession’, like her mother-in-law, Mieko. As do maps, masks dissemble. A red lipstick smear, a red item of clothing, a mention of spilled blood, intimate violation. Their ‘small lips, round and pink’ and ‘glowing, flawless, silken skin’ align the two women to the vengeful ‘sunken-cheeked’ Ryō no onna, our first and principal mask. Soon after indicating Mykamé her likely future husband, Yasuko teasingly removes a half-smoked cigarette from Ibuki’s (soon-to-be lover’s) mouth and places it between her own ‘small lips’. Yet, fearing ‘some outside form has taken over my mind and my body’, she hastily reinserts the ‘lipstick-stained end [back] in his mouth’.[ii] Such quirkiness extends everywhere. Our menfolk prove to be paper-thin characters, especially when it comes to confronting the wiliness of our two quintessential Nō protagonists. Against this febrile backdrop, Enchi introduces Harumé, daughter to Mieko and sister-in-law to Yasuko, and admittedly another stereotype—a ‘mental retard, […] destined forever to be a little girl’. Harumé first appears as a mysterious young woman in a flashback to a firefly party at Mieko’s house in Tokyo, where the soft glow of the stone lantern illumines her enigmatic features (just as, Enchi informs us, fireflies had illuminated those of the infamous temptress Tamakazura in The Tale of Genji. Further, it was another Genji character, Lady Rokujō, who had inspired Mieko’s ‘An Account of the Shrine of the Fields’, a scholarly exposition of sexual jealousy among the ancients, published in Clear Stream in 1937.[iii] It is Lady Rokujō, besotted with Lord Genji, who harasses his sexual partners.) Masks steeps in forebodings.
2. Masugami
Four years have passed since Yasuko lost her first husband, Akio, in an avalanche. In a frightening nightmare, she relives the accident, prodding the deep snow with a long steel rod in search of the corpse, only for it to be recovered with ‘one side of the deceased face preserved intact like a wood carving, the flesh on the other side entirely torn away’. She has killed him. Unnerved, she seeks sanctuary
(wearing the same red-striped nightdress) in Mieko’s bed, where their legs soon entwine, and whereby Yasuko ‘became as tender and childlike as […] a contented babe at its mother’s breast’. It’s a curious moment. Physical bodies in the text frequently exhibit a ‘peculiar smell’, and the claims made on them are often fraught and uninvited. Yet objectifying another’s body reveals neither an originating cause nor a clear future outcome. As in Kawabata, doyen of Japanese novelists, there are deaths (three), unfulfilled marriages (two), and vexed relationships (most). ‘What sinful things words are’, remarks Meiko regarding her ‘Shrine’ composition, ‘coming to life again just when I’d forgotten them’. Her memory reawakens of the fated early love affair with ’someone else, someone young’, her life’s love.[iv] At this very point, their child Harumé reappears, reciting a traditional song about falling snow and lost love. The faces – and fates – of Harumé and her twin brother, Akio, merge.[v] (Harumé is transformed into a ‘shamaness’, akin to bitter Rokujō, who, in Genji, casts a ‘living’ spell over Aoi, his young wife.[vi] Pressing the movement of betrayal further, Enchi cites yet another shamaness, from Tales of Ise, whose fortune similarly declines as ‘she falls into a mixture of eroticism and psychic power’, a model for our protagonists.) Characters are pressed to their own peril. The trope of a ‘red rose’ on the ‘withered tendril’ appears in a late scene, in which Harumé, freshly bathed, has makeup lavishly applied by her mother. Mieko ‘painted the slack lips a rich red’, applying the ‘glossy tip of a tube of lipstick from the vanity drawer’, until her daughter ‘glowed faintly’ with ’a moist seductiveness [and] pliant softness of a baby’s skin’. (Rightly, the contemporary reader is aghast, both at the infantilism and the processes of abuse.) We learn that Ibuki has been invited by Yasuko to a rendezvous in her dead husband’s study, only to be drugged by her. Ibuki steps ‘strangely spellbound […] upon the thick mat of a dark red Persian rug’ and is ‘transported into another realm’. Embracing Yasuko, he—or is it she?—becomes Mieko: ‘The sensation was strangely agreeable, as if she were waiting on him, as if he had taken Mieko’s place’.[vii] The next morning, Ibuki startles when he finds lying beside him not Yasuko but Harumé, whose ‘heavily rouged, camellia-bright lips were ripe with sensuality, her face the face of our second mask Masugami (the very mask Ibuki had seen on display at Yorikata Yakushiji’s home in Kyoto, on the occasion of the Nō exhibition with which the novel opens). In effect, Ibuki has sex with three women—an innocent waif (actually), a mistress (hypothetically), and their mother (mythopoetically). The middle section of the novel closes on a note of Keatsian bewilderment, with Ibuki pondering the 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?’
3. Fukai
Plot machinery, the moving parts, matter more to me than moral imperatives. To be sure, the mother-daughter malfeasance sets in motion a repugnant journey of intrigue, especially the casting of Harumé as an unwitting temptress. It’s as if Enchi’s characters jeopardise the very means by which they become themselves. The same perversity extends to Ibuki’s aggrieved, unaccountably peripheral wife, Sadako, who employs a private investigator (another ‘third’ in an assembly of
thirds or triangles) to remedy their own marital discord. Certainly, it does get complicated: these Japanese folk are all in bed with one another. Noticing a lipstick smear on her father’s uppermost rib (on his return from the Yasuko/Harumé tryst), their child Ruriko exclaims, ‘Daddy! Red, red!’ Red, of course, is instant recrimination—‘a camellia petal’, referenced above. Indeed, in this peculiar novel exploring ‘deep and turbid female strength’, its essence remains in question. Following the substitute-lover scene, Yasuko learns that Harumé is carrying Ibuki’s child. To Mieko, she confesses: ‘I’m as excited as you by the prospect of a baby with Akio’s blood in its veins’. It’s a repellent thought. Among other things, blood becomes the conveyor of torpor. We are reminded of Coleridge’s maiden Christabel, who invites another version of the rescuer-witch, the alluring Geraldine, to share her bed:
But we will move as if in stealth,
And I beseech your courtesy,
This night, to share your couch with me.
Yū, Mieko’s maid, rebukes her mistress for her futile stratagems, saying they achieve little beyond ‘an endless river of blood’, a veritable menstrual flow.[viii] And so the scheming runs its course. Our instigator Mieko, a ‘counterfeit’ poet, whose ‘spirit alternated constantly between spells of lyricism and spirit possession’, is marooned, detritic. Our cast of emasculated males, like the youth undone by ‘dead beauty’ in the Peony Lantern poem, is reduced to ‘playing the part of the fool unintentionally’. Newly discarded Ibuki, determined once and for all to unearth the significance of the mysterious Rokujō figure at the heart of Mieko’s research, visits the original ‘Shrine in the Fields’ in Kyoto (a place the present writer has also visited). Wandering to nearby Jikōji Temple, he overhears Harumé’s familiar plaint: ‘Snow is falling / Snow is falling’. ‘Fear [in his mind turns] into pity’, then to ‘peril’ and a feeling of ‘uncleanness’. We realise that we are back at the outset. It is the anniversary of the Nō viewing at the Yakushuji house in Kyoto, and his daughter Toé arrives at Meguro, Tokyo, to attend Mieko’s poetry circle. Announcing her father’s passing, Toé presents Mieko with a parting gift from him. It is the Fukai death mask that Mieko had so admired the year before, and which Yakushiji had famously worn at performances of Sumida River and Mie Temple. Mieko, who at the start mourns the tragic death of her son and the more distant loss of his father and love of her life, ends by sacrificing her misused daughter Harumé, who we learn dies giving birth. Mieko’s endeavours to perpetuate the Toganō family bloodline have ended in vain. The Fukai mask, which she takes in her hands, embodies ‘the melancholy, sunken cheeks, and the subdued red of the mouth with its blackened teeth—conveyed the sombre and grief-laden look of a woman long past the age of sensuality’. Mieko has lost herself in a centreless circle. The novel of inscrutable masks crumples against the very urge that gives life.
moralitas
‘Mieko’s spirit […], making no philosophical distinction between the self and its relation to others, [was] unable to achieve the solace of a religious indifference’ (adapted, 132).
notes
[i] Fumiko Enchi, Masks, Charles E. Tuttle Company, Tokyo (1958/1983), 105. The words are taken from a letter written to Mieko by her deceased lover. The present text distils the novel into a three-act morality play.
[ii] At this moment in the novel the train they are travelling on passes under Mount Fuji, where four years earlier her husband Akio had been ‘swallowed’ in an avalanche. The cigarette,
the chill, Akio, the ‘stain’ of lipstick, prefigure the later episode when Yasuko, frightened, recounts to Mieko the nightmare in which she prods a rod through the snow into the side of Akio’s face.
[iii] In Mieko’s essay, included in the novel, the Rokujō lady is characterised 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’, 52. Mieko herself is said to be a ’tanka poet of the romantic school, with roots in the Shinkokinshū aesthetic of “mystery and depth”’. Her Clear Stream piece is written ‘in a style that lay somewhere between a discursive essay and a memoir’, 45-6.
[iv] 'Yasuko, that man was Akio and Harumé father. Those children never had a drop of Toganō blood', 69. Her lover was conscripted and sent to Manchuria in China, where he died.
[v] A weird divine retribution is at play: the dream in which Yasuko disfigures Akio’s face corresponds to the speculation that it was the pressure of his feet in the womb that damaged Harumé’s brain. Yikes!
[vi] ‘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.
[vii] Lovemaking related to potions and duplicity enjoys an extensive deus ex machina in literature. Appositely, one recalls Gerladine's doping and undoing of her benefactress Christabel, in Coleridge’s poem, bearing the latter's name. In this novel, the allusion to a mysterious ‘philter’ refers to a potion or charm given to Ibuki to excite the passion of love.
[viii] When Harumé menstruates, ‘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 is Mieko who ‘insisted on laundering the soiled undergarments herself’, 74.