masks in threes

‘I am not in the least sorry to have loved you’.[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

Yasuko, announcing her ‘scarlet coat’. Consider it a presentiment—like Hawthorne’s heroine who must wear the scarlet letter, an outward sign of witchcraft, aberration. Further on this theme, in addition to a ‘red-striped nightdress’, Yasuko shares with her mother-in-law Mieko a hankering for ‘spirit possession’. Like maps, masks require attribution. A lipstick smear, an item of clothing, a mention of spilled blood, suggest an inclination to dissemble—and, of course, seduce. The pair’s ‘small lips, round and pink’, and ‘glowing, flawless, silken skin’, betray likeness to vengeful ‘sunken-cheeked’ Ryō no onna, our first mask. Conniving Yasuko, having identified Mykamé as her likely husband, takes a half-smoked cigarette from the fingers of his friend Ibuki—her soon-to-be lover—and places it between her own ‘small lips’. Immediately fearing ‘some outside form has taken over my mind and my body’, she reinserts the ‘lipstick-stained end in his mouth’.[ii] Our menfolk prove to be flimsy paper cutouts, especially when it comes to the machinations of Mieko and Yasuko, quintessential Nō performers. Against this backdrop of menace, we are introduced to innocent Harumé, daughter to the first and sister-in-law to the second, a (it has to be said clichéd) ‘mental retard’ who is ‘destined forever to be a little girl’. Harumé initially appears during an early firefly party at Mieko’s house, where light from the stone lantern is said to softly illumine her enigmatic young face—as had the fireflies the features of The Tale of Genji’s infamous temptress Tamakazura. You see, connections abound. Another Genji character, Lady Rokujō, had been an inspiration for Mieko’s ‘An Account of the Shrine of the Fields’, an exploration of sexual jealousy, appearing in Clear Stream (1937).[iii] We learn in the essay that the Lady, besotted with jealousy of Lord Genji, harasses his sexual partners. The same is true in this short tale of vengeance.

2. masugami

nightdress’) in Mieko’s mother-sister-love, and the women’s legs entwine, whereby Yasuko ‘became as tender and childlike as […] a contented babe at its mother’s breast’. In this novel, bodies exhibit a ‘peculiar smell’, and claims made on them are fraught and often uninvited. Yet exposure discloses neither original cause nor future outcome. As in Kawabata, doyen of Japanese novelists, there are deaths (three), unfulfilled marriages (two), and fraught relationships (most). ‘What sinful things words are’, remarks Meiko regarding the ‘Shrine’ composition, ‘coming to life again just when I’d forgotten them’. The very memory unmasks her fated love affair at that time with ’someone else, someone young’.[iv] Minutes later, Harumé reappears reciting a traditional children’s snow song about loss; and for Yasuko the faces of Harumé and her brother (Yasuko’s husband) merge.[v] Harumé becomes an unwitting ‘shamaness’, akin to bitter Rokujō who, in Genji, casts a ‘living’ spell over Aoi, his young wife.[vi] Driving the point of betrayal home further, Enchi references another shamaness in Tales of Ise, whose good fortune declines as ‘she falls into a mixture of eroticism and psychic power’. Thus characters are driven to their own peril. A ‘red rose’ on the ‘withered tendril’ trope occurs in the climactic seduction scene of the novel, wherein a freshly bathed, unsuspecting Harumé is painstakingly made-up by her duplicitous mother. Mieko ‘painted the slack lips a rich red’, applying the ‘glossy tip of a tube of lipstick from the vanity drawer’, until the child-daughter ‘glowed faintly’ with ’a moist seductiveness [and] pliant softness of a baby’s skin’. True, at this point the contemporary reader may be somewhat repelled. But the intrigue continues. A similarly unsuspecting Ibuki, invited by Yasuko to a clandestine rendezvous in her deceased husband’s disused study, is drugged, and shortly thereafter one love-partner is to be substituted for another—the dupe Harumé for the actual mistress Yasuko.[vii]  ‘Strangely spellbound’, as he steps ‘upon the thick mat of a dark red Persian rug’, Ibuki is ‘transported into another realm’. Initially embracing Yasuko, she—or is it he?—becomes Mieko: ‘The sensation was strangely agreeable, as if she were waiting on him, as if he had taken Mieko’s place’. However, reality reasserts, and the next morning he wakes and is startled to find beside him not the expected Yasuko but Harumé, whose ‘heavily rouged, camellia-bright lips were ripe with sensuality, and her face was the face of Masugami’. It was this mask that Ibuki had seen on display at Yorikata Yakushiji’s home in Kyoto, on the occasion of the Nō exhibition that opens the novel. In effect, Ibuki has sex with three women—an innocent waif, a mistress, and their mother—a truly baffling confabulation. 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

complicated. As Japanese, they’re all in bed with one another. Noticing a smear on her father’s uppermost rib (on his return from the Harumé-Yasuko escapade), young Ruriko exclaims, ‘Daddy! Red, red!’ ‘Red’, of course, incriminates—‘like a camellia petal’, as mentioned earlier. Indeed, in this peculiar novel about ‘deep and turbid female strength’, its essence remains in question. Following the substitution scene, Yasuko learns that her deceased husband’s sister has fallen pregnant to Ibuki, and she confesses to Mieko: ‘I’m as excited as you by the prospect of a baby with Akio’s blood in its veins’. I say… again, pretty yuk. Strength is an oozing, furtive treasure, pressed up against a restraining wall, with nowhere much else to turn for relief. 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.

Mieko’s maid Yū rebukes her protracted shenanigans that release nothing except ‘an endless river of blood’, like menstrual flow.[viii] And so it runs. Poor instigator Mieko, a self-confessed ‘counterfeit’ poet, whose ‘spirit alternated constantly between spells of lyricism and spirit possession’. In the end, detritus. And so the youth undone by ‘dead beauty’ in Peony Lantern is matched by our emasculated males, duped into ‘playing the part of the fool unintentionally’. Crestfallen Ibuki determines to resolve once-and-for-all the significance of the mysterious Lady Rokujō figure at the heart of Mieko’s inquiry. Visiting the still-existing ‘Shrine in the Fields’ in Kyoto (a place the present writer has shared the good fortune to visit, see photograph below), he wanders on to nearby Jikōji Temple, where he overhears the familiar Harumé plaint: ‘Snow is falling / Snow is falling’. The unseen mother-to-be of his child is nearby! Remembering her beauty, ‘fear [in his mind turns] into pity’, then to ‘peril’ and ‘uncleanness’. Now we are returned to the place where it all began, on the very anniversary of the opening Nō viewing, with Yakushuji’s daughter Toé arriving from Kyoto to attend a poetry circle held at Mieko Toganō’s home in Meguro, Tokyo. The novel retraces its steps in a kind of retribution. Announcing his passing, Toé presents Mieko with her father’s parting gift. It is the Fukai mask of death that Mieko had so admired on the earlier occasion, and which Yakushiji had himself worn in performances of Sumida River and Mie Temple. Mieko, who at the outset mourns the loss of a son and that of the love of her youth, ends up sacrificing her one birth-daughter Harumé, who dies in childbirth. All this to perpetuate the Toganō bloodline. 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. The novel of masks crumples against the very urge that gives life.

moralitas

‘Mieko’s spirit alternates between spells of lyricism and self-possession, making no philosophical distinction between the self and its relation to others, unable to achieve the solace of a religious indifference’ (adapted, 132). 

notes

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] The lover and father to her twin children had been 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 revelation 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, potions and duplicity enjoy an extensive literary deus ex machina. Appositely, one recalls Gerladine doping and undoing her benefactress Christabel, in Coleridge’s poem named after the latter. 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.‘