The Mask Carver's Son

by Alyson Richman

  “Yes, Grandmother. I know.”

  “Your mother was a truly selfless child. Her only indulgence was the mountain. How she loved to draw it! Neither the harshest winter nor the most humid summer could keep her away.”

  Grandmother stared at me with great intensity, and the haze over her pupils grew thick and cloudy. It was almost as if I, sitting square before her, was being transformed.

  As if in a trance, Grandmother rose from the tatami. With careful and delicate steps, she walked to the low tansu chest that rested on the other side of the room. Her knees bent slowly and with great reverence she wrapped her ancient fingers around two iron handles and quietly withdrew one of the drawers.

  I could hear the brittle sound of paper. Its rolled edges scraping over the wood. The paper was old and yellow, as cracked as the hands that now unrolled it before my eyes.

  “I believe that you were born with her talent,” she said as she revealed the drawing that had come from my mother’s hands, the ink sketch of Mount Daigo.

  I looked at the sketch. This was something my mother had created around the same age as I was now. I could discern her skill, her exacting eye, from the preciseness of each of her lines. She had rendered Mount Daigo as if she had buried herself in the back of my mind and viewed its mighty peak from the irises of my own eyes.

  I sat in awe, staring at the worn paper with its fading images as if they were my mother’s fingerprints. Was this her legacy to me? An inheritance of images bequeathed to me, a reminder that in me she was forever born.

  Grandmother clutched my hands with the force of her wrinkled palms and shook them. “Kiyoki, I betrayed your mother in many ways. Her death will haunt me to my grave. I transferred my burden onto her, and she sacrificed her life in order to fulfill your grandfather’s and my wishes. She did as we told her and denied herself who and what she loved in order to please us and the world in which we lived. She died as a result. I will not allow you to do the same.”

  I looked at Grandmother and then at the aged drawing before me and felt that there were not two but three of us in the small room. I felt Mother’s ghost eyeing us from the bamboo rafters, her spirit breathing cool mountain air into the tatami chamber. And I saw how Grandmother sat there, almost relieved. Having waited years to unburden herself of that which she kept contained. Weighing her down like an iron anchor on a ship of fragile sails.

  * * *

  The following Thursday I found her with her eyes wide open and her skin milky white. In life, pain had cracked her countenance, but death had been kinder, leaving her with the face of a sleeping doll. The lines of age that had run rivers into her porcelain skin had vanished, and the cataracts that clouded her eyes had cleared.

  For the first time in my life, she appeared beautiful to me. I had always reserved the word “beautiful” for the image I harbored of my mother, but as I scooped Grandmother’s tiny head into my lap, and stroked her long strips of charcoal-colored hair, I could not help but think her the same.

  I did not call out to my father, as another child might have. I wanted to have Grandmother alone to myself before the priests arrived, before her body was reduced to ashes in an urn.

  I had been denied this privilege at my mother’s death. I never had the chance to study her face, to hold her fingers to my cheek, to cry over the departure of her soul.

  With Grandmother, I mourned her death as if she were my own mother. She was the only one I had made myself vulnerable to, the only one who knew of my dreams, and the only one who seemed to care. My father would not see my tears. I made sure that they had dried before I left the tea hut.

  I whispered good-bye into Grandmother’s delicate ear and closed her eyes with my two fingers. I covered her with the blanket that she had embroidered as a young bride, knelt beside her, and prayed for her safe journey into the next world.

  I walked from the tea hut to the main house. I passed by the main room with the tokonoma. The flowers in the vase had wilted, and the hanging scroll tilted slightly to the left.

  “Father,” I called up through the ladder leading to his studio. “Father!”

  He did not reply. After I received no answer from my calls, I decided to go up to the second floor. I had never interrupted him before, but I knew I had to inform him of Grandmother’s death.

  Exercising great caution, I proceeded up the ladder.

  “Father,” I uttered again, as I slid open the shoji and craned my neck inside. He still did not answer me. He sat with his back turned to me, as if in a trance, his small body resting on a tiny pillow, a long wooden board extending from beneath his legs.

  He held the mask between his slippered feet, his bent legs extending like the small wings of a Japanese beetle and his back curling to shield the face of the birthing form. Within the studio’s wooden walls and tatami-mat floors, the smell of cypress, freshly stripped by the blade of my father’s chisel, floated through the air.

  I felt as though I were trespassing. I was used to seeing him carve, but during those times he was cognizant that I was watching him. Now I felt like a voyeur. All I wanted to do was close the screen and vanish.

  “Father, I apologize for disturbing you.”

  His back stiffened, and I saw him remove the mask braced between his knees. He placed it at his side and covered it with a piece of cloth.

  “Yes, Kiyoki,” he said, his back still facing me.

  “It is Grandmother,” I stuttered. “She is gone.”

  “Gone where?” His voice rose slightly and his head spun to my direction.

  “She has died, Father.”

  He closed his eyes and the blue spider veins of his lids bulged ever so slightly. I stood there, in the small entranceway just outside his studio. He did not invite me in, and I dared not enter.

  As he rose from the tatami, he brushed the thin curls of wood from his limbs and placed his mask carefully on the shelf. He walked past me and closed the shoji silently behind him. I allowed him to walk down the ladder before me, and watched as he descended without the assistance of the slender rail.

  When we reached the genkan he turned to me. “I’ll go to the temple and inform the priest,” he said to me flatly. He put on his sandals and slid open the door. He walked past the front garden, undid the latch of the gate, and vanished before my eyes.

  When he returned, he did not bring the priest inside. He took him around the outer walls of the house, past the formal garden, to where the weeping sycamore trees veiled the tea shack.

  As I lay in my futon that evening, unable to sleep, I heard the priest chanting the Buddhist rite in his deep, hollow voice and the striking of a bell. The rice-paper windows glowed from the interior candles and the structure creaked and cracked from the two men moving inside its tiny walls.

  I wanted to join the vigil. I wanted to burn the incense and pray for Grandmother, but I had been ordered to remain in the main house, alone with my thoughts and my ghosts.

  The two men did not exit the tea hut until the next morning when the funeral palanquin arrived. After it had been carefully shrouded and laid inside a wooden coffin, five silent monks removed Grandmother’s body from the chashitsu. Father entered the house, and his face betrayed his fatigue.

  “It is time to leave for the temple, Kiyoki,” he said with a sigh.

  I turned to fetch my sandals and watched as he removed several strings of silver from the tansu chest in order to pay for the funeral pyre and the burial.

  “Will they burn her in front of us?” I asked with a twelve-year-old’s innocence.

  “No, Kiyoki,” he said, his voice sounding for the first time tender. “You will stay outside while I go to the crematorium and pray for her safe passage.” He never told me that he would be there with long chopsticks in hand, picking through her bones.

  I remember I stood up and tried to grasp his hand. But I was too late, he had slipped ou
tside the gate and had already clasped his hands tightly behind him. At that moment, I wanted so desperately to be proper, to honor the customs of my family, to make my father and the spirits of my mother, grandfather, and grandmother proud.

  And so, with the sunshine of that autumn morning, I walked behind the funeral carriage, imitating my father: my hands carefully interlocked behind me and my head solemnly bowed.

  THIRTEEN

  After the deaths of my mother, my grandfather, and my grandmother, I was forced to acknowledge that my childhood was to be forever laced with death. The smell of burning incense became familiar to me, as did the sound of the priest’s sandals, his small bell, and the drumming of his voice.

  Our house became a shrine for the dead, as the dead seemed more alive in our house than the living. In my twelve short years I had watched the family altar, the butsudan, become more and more crowded. There were days when I would spend hours watching Grandmother as she knelt, her wooden Buddhist prayer beads wrapped around her withered knuckles, praying to the spirits of my mother and grandfather. She would burn a long stick of senko, clap her hands, and chant the sutras over the candles’ flicker and around the incense’s clouds of smoke.

  Almost daily she replenished the vase with flowers, and after every meal she left small offerings of food. She dusted the small tokens of my mother’s memory: one of her hair combs, the silver and gold fan she had used on her wedding day, and a canister of her favorite tea. For my grandfather, she placed a program from his last performance and a piece of fabric from his favorite robe.

  When Grandmother believed she was alone, she would finger these tangible memories with her weary, wrinkled hands and recall the days when her house was her own and those she loved the most in the world lived within its walls.

  Now I was left with the responsibility for maintaining the family butsudan. Like my grandmother before me, I replaced the flowers daily and offered small samplings of food. I learned to kneel and recite the Scriptures in front of the small bronze image of Amidah; I burned sticks of incense and kept the small, white candles alight. In honor of my grandmother’s memory, I brought red maple leaves in autumn and branches of cherry blossoms in spring.

  The tea canister inside the altar intrigued me. The seal and name of the store—Kitano-ya—was strange and unfamiliar to me. Why had Grandmother ceased to frequent this shop, I thought to myself, knowing that she had always bought from Kuniyoshire-ya, a store several miles farther away and whose tea bore no fame that could justify the extra distance?

  Now that she was gone, it was my responsibility to pick up the household necessities on my way back from school. Kitano’s tea store was not far from the road I took every day, and I decided that I would pay a visit, realizing that it had been a supplier of a tea that my mother obviously cherished. It would not have been placed on the family altar had it been otherwise.

  The following Wednesday I took a five-yen note from the household purse and went to school planning to visit the tea purveyor at the day’s end. That afternoon I expected to find nothing but a small country shop with an old man behind the counter and bushels of tea leaves lining the shelves. How wrong I would soon discover myself to be.

  The blue and red curtain outside the shop marked the store’s name and boasted about what goods lay inside. I walked through, imagining that my mother had once touched the curtain, her hands once cupped the bowl of offered tea.

  I walked up to Kitano-san, who stared at me as though he had suddenly awakened from a dream.

  “Hello,” I said cheerfully. “I am looking to buy some Mugicha.” Hoping to gain nothing more than better service, I added, “My mother used to be particularly fond of your blend.”

  His nervousness betrayed him even before the words came. His eyes went to a corner of the wall.

  Confused by the man’s behavior, I found myself following his gaze until I saw the painting of Daigo. Sketched in thin black line, smoothed in loose fading washes. That which could not have come from anyone’s hand but Mother’s. Like the painting given to me by Grandmother. Here on Kitano’s wall, among the barrels of tea.

  I pointed, my finger shaking with disbelief.

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes brimming with tears. “I knew it was you when you walked through the door. Even though you are male, you have inherited her beautiful face.”

  He walked to the corner and unpinned the drawing from the wooden boards.

  “She gave it to me shortly before she was wed,” he said as he spread it on the counter’s flat surface. “She came in the night, when her parents were asleep.”

  I looked at the lines that had come straight from her hand. Traced each gesture that had been preserved in ink.

  “It was the last time I saw her. She never came again, nor did your Grandmother.”

  All this information was so much more than I could have expected. I had only hoped to buy some tea, not to discover that, had things been different, my mother could have been the wife of this man.

  “She loved to sketch. She used to have bits of charcoal stored between her toes sometimes when she was a young girl and would come to visit. We used to play a game when we were small children, and I would try and dislodge them with my thumb.”

  “She died when I was born,” I said, finding myself jealous of his memories.

  “I heard. Your grandmother passed on recently as well . . . The city is very small and a tea man like me hears everything.” He paused. “You know, I never stopped listening for news about her, hoping that someday she’d come again.”

  I looked at him, a man who looked far younger than Father, and who talked with ease.

  “What is your name?” he asked staring deep into my eyes.

  “Kiyoki.”

  “Kiyoki? A strange name, eh?” He rolled up the painting and after a minute of silent hesitation, handed it to me.

  “As much as I want it, it would be selfish of me to keep it. She was, after all, your mother.”

  He extended his arms slowly, the rolled-up painting resting on his palms. “Please,” he uttered once more, before I finally accepted his offering. With my head bowed in gratitude, I saw how the edges of the parchment were curling, the color yellow like the one Grandmother had showed me.

  “Thank you,” I mumbled sheepishly, as I was deeply embarrassed by what had transpired.

  “Please come again, Kiyoki,” he said earnestly. “I would enjoy seeing you . . . ” He seemed to catch himself in midsentence. Seeing how uncomfortable I looked, he too turned pale.

  “I must apologize for having told you so much. Perhaps I should have kept my memories to myself.”

  I nodded politely to him and tucked the painting underneath my arm. “Perhaps I’ll come again,” I said softly. “Thank you for your kindness.”

  I walked out slowly, turning my head back to see the tea man’s face once more. To try to see beyond the lines of age. To see what my mother had loved once long ago.

  Then I was beyond the interior’s curtain out in the fading sunlight of the afternoon. I found myself walking blindly, trying to comprehend all that I had just learned.

  The sun’s glare prevented me from seeing more than a few steps ahead of me, so I walked without seeing. Walked while inhaling the faint smell of tea still clinging to my sleeves. Walked while wondering how different my life would have been had I been born the tea man’s son rather than the mask carver’s.

  * * *

  I returned home that evening to find my father waiting patiently for me to come and eat our dinner. It was the only meal we shared, and it usually began a few hours after I had completed some carving.

  We did not join each other for breakfast. He awoke every morning before me. And although we had slept side by side since the death of Grandmother, our bodies never touched and the cushions of our futons never overlapped. We existed like two separate pods, sleeping within the same coc
oon but never binding ourselves to each other.

  Each morning at dawn, before the birds began to chirp, before the fog lifted its dewy haze from the tall grass, he rose from his futon. He moved stealthily, as if his body was not his own. His movements were performed like rituals: slow and methodical, reverent yet strangely unconscious. Half asleep, I would watch his thin legs protrude from his cotton yukata, slim as candles with bony ankles that quivered at his first steps on the floor.

  Father looked his most vulnerable in the morning: before he dressed himself in his robe, and before he combed his hair and washed his deeply lined face. Before he left his nocturnal world of dreams and entered the world of Noh.

  After having tied the sash of his yukata a little tighter and after having rolled up his futon in one of the room’s sliding closets, Father would kneel at the base of the dresser, his sleepy, half-molded face floating within the spotted glass.

  He stared at himself for what seemed like several minutes. He never lifted his hands, which remained flat on his thighs, his slender calves carefully folded beneath him. He only stared. He stared until his sleep-swollen eyelids began to retract and his face began to resemble the serious and staid man I saw each and every day.

  I too would stare, through carefully cloaked eyelids, at his daily transformation. I would wonder whether, if he did not rise from his knees, he would be different. Would his features remain soft, and would his feelings be revealed in a face made of flesh rather than wood?

  Each morning as he sat before the glass, my body tucked into the right-hand corner of his reflection, he squeezed the pain from his mind. With tightly shut eyes, he purged my mother from his memories. No longer seeing her laid out on the futon and me cupped in his palms. That guilt so heavy that its weight stifled words.

  And with those thoughts pushed from his mind, he shifted his concentration from that of the world of pain and the world of love to the world of Noh.

  * * *

  He rises. He lifts his pale and slender arms, the skin puckered from middle age, to the graying peak of his hairline and smooths the river of silver and black hair with the oil of his palms. His back stiffens for a moment, his shoulders arch so that the blades almost touch, his neck rises from the high stiff collar of his robe, then retreats like a turtle to its starched folds. After a few more moments he heads to the door.