The Mask Carver's Son

by Alyson Richman

  Blessed with great powers of persuasion, these two men convinced the government to dissolve the Technical School of Fine Arts and combine it with the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. As a result, an aspiring painter in 1894, someone like me, had little choice but to apply to the newly established Tokyo School of Fine Arts. The new school would be the complete opposite of the Technical School of Fine Arts, in which everything was Western. Okakura and Fenollosa, who oversaw the creation of the new school, concluded that it should be completely devoid of Western influence, thus strictly forbidding instruction in Western painting techniques. Its principal goal was to reestablish the traditional Japanese art forms that the nation had turned its back on only a few years before. Even the uniforms of the students, designed by Okakura Kakuzo himself, were to echo the traditional costume of the Nara period.

  Since my record was excellent and my family background was equally impressive, my acceptance and subsequent scholarship to the school came as little surprise. As much as it was an honor to be admitted to the academy, however, I could not feign excitement.

  Much to my dismay, the registration papers informed me that there were only three departments in the program: painting, sculpture, and crafts, all in the traditional Japanese techniques. The school offered no courses in yoga—what we call the Western style—or in oil painting or pencil drawing.

  The prospect of an education in all things traditional made me miserable. I hungered for the West. The school that I had always anticipated attending, a place that I had perceived as my entranceway to a Western art education, had been radically transformed.

  In my mind, I had already walked the streets of Paris, lost myself within the magnificent walls of the Louvre, and drunk coffee in a sidewalk café by the Seine. In Tokyo I feared that I would never learn the proper techniques for being a Western oil painter. The classes I was to take would surely not teach me the science of blending pigments, the laws of perspective, or the methods of modeling. I feared that I was not going forward at all; instead, I was leaving one house fiercely grounded in the ancient traditions for another.

  I placated myself with the fact that I was at least going to study in Tokyo, where the wave toward modernization was strongest. As much as I loved the quiet and natural beauty of Kyoto, I knew that in the capital I would have bookstores, peers, and most importantly, the mouth to the West—the port in Yokohama.

  EIGHTEEN

  I postponed telling my father of my application to the Tokyo School of Fine Arts for as long as possible, but as I would be leaving in two weeks, I could delay the announcement no longer. I knew my departure to Tokyo would forever change our relationship and would inarguably demonstrate to him that I would never follow in his footsteps. But much to my surprise, I found myself not dreading informing him of my departure; I actually seemed to long for it.

  I suppose somewhere deep in my heart, I wanted to wound my father. To punish him for not loving me more. For cowering from life. Once and for all to make him feel the impact of his blade.

  As I had lived my childhood in its mirror.

  * * *

  I plotted how I would finally tell him. I would tell him in his studio. His sacred room, a place reserved only for the wood and those who revered it. Not I! I would slice through that which should have been my destiny. Rebel, and tell him that I would finally be free.

  * * *

  “Kiyoki,” he whispers in his quiet voice, “would you please hand me the tsukinomi.”

  I hand it to him, and the blade passes through my hand like a sword. Heavy and gleaming. To be mine no more.

  Around me, unpainted masks look down at me from the shelves, their mouths turning up at the corners in silent, slick smiles. The chorus of my judgment.

  My own mask rests on a pale swatch of waste silk. Its features are sad and awkward, infused with a spirit it wishes it could exchange.

  “Father,” I say. And I look at his ancient body crouched over the block of wood. His spine twisting now, as Grandmother’s had, his hair slicked behind his ears. “I have something important to tell you.”

  He does not look up from his carving. He does not turn his head to see my burning eyes. Around me I hear the sound of his saw slicing, the dropping of his chisel.

  “What is it, Kiyoki? Do you need me to return the tsukinomi?”

  “No, Father, it has nothing to do with the wood,” I say with premeditation.

  He is silent and I can feel the rush of his veins, the perplexity of his mind. He is confused, unprepared for anything else that I might want to discuss.

  I loosen my sash and reach to find my letter of acceptance so that I might hold it in my hands, to receive its strength, see the proof of my escape.

  “I have been accepted to the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, for the autumn semester, Father.”

  Silence. Except for the thin rustle of his kimono, the faint stiffening of his vertebrae.

  “Father,” I say, “they have given me a full scholarship, complete with a living allowance. The government will sponsor me so that one day I might be a great painter.”

  This is the wounding of Father. More bitter than sweet. Father, sitting there, crumpled like a bag of bones. Cloaked in a kimono. Wood at his knees. Knowing that never will his son be like him.

  The mask carver. And he thinks to himself, The only family members who stay are made from timber.

  I see him before I leave, as he will be when I am gone. Walking through a house that was never truly his. Where the braziers still glow orange and the altar still reminds him. Alone with ghosts and memories. And when he lays himself down in bed, does his face melt and his feeling surface? Does he wear his pain the way a tree wears its age? In rings of gold. Choked around a crumbling spine.

  Does he think of the woman he loved, the son who arrived when he was already broken? Does he wonder why his son does not see him as his wife finally did?

  He finds himself in his futon, the coverlet cloaking his chin. And in the night he stares, longing in the darkness to see her. For her shining form to come and forgive. In the whiteness of his sleeplessness, he sees his tragedy clearly. The wood had not been his anchor, but rather his divider. And his son would now leave him, not in death but in defiance. That which he had hoped would save his son had instead shackled him.

  But there is nothing he can say. His voice has long since gone.

  These are the thoughts that belong to the world of silence. Confessions uttered to a ghost. My father.

  * * *

  Two weeks later I say good-bye to my father with a surprisingly heavy heart. He stands in the genkan as I walk down the hallway, his chin lowered to his chest, a lock of his hair falling in front of him, bending like a sweep of calligraphy.

  In his clenched fist he holds a shard of plum wood. Black as burned eggplant. Nearly as old as he, softened from the years of his grip. The only thing he carried from the only home that was his.

  “Kiyoki,” he says and his eyes this time are wet with tears, “take this wood. It is my memory. It is the ki from which you were born.”

  He has not carved for several days and his face falls like melted wax, no longer taut from a mask worn for so long.

  He extends his slender arm and beseeches me to take that which he has held on to for half a century. Tight as twine.

  I hold the shard in my hands not as my father has over the years, but as his son. And for the first time I see him with compassion. The lonely man that he is. Giving me the wood he has held on to for so many years. Perhaps in the hope that he too can now be free, that one day I shall bury it and all its power will be gone.

  “Father,” I say, and he motions with his finger that I should be silent. He stretches one arm toward the door and with the nodding of his head urges me through.

  I do not utter the words “I am sorry,” and do not mention that I can only hope to be as great an artist as he. I am too young,
too foolish, to understand the concept of regret. I just bow my head and bend my knees, place his offering of plum wood in my furoshiki, and barely graze his shoulder as I walk past.

  He stares through the open door, the overgrown garden of wild weeds beyond. A wash of sunlight bathes his gray face and he suddenly appears white. Pure as his pain. An old man who has been old for so very long.

  He watches as I leave, wondering what I will do with that shard of wood that he has carried since he was a boy of five.

  Part Two

  NINETEEN

  The Tokaido railway, its sparkling locomotives only two years old at the time of my departure, shuttled me from Kyoto Station all the way to Tokyo, its brass gleaming, its whistle sounding through the hills. Women with flat bamboo-woven hats turned their heads from rice paddies that soaked their ankles and callused their palms. I thought of them, trapped like gnarled roots forever planted in the soil, and thanked the gods and the ghost of my mother for giving me my freedom.

  I would not allow myself to think of Father. The last image of him standing in the threshold. His body bent like a bow, his fingers laced before him like an arrow. I preferred to let my imagination reincarnate him so that, when I left, he now stood tall. The years of sadness woven into the lines of his face eased and then erased, like the cracked earth after a storm.

  It was easier for me now to think of him this way. Would he not be genuinely pleased to finally have a space all of his own? I struggled to convince myself. Would he not be relieved now that he no longer had to rise at the break of dawn to prepare my breakfast? Now there would be no one to interrupt his sacred routine of carving, no one to interfere with his beloved craft.

  And perhaps most important, no one to remind him of the woman who opened him up for the first time and then closed him shut forever.

  I told myself that it was not I who had sacrificed our relationship, it was he. Long ago. When he cowered from life. When he chose to replace the cry of love lost with the silence of wood. I repeated this to myself throughout the train ride, and tried in vain to convince myself of its truth. For there, beside me, the shard of plum wood protruded from my furoshiki. I pushed it back into the cloth, its pointed, fraying top piercing the tip of my finger. I thought of Father again. The pain caused by that broken bough was as ancient as it was intense, and I could not help but feel connected to him. I withdrew the sliver of wood and held it close.

  * * *

  I arrived at Tokyo Station and took a rickshaw to the house where I was to board. Shuttered by wooden planks and papered with shoji, it existed like a shadow on a street of large and once lavish Edo-style mansions. The owners of these once splendid residences had since moved into larger homes that reflected the Meiji architectural fashion for stone-carved flourishes, domed roofs, and pillared verandas. All around Tokyo, from the elaborate construction of the Kabukiza Theater in the Ginza to the Ministry of Justice Building in Kasumigaseki, Japanese architecture could no longer be distinguished from the structures of Europe. It seemed as though Greek Revival and Italian Renaissance had replaced wood and shoji. I would soon grow accustomed to seeing my reflection in the pane of leaded glass, no longer my silhouette on rice paper.

  The rickshaw left me outside my new residence whose family name, Ariyoshi, was written in calligraphy on the dark wooden gatepost. I opened the latch and proceeded to the entrance, noticing that the outer garden had not been maintained and that a crooked old plum tree grew in the middle of the patch of overgrown grass.

  Ariyoshi-san greeted me at the door, a graying man already bent with age. As I lowered my eyes and bowed in greeting, I glimpsed his bluish face. His strange pallor, eerie and translucent, reminded me of Father.

  “Welcome, Yamamoto Kiyoki-san,” he said politely. His few words would be my first encounter with the staccato pronunciation of the Tokyo dialect. I realized quickly that my articulation of our shared language was slower, softer, and considerably more elegant.

  With my usual lack of grace, I handed Ariyoshi an envelope that confirmed my enrollment in the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. He received it with indifference.

  “They have already paid me for the first month and have informed me that they will continue to pay me in monthly installments,” he told me as he led me from the genkan into a long, dimly lit corridor, his shadow stretching before him.

  “I have had only one art student live here before you,” he continued. “His name was Murakami, but I suppose you wouldn’t know him . . . When my wife was alive, she enjoyed having another person in our old house,” he said wistfully, his voice trailing like a faint cloud of smoke. “But now that I’m alone, I still continue to do it. It’s not for the extra money,” he said almost apologetically, turning his head to me as he walked forward. “I suppose I like company.”

  Ariyoshi’s openness and friendly demeanor surprised me. It was wholly unlike Father, who would never have rented a room in our home or spoken so freely to an outsider. I wondered if the old man suddenly found living alone so unbearable that he took on boarders simply to fill the emptiness in his life. Certainly, in the case of my father, the reverse had occurred. Yet when I stared at Ariyoshi, I saw a physical resemblance between the two men: the oyster-blue pallor, the fragile spine bending like a pine in the wind. But Ariyoshi’s voice, rising high and trying so mightily to be ebullient, could not have been further from the memory of the man I left so shrunken at the threshold.

  For Father was as still as the winter waters. Frozen on the top, yet silently flowing underneath a sheet of ice.

  * * *

  Aside from the faint physical resemblance between my father and my new landlord, everything I encountered from the day I left Kyoto appeared new and different. I cherished the sound of the old man’s slippers on the wooden floor, black as satin from years of lantern fumes, because their rhythm seemed vaguely familiar.

  Once alone, I slid open the screen door of the closet and removed the futon and the blankets. The room was Spartan, containing only a low wooden table and a charcoal brazier. An iron kettle sat silently on the table with five ceramic cups nestled by its side. This would be my new home, my studio away from school, my first refuge away from my father. Here the tatami were not new, as decades had probably passed since they were last replaced. The grass mats were a white yellow, their former greenness dried, their strawlike scent evaporated. Here in my one-room flat in Tokyo, my futon was my only companion, white and heavy, the only thing between my flesh and the floor.

  * * *

  I began to unpack my satchels. First I removed Father’s shard of plum wood. Immediately I could sense how out of place it felt here. Even though a plum tree grew just outside my window, this piece was from another time. I held it briefly, rolled it back and forth in the cup of my palms. I looked at it again: the twisted stub; the smooth obsidian patina of its outside; the coarse, frayed appearance of its edges. I held it up to the stream of sunlight and tried to discern any distinguishing fingerprints. Had Father’s pain pressed itself into its skin? Had his grip been responsible for the waning of its middle?

  In the end, I decided not to display it. I was not ready to come to terms with what it symbolized. Instead, I walked to the closet and tucked it deep in one of its interior drawers.

  I returned to my carrying cases and furoshiki and unpacked my sketchbook. I placed it on the low paulownia table and laid my sticks of graphite and my stubs of charcoal down beside it. I carefully unrolled Mother’s painting and placed the five teacups on each corner and one in the center in order to coax the paper to lie flat. I thought her art would serve to inspire me. To remind me of her unfinished talent. That which she had tucked neatly within me before she died.

  Last, I withdrew my yukata and my sandals. I shook out my silk navy kimono and smoothed out its creases with my palm. Everything smelled of Kyoto. The scent of Mount Daigo and the perfume of cypress wood still clung to my clothes.

  That smell
was perhaps more emotional than the plum wood. I pushed my face into the cloth of my kimono and inhaled the fragrance of my past. That which I had so eagerly left behind and had tried desperately to force from my mind, I clung to now, perhaps out of longing, perhaps out of nervous anxiety. I did not know. I am only sure of that memory: my face buried in silk, my lungs desperately trying to regain what I had lost.

  * * *

  Within the shoji-lined walls of my rented room in Tokyo, I am reminded that I am now alone. I can no longer gaze out at the mountain whose seasonal changes I had charted since birth. I can no longer walk the soft earthen path to the shrine where my grandmother carried me to be blessed. Here there is no one but my ghosts to watch over me. And here I am no longer known as the mask carver’s son.

  TWENTY

  Picture me then. Close your eyes and forget the gray, wrinkled man who sits before you now. Pretend that you have not seen his brown spots of age, the bits of sticky rice that hide themselves in the white patches of his beard. Ignore the smell of turpentine and the flecks of charcoal underneath his nails. Picture me as I now describe myself to you. A young student. A boy who realized he was born to be an artist long before he discovered that he had become a man.

  Tall and as lean as a strip of burdock. Thick black hair. Skin as white as a maiko. Eyes the length of a dried almond. Black eyes and pretty red mouth. Some might even say beautiful. Beautiful. Like a girl’s.

  I was discovering myself during those first few weeks in Tokyo. I found myself suddenly exposed and vulnerable. I knew no one when I arrived. And even though I could read, write, and communicate in the same language, my Kyoto dialect revealed that I was not a native of this new and thriving city. I was beginning at a new school as a nervous boy from traditional and ancient Kyoto. I was unused to the crowds of the city, the pace of the nation’s capital. My world at Daigo had stood still. I recalled my childhood, how it was speckled with testaments to the past: the pagodas, the temples, the gardens, and the theater of Noh. I remembered the mountain. I remembered Father’s masks.