The Mask Carver's Son

by Alyson Richman

  He had heard that there was a place on the other side of the ocean where men had pale skin and burned in the sun. But it was not until he was thirteen that he heard that these men also painted figures that were so real, it seemed they could walk off the page. Because they used thick and luminescent pigments, their pictures had such depth that one could be submerged in the architecture of the images.

  He had learned all of this from his uncle, who returned to the village every April. Tall and wiry, his smile accentuated by the black mustache suspended between his nose and lip, he arrived, seeming as foreign as the prints he had rolled up in his suitcase.

  He was Noboru’s father’s younger brother, who had left the village by the sea for the great capital. Now he worked as an importer of Western prints. He wrote and traveled and had been an editor for the art journal Hosun. Every time he returned to the house of his childhood, now the house of Noboru’s father, he would slide off his loafers, pull up the pleat of his trousers, and complain about the heat. Noboru’s mother said she was sorry, the best they could do for him was to give him a cold glass of mugi-cha.

  She would return from the kitchen with a tray of iced cups of wheat tea and slide open the shoji to where the men were sitting. There she would kneel and beg of him in her soft, melodious voice, beautiful in its distinct southern dialect, to take the cold drink, apologizing that they did not have anything more to give him on this hot evening. And then from the sash of her kimono, she offered him a freshly painted fan.

  Pale white stretched over a bamboo spine. The flattened grains of rice floated in the parchment like sleeping worms.

  Just as I had, Noboru wondered if he was like them. He wondered if he would ever be free.

  * * *

  The only person the uncle loved more than himself was his nephew. His love for Noboru was the only reason he returned to his village every year. The young Noboru was precocious, energetic, and displayed an incredible artistic sensibility.

  The uncle claimed that he had discovered Noboru’s gift. But his mother had known of it for years.

  Noboru painted everything he could imagine. He sketched the mountains and colored butterflies, and he created intricate battle scenes with sword-clashing, heavy-armored samurai and palanquins containing sleeping princesses.

  When he entered high school and learned of the painters of the Kano and Tosa schools, Noboru displayed a prodigious talent for re-creating their landscapes. He experimented with black ink and with the ground pigment he found in his parents’ studio. Like that of a wizened calligrapher, his body turned with every movement of his brush; his painting became a dance, and his dancing gave birth to the painting.

  Fully aware of his nephew’s talent, during one of his visits the uncle brought with him a book entitled European Artists of the Nineteenth Century. It was this book that propelled Noboru into his lifelong obsession.

  Through the illustrations in this book Noboru tried to teach himself the laws of perspective. He practiced shadowing, drawing the same object during the early morning, late afternoon, and evening, until he understood how the light varied and how it affected the object of his study.

  When he came of age, his uncle offered to pay his expenses, should the Tokyo School of Fine Arts accept him into its prestigious program.

  When the school’s letter of acceptance arrived, his parents embraced their only son. They took what money they had saved over the years and told him to buy the finest set of paints Tokyo offered. The next month he left his tiny village, carrying little more than a small satchel and a homemade o-bento containing three salmon rolls made by his mother’s tiny and talented hands.

  When he bade them his final farewell, they masked their tear-filled eyes by hiding behind their fans.

  * * *

  And so it was that I learned the story of my closest friend at the academy. He had told me of his life before Tokyo, so how could I not tell him mine? We left that night for a tea shop near Asakusa. There amid the light of red lanterns and the warmth of several cups of sake, I told him much of what I have written down here.

  This time, after I had conveyed my story—for it was the first time it had been spoken from my lips—I welcomed the silence that came upon the room. For I believed that our friendship was forever sealed, that no matter what came between us, we shared an intrinsic and essential bond, one that I believed could never be broken. In the end, however, I would underestimate certain powers.

  Powers such as the sheer force of the sea.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Noboru’s friendship was the only glimmer of light in my otherwise bleak existence. The absence of color in the big city and within the walls of the school pained me. Having been blessed with a childhood that never lacked in autumn hue, snowfalls, or cherry blossom winds, my paper absorbed every color and every season. Here, within the city and within the classroom, I quickly detected a profound difference. Tokyo had long since begun to turn the wheels of change, whereas Kyoto had fought against it. And despite all of the energy and progressive undertakings surging through the city, the walls of the School of Fine Arts struggled to be impervious. Perhaps that was what caused me to be so especially unsettled; I had come from the eternal city of Kyoto to one deeply dedicated to progress. And yet I could not submerge myself in the revolution; I was cast into one of the last remaining strongholds in the city, a wooden fortress firmly rejecting any change.

  During the first semester, Morita sensei assigned the class the task of studying the works of the great painter Sesshu Toyo. Struggling to reproduce Sesshu’s landscape, we worked silently under the watchful eye of Morita sensei.

  Sesshu did not paint with his brush. Instead, he carved. The sixfold screen was not a plane of paper but a piece of stone in which he could unearth an entire terrain of mountains.

  He coined the ax-cut brushstroke, slicing away the whiteness of the page to create cliffs. His shrubs looked more like vines, protruding and, in some cases, choking the mountains from which they grew. His mountains were not soft and sloping; they were rocky and jagged. They stood out like rugged towers against a soft, misting sky.

  Noboru and I both found such assignments torturous. Although he excelled in them, I struggled to capture the strokes on the page. Both our minds were elsewhere. We both dreamed of someday being yoga painters—Japanese painters who used oil and canvas and whose works were executed in the European style. After our long sessions in class, we would walk to a small tea shop and pore over the images of the great painters from the West—Delacroix, Corot, Ingres. We imagined ourselves viewing the creation of Liberty Leading the People. We saw the artist blending his pigments on a slab of polished pine. We saw the swish of his brush in the clouds of tinted jars of turpentine; we saw the stretch of naked canvas bejeweled.

  We would nearly cry with envy when we saw the first reproductions of the Impressionists—Manet, Monet, Morisot. We memorized their names until they fell from our ears like notes from a well-known symphony.

  We closed our eyes and imagined ourselves stepping into Pissarro’s Entering the Village of Voisins. We saw the steel gray of the sky, the autumn-stripped branches, and the village shadowed by the approaching dusk. Horse-drawn carriage. Cathedral in the distance. If the magazine had provided a door, we would have gladly entered.

  With our fingers extended, we traced the lines of their strokes as if it would help us learn the way these Europeans wielded their brushes. We imagined the wooden tray before us was a shining palette and we dipped our fingers into the cups of tea as if they were pots of warm pigment. And I, with the liquid running down my fingers, traced his profile on the glass.

  * * *

  During my first few months in Tokyo, I was conscious that I had begun to change. No longer did I think incessantly of Father and how I had left him behind. I began to enjoy myself and concentrate on my classes. Although I struggled with the curriculum, I was overjoyed to have found Noboru. W
hen I was with him and when we were lost in discussions of Western painting, I was happier than I had ever been.

  There were occasional reminders of Father, of course. Ones that I could not ignore. The plum tree outside my window. Its crooked boughs and ripening yellow fruit. The sight of Ariyoshi’s aging form.

  I had started one or two letters to Father, although I never finished them. I always ended up crumpling the rice paper into tiny white balls and tossing them into the brazier.

  I thought he would always be there. Forever in Kyoto. Eternal, like his masks. I had grown up believing love was transient and pain lasted forever.

  So you must understand my surprise when around the third month of my studies in Tokyo, a letter was delivered to Ariyoshi’s house informing me that Iwasaki-sama, the patriarch of the Kanze theater, was coming to Tokyo. He would attend to some business associated with the Noh community, and in his letter requested to meet with me at a time suitable to my convenience.

  I had not seen Iwasaki-sama in years. Not since that day I had traveled as a young boy with Father and his masks to the Kanze theater. I sat down on my tatami and tried to recall his face. I remembered his full cheeks and black hair. I saw him as he had been on that day: when he held Father’s masks in his hands and informed him with great embarrassment that the theater could no longer afford his masks.

  I took out a sheet of rice paper and in long black strokes wrote that if it was convenient to him, I would meet him in front of the campus gates the following day at six o’clock.

  * * *

  The next day, after I had finished my classes, I walked out of the main building and saw him standing underneath the iron gates.

  He stood with the stature of a proud actor, his posture learned since childhood, his feet firmly planted on the ground and his stomach puffing proudly over his sash. Immediately I was struck by his resemblance to Grandfather, who I saw in the face of Iwasaki-sama. He would have worn the scowl of the current patriarch, had he lived to see me take the path I had chosen. He would never have been able to accept that the great family tradition would die with Father. A man not even his son.

  Iwasaki’s face had aged gravely. And had I not known better, I might have thought that he wore a mask. His skin had grown gray. His hair had been cast over in white. There was hardly a likeness to the man who had ascended to the rank of patriarch so many years before. “Kanze Iwasaki-sama,” I said as I greeted him reverently, my forehead straining to reach my sandals. “I am honored that you have called on me. I realize how busy you must be.”

  He nodded solemnly. “Let us go someplace quiet, Yamamoto-kun. Let us go someplace where we can speak.”

  As the sun descended into the clouds, the moon slowly became its shining replacement. I walked behind the patriarch, whose shadow enveloped me. And once again I felt swallowed. As if Father had sent a messenger, in the guise of Grandfather.

  Only father had not sent him. And as a result, his silence was all the more powerful.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I have come to inform you that your father has been ill for the past month,” Iwasaki told me in the seclusion of a small restaurant not far from my school.

  “Since you left, he has grown frail and thin. The other actors and I have visited him on occasion, only to find that he rarely will come to the door.”

  The old patriarch rested his full and delicately lined lips on the rim of his teacup. The smoke wafted over his face and made him appear even more ghostly than his already hoary appearance.

  “We have been concerned for him. We have been unable to commission any masks, yet we know from the fallen cypresses in the forest that he must still be carving.”

  I looked down at my plate of grilled fish. My appetite had suddenly vanished, and as I was unable to eat my meal, I concentrated on removing the small grid of bones from the fish’s middle.

  “Have you been writing to your father since you’ve come to Tokyo?” he asked, and his tone seemed less kind.

  “I have been meaning to for some time,” I said, struggling awkwardly.

  “It must have been devastating to your father when you left.”

  I remained silent.

  “For all of us in the theater, it is damaging when a child does not follow in our footsteps. In this time particularly, when so many of you are seduced by the ways of the West.” He paused and then looked at me with raised eyebrows. I could instantly envision the man who sat before me performing on stage. I need not close my eyes to picture him beating his feet over the polished floorboards in the dance of the demon queller or in the ravaged spirit of Ono-no Komachi.

  “It must have been particularly brutal for your father, as you are his only son,” he said, interrupting my reverie.

  I could feel my face begin to redden. My ears beginning to burn. Had he traveled all the way to Tokyo to remind me of my betrayal? Something I remembered all too well. Had his reason for attending to affairs concerning the theater been a ruse?

  “What you tell me of my father is of great concern to me, Patriarch,” I confessed politely. “It was wrong for me to have been so self-involved here that I have not inquired about the status of his health. I will write to him immediately and I will try to schedule a trip to Kyoto during the next few months.”

  “I am glad to hear this, Yamamoto Kiyoki,” he said. As he pushed a small piece of sushi into his mouth I noticed the large, swollen quality of his hands. Once again it struck me that I was sitting across from someone who strongly resembled Grandfather.

  As we exited the restaurant, the long red curtains falling to the side of the entranceway, he leaned toward me.

  “It is a shame, Yamamoto-kun. We all at the theater had always thought you would be a great mask carver like your father.”

  He turned away from me, and his broad shoulders seemed to slope to the ground. The fading light of the distant lanterns made him appear even older, and he sagged when he bade me good-bye.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  A-kan! A-kan! A-kan!” the teacher shouted at me from his zabuton. Saito sensei was from Osaka, and he always slipped into dialect when he expressed his disapproval.

  The silence and sobriety of Morita sensei’s painting class was in complete contrast to Saito’s sculpture class. Here we worked in constant fear. Here our teacher reigned from his zabuton; the slightest incorrect move from one of our chisels was incapable of escaping from his line of vision. Even Noboru, whose work was least likely to be criticized, often felt the sting of Saito’s vicious bark.

  If it hadn’t been for the overbearing presence of Saito sensei, I might have thought I was in my father’s studio again. The smell of freshly stripped wood interlaced with the fresh scent of new tatami made me think of home, and this, combined with Iwasaki’s visit, caused me to be overcome with a certain bittersweet nostalgia that I was surprised to learn was inside me.

  It was not surprising that my classmates and I struggled in sculpture. Most of us were familiar with a brush and ink; we had learned how to write our characters with a brush during our earlier years, and drawing was a skill that came naturally to us. Creating in the third dimension, however, was another matter.

  I was probably the only one of my peers who had any knowledge of the art of carving. I watched the others receive their chisels, and their faces betrayed their confusion over the shining blades handed to them.

  Had Father been here in this room with me, I know he would have balked at the chisels they were dispersing. The slender pine handles were rough and unvarnished, the silver blades square and blunt to the touch.

  I heard the echo of Saito sharpening the edges of his chisels. The sound of the blade against the wet stone brought back more images of Father. Once again I saw him, his back crouched and his knees pressed to the floor, his white wrists jutting from the billowing sleeves of his gray kimono, the blue veins pumping through his skin. He grasped the handles of hi
s chisels like a samurai clasping his sword. Swiftly and powerfully, fingers meshing with wood, Father slid the blades over a shining flat black stone, wet and glimmering in the sunlight. Like the ink stone used by a calligrapher, ground down in the middle.

  In accordance with his sharpening ritual, Father always touched the shining blade, sharp as dagger, against his fingertip. The red blood, reminiscent of waxberry juice, ran over his knuckle.

  I held the chisels in the palms of my hands. I had traveled so far to avoid the prison of these wooden instruments, yet here I was, picking up the very tools I had rejected years before.

  I should have laughed at my situation. The ridiculousness of it could not be met with anger or tears. But in the end, I did grasp the chisels and plow into the wood, just as I had done countless times with Father.

  The sensation of wood beneath my blade felt surprisingly refreshing to me. Without the shadow of Father behind me, I worked freely, without the confusion of the man for whom I was carving.

  Around me, my classmates struggled. Their hands fell clumsily over their handles. Their blades buckled over the wood. The slab of cedar they were supposed to incise splintered and frayed like a piece of cheap cloth. The irony of my situation amazed me. Here I was, excelling in the only class I had hoped to avoid. The craft from whose chains I thought I had finally sliced myself.

  On the second day, Saito called me aside and asked that I remain after class so that he might speak with me.

  “Kiyoki,” he said that afternoon

  “Yes, Saito sensei.”

  “Is it true that you are the son of Yamamoto Ryusei?”

  I was stunned. I had not anticipated that my father’s reputation would follow me to Tokyo.

  “Yes.”