“I am very pleased to have you in my class, I am sure you will do well.”
“I am honored to be under your guidance, honorable Saito sensei,” I replied, stressing the word your in order to seem as humble as possible.
“I am sure that you will be far ahead of your classmates, as you have probably been carving since the day you were born.” He chuckled to himself as if the fact that I came from a carving family bonded us.
“Carving may come easy to me, but it is the art of Western painting to which I aspire.”
“Why do you not make your country and the emperor proud by learning to produce the great craftsmanship of the Kamakura?” he asked, his voice revealing annoyance at my irreverence.
“I am not moved by the wood, sensei.”
And then I added, so that the silence between us would be broken, “I am most unlike my father. I am more like my late mother, who was an accomplished painter.”
He looked at me with stony eyes. “Such pain you must have caused your family!”
“Pain has always lived within the foundation of my family. That and wood. Forever entwined.”
The crooked bend of sensei’s nose flashed before me, reminding me of Father’s shard of plum wood that still remained deep in one of my closet drawers.
“I had hoped that you might be a student that I could encourage your peers to follow,” he said, disappointed. “But, alas, I see that I was mistaken.”
The bond that he thought existed was dissolved in seconds. He turned his gaze away from me. I saw the reflection of his face in the glossy weave of the tatami.
“You are dismissed, Kiyoki.”
I heard the crick of his neck as he raised his head, and I felt his gaze burning into my back. It was an all-too-familiar feeling. Reminiscent of my childhood. He was like a bough sliced from the trunk of my father. Wooden and restrained. Disappointed and now silent.
I left the classroom to the sound of my sandals clicking on the hall’s wooden floorboards. The echo was loud and seemed inappropriate within the walls of the school, this contrived structure built to reaffirm tradition and reject the new age outside its gate. Yet as I clicked down the hallway, I made no attempts to muffle the sound.
In fact, with the arrogance of a foolish young man, I tried to amplify it.
TWENTY-SIX
Nearly a week passed before I gathered the courage to write Father. I was still angry that Iwasaki-san had invaded the new life that I was trying to create for myself in Tokyo.
Dear Father,
I hope these autumn months find you surrounded by many red and golden leaves. Please forgive me for not having written to you sooner, but adjusting to life in Tokyo has been difficult.
I have been struggling with many of my classes. The college is not all that I imagined it to be. Okakura and Fenollosa have certainly established an institution that is staunchly dedicated to preserving the traditional artistic ways of our nation’s past. I am sure that you would be pleased to hear this.
I am not getting instruction in Western-style painting, as I had wished. Only after one masters the courses in the traditional classes can one ascend to this highly competitive class. And even this class is not a Western-style class but really one that just encourages the best students to create a “new” Japanese style. All of this is very frustrating to me, but I am happy to be on the path toward painting, which, as you know, I love.
I realize, Father, that I have caused you great suffering with my departure. I write because I want to ensure that you are well. Have you been carving? I hope that you will answer my letter and inform me of your status.
I remain your only son,
Yamamoto Kiyoki
I sealed the letter with rice glue and sent it the following week.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I, Yamamoto Ryusei’s son, still silently resented the wood. I endured Saito sensei’s class, as humiliating as it was, because I wanted desperately to be accepted to the accelerated painting class. There the students were allowed to experiment with spatial depth and the rendering of light and shadow. Still no oils or canvas, but at least it was something.
Dreams such as those, however, had to be postponed until I completed all of my studio work for the day; otherwise none of my assignments would ever be finished. There were mountains of work to be done. My final project in Morita’s class was a replica of a Heian hand scroll, complete with small ink drawings and extremely difficult calligraphy. Additionally, a medium-sized bodhisattva had to be carved for Saito sensei. Then there was still the bizenyaki to be done in my crafts class.
Late in the evening, after I had finished my work for the day, I would drag myself home to my small rented room. There I would dream of the paintings I had not yet painted, of exhibiting in spaces I had not yet visited, and of meeting with Japanese painters who had actually studied in Europe. Men like Kuroda Seiki.
All of the newspapers had written about Kuroda’s return to Japan in 1893. He had spent nine years in France, abandoning his initial studies there, as a student of law, for painting. Along with Kume Keiichiro and Fuji Masazo, two of Fontanesi’s pupils from the old Technical Art School, Kuroda began his study of Western art with the academic painter Raphael Collin and eventually cultivated himself into the role of a well-respected artist.
Noboru and I had often discussed Kuroda and his work, especially after the uproar his painting Morning Toilette created during its first exhibition in Japan. With all of the publicity the critics created, denouncing the immodest subject matter and the overt sexuality of the model’s pose, Noboru and I decided that we should see the painting for ourselves.
We walked together into the crowded exhibition space not far from the new railway station. It was a far-from-scandalous painting in the eyes of two appreciative art students, especially two art students who wanted so desperately to paint in the Western style. Noboru and I failed to see why the painting shocked the crowds and critics.
It was a rather tall canvas, depicting a young girl standing before a full-length mirror. By introducing the reflection in the glass, Kuroda’s composition increased in depth, as the viewer was now able to see both the frontal and rear view of this naked young girl. Unclothed, the woman stared at her own reflection while wrapping a long lock of her hair around her head. Her upswept hair exposes the most delicate, sensual, and most appreciated area of the female for any Japanese male—the nape of the neck.
Noboru and I both loved this painting. Clearly, it was masterful in its technique: its soft palette well blended and the semi-impressionistic brushwork extremely well executed. But the most wonderful thing about the painting to Noboru and me was that it brought out the hypocrisy of the Japanese public.
“Really!” Noboru exclaimed. “Did you hear Okada-san commenting on how vulgar Kuroda was to show not only a nude woman but also one with her neck exposed? It was if he had never looked at one single work of our own Ukiyo-e artists.”
“We should be sending the old man a print of Harunobu’s Woman in a Bathhouse,” I suggested.
“Or even better,” Noboru said, “we could send a book of Tokugawa shunga illustrations.”
The thought of seeing the old man confronted with graphic images of sexual practice sent us into peals of hysterical laughter.
We were cocooned in our own amusement that day. We were sated with happiness: by the sun, the exhibition, our impressions of Kuroda’s work, and his success in Europe and Japan. We were satisfied like the happy and drunken image of Hotai, his belly full and his face smiling.
That day there was nothing preventing us from believing that we too could achieve the greatness of Kuroda Seiki. We were swollen in our youthful arrogance as we sashayed through the streets, our sandals clicking and our shoulders back. We were truly convinced that someday our own paintings would hang on those walls.
TWENTY-EIGHT
For several wee
ks I waited for a response from Father, and I began to think of him with increasing frequency. At night he would often appear in my dreams. I no longer felt the beneficent presence of my mother. Now I felt the heavy face of Father gazing down on me, his spirit stretching out to reach into the corners of my mind. I wondered how he responded when he received my letter.
I pictured him as gaunt and frail, as Iwasaki had described him. I envisioned him unshaven and unbathed, the skeleton of a man more dead than living, wrapped in a thinning cloak of gray silk.
When I imagined him reading my letter, I saw him illuminated by the light of a rapeseed lantern, his tired, lined face straining as he read my words. Had he read what I had written? Or had he instead read what he believed I should say? Did he wish that I had said that I was sorry? Or, even more simply, “Father, I know I have done wrong”?
I wondered if he spoke now to my mother. Whether her spirit was the only thing that kept him warm. Or perhaps he cursed her for leaving him. Silently, of course, because words between them were never necessary for communication. Had he closed the butsudan so that he could forget Grandfather and Grandmother, the family who had taken him as their own? Had he sworn at their memory because his son had abandoned him?
At night I see him again sitting by the lantern, the taper thirsty for fuel. He lights my letter with its burning wick and sets it aflame so that my words—my inadequate words—evaporate into thin air, trailing behind him in a thin wand of smoke.
* * *
Nearly two months passed before I heard from Father. A letter did not arrive, as I had hoped. Something far larger came in the form of a small, neatly bundled package. I opened it as soon as I arrived home from class that day. Yet nothing could have prepared me for the surprise.
I placed the pine box wrapped in cloth down on the tatami and cut the twine with a small knife. There, under several layers of tissue and swatches of silk, I unveiled a mask. Father had enclosed no letter. No simple note. No message except one that could be inferred from the mask.
What did it mean? I wondered as I revealed the pale white face, translucent as a robin’s eggshell, and placed it on my lap. It was not the Ishi-O-Jo mask, the mask of the old man trapped in the form of a cherry tree, by which I had always imagined him. Rather, the delicate, youthful features, downswept eyes, gently curving brows, and slightly parted lips led me to believe that it was the Semimaru mask, used in the saddest of Noh plays, The Story of Semimaru.
I recalled the character of Semimaru, the fourth child of Emperor Daigo, who is born blind but talented. His melodies on the lute were said to be unrivaled. Yet Emperor Daigo, unable to accept that his son has been born imperfect, orders him exiled and left abandoned on Mount Osaka. Grandfather had once chanted several lines from this play while making his way to the old Kanze theater.
In jeweled pavilions and golden halls
You walked on polished floors and wore bright robes.
In less time than it takes to wave your sleeve,
Today a hovel is your sleeping-place,
Bamboo posts and bamboo fence, crudely fashioned
Eaves and door; straw your window, straw the roof,
And over your bed, the quilts are mats of straw.
Pretend they are your silken sheets of old.
Those words could also have applied to Father, a long time ago, when he was just a boy, when he lived and whittled his masks squatting alone on the forest floor.
Now Father had sent me this mask, and I wondered about its meaning.
I raised the mask closer to eye level. When I held it upright it appeared sad, almost weeping. Its lids weighed heavily, veiling blank eyes. Its mouth quivered, as if withholding a cry. I remembered how, once he is alone, the actor who plays Semimaru takes his lute, his only possession, clutches it to his breast, and falls to the stage weeping. And the mask suddenly came alive to me. Its pain reminiscent of my father. The memory of him all alone except for his masks.
And I recalled how the last scene on the stage is of Semimaru, his blind gaze searching for the vision of his sister who visited and then departed. His tears falling through the mask. And for the first time, I began to understand my father.
I needed no words to realize that he was calling me, asking me to visit him once more. I knew that I had to return to him at once. I decided to return at Shogatsu, the Japanese New Year, which would fall in nearly three weeks’ time. I told myself that I could check on his health and could confront him about the meaning of this mask. I told myself it would be an opportune time to visit him. That, this year, we could start our relationship anew.
I sat down on the tatami and began a second letter to Father.
Dear Father,
In these months of cold and frost, I write to you. Your mask arrived today, and I wish to thank you in person for sending it. Is it the Semimaru mask, as I suspect? I hope to discuss its meaning with you when I return home. I am planning to visit Daigo at Shogatsu time. We have two weeks’ vacation from classes, and I believe I can manage the journey.
I remain your only son,
Yamamoto Kiyoki
I sent the letter the following day and began to look forward to seeing him again. I hoped that we might communicate for the first time our feelings toward each other. But fate, it seems, had other plans.
TWENTY-NINE
Noboru was with me when I received the letter from Iwasaki that informed me my father had passed away. Only minutes earlier, he had discovered the Semimaru mask wrapped in silk and carefully placed in the corner.
“What’s this?”
“I believe it is a message from my father.”
He picked it up between his palms and studied its face intently.
“Such a beautiful face,” he remarked as he continued to stare, transfixed by the intensity of the mask.
“Do you see anything else?” I asked, eager to hear him confirm my suspicion of its meaning.
“Sadness,” he said as he looked up at me and then back at the mask. “It is almost as if I can feel its spirit shaking in my hands. It’s weeping from underneath its skin.”
“Tilt it,” I told him anxiously. “Don’t you see anything else when you rotate it back and forth?”
He continued to sit on the floor, his feet tucked under him, his palms outstretched, when suddenly there was a violent knock on my door.
“Yamamoto Kiyoki, Yamamoto Kiyoki!” It was Ariyoshi, and he was out of breath from climbing the stairs to my room.
“Yes?” I asked the old man as I slid open my door.
“There is a messenger downstairs who will not leave until he has delivered a letter to you!” Ariyoshi’s face was flushed and his words were difficult to make out, each one merging into the other, like a string of beads.
“All right, then,” I said, not giving much thought to it. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
I went downstairs and discovered the messenger breathing clouds of steam into the frosty air. When he saw that I had come to accept the delivery, his shoulders tensed and his posture suddenly stiffened. He could not have been more than fifteen years of age.
“Yes, I am Yamamoto Kiyoki,” I told him, and extended my hand to receive the letter.
With his two hands clasping each side of the envelope, the young boy handed me the letter. “It has come from Kyoto.”
I handed him two yen and turned to read the letter in private.
The letter was dated December 14, 1895. I closed the shoji to my room and went past Noboru, who had wrapped the mask from my father and returned it to the corner. I sat down on the floor beside him.
Dear Yamamoto Kiyoki,
The year, it seems, has ended badly. The frost has come early to Kyoto, and, sadly, I must be the one to write you the devastating news. Your father passed away last night. Our colleague Isao-san discovered him early this morning after deciding to visit on him
on his way to the theater.
We in the theater recognize that you will want to take responsibility for your father’s funeral. We thus urge you to return as soon as possible.
With grave sadness,
Kanze Iwasaki Keizo
I received the news of my father’s death without any immediate signs of grief. It was almost as if I could not believe that he had left me before I had a chance to return.
I remained on the floor with my knees curled beneath my chin, my kimono smoothed out underneath me. “I must return to Kyoto,” I told Noboru after minutes of silence passed between us. “You see, my father has died. I must return at once.”
I had missed seeing my father one last time by only three weeks, I thought to myself, as I began to pack for the long journey home. I was stunned by his passing. How could he have left me before I had a chance to say good-bye? I thought to myself. I felt weak and despondent. I had not had a chance to reconcile with him, and I knew that, once the initial shock wore off, this would weigh heavily on my conscience.
Out of respect, I chose to wear my black kimono with the family crest that Grandmother had embroidered. A few years back, I had had the crest removed and sewn to a newer kimono, as I had outgrown the original several years before.
It was difficult to think what I should bring. I rolled up my yukata and wrapped an extra pair of sandals in cloth. I bundled the mask my father had last sent me and slid the shard of plum wood into my sash. With each additional movement, I began to feel increasingly nauseated and faint.
“Are you all right?” Noboru asked, concerned.
“Yes, yes,” I muttered and tried to show I was fine.
“I should travel with you to ensure that you are all right. The journey will be long and the funeral difficult.”
“It is very kind of you, but unnecessary. After all, I will need you to keep abreast of our classes so that you can assist me when I return.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, and I knew that he was sincere by the way he lightly touched my shoulder and went to lift my bag.
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