SUPER: Spring is a dangerous season.
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DEALER: You'll be ruined. Your heart'll be torn to shreds. You'll end up no longer able to feel anything.
KIYOKO: Still, nothing that happens can ever change my face.
[ KIYOKO takes a lipstick from her bag, applies it to her lips, then turning her back on the two men, who watch her blankly, she suddenly rushes off to right, fast as the wind.]
CURTAIN
Translated by Donald Keene
Onnagata
Masuyama had been overwhelmed by Mangiku's artistry; that was how it happened that, after getting a degree in classical Japanese literature, he had chosen to join the kabuki theatre staff. He had been entranced by seeing Mangiku Sanokawa perform.
Masuyama's addiction to kabuki began when he was a high-school student. At the time, Mangiku, still a fledgling onnagata, was appearing in such minor roles as the ghost butterfly in Kagami Jishi or, at best, the waiting maid Chidori in The Dis-owning of Genta. Mangiku's acting was unassertive and ortho-dox; nobody suspected he would achieve his present eminence.
But even in those days Masuyama sensed the icy flames given off by this actor's aloof beauty. The general public, needless to say, noticed nothing. For that matter, none of the drama critics had ever called attention to the peculiar quality of Mangiku, like shoots of flame visible through the snow, which illuminated his performances from very early in his career. Now everyone spoke as if Mangiku had been a personal discovery.
Mangiku Sanokawa was a true onnagata, a species seldom encountered nowadays. Unlike most contemporary onnagata, he was quite incapable of performing successfully in male roles.
His stage presence was colourful, but with dark overtones; his every gesture was the essence of delicacy. Mangiku never expressed anything - not even strength, authority, endurance, or courage - except through the single medium open to him, feminine expression, but through this medium he could filter every variety of human emotion. That is the way of the true onnagata but in recent years this breed has become rare indeed. Their tonal colouring, produced by a particular, exquisitely refined musical instrument, cannot be achieved by playing a normal 145
instrument in a minor key, nor, for that matter, is it produced by a mere slavish imitation of real women.
Yukihime, the Snow Princess, in Kinkakuji was one of Mangiku's most successful roles. Masuyama remembered having seen Magiku perform Yukihime ten times during a single month, but no matter how often he repeated this experience, his intoxication did not diminish. Everything symbolizing Sanokawa Mangiku may be found in this play, the elements en-twined, beginning with the opening words of the narrator: The Golden Pavilion, the mountain retreat of Lord Yoshimitsu, Prime Minister and Monk of the Deer Park, stands three stories high, its garden graced with lovely sights: the night-lodging stone, the water trickling below the rocks, the flow of the cas-cade heavy with spring, the willows and cherry-trees planted together; the capital now is a vast, many-hued brocade.' The dazzling brilliance of the set, depicting cherry-trees in blossom, a waterfall, and the glittering Golden Pavilion; the drums, suggesting the dark sound of the waterfall and contributing a constant agitation to the stage; the pale, sadistic face of the lecherous Daizen Matsunaga, the rebel general; the miracle of the magic sword which shines in morning sunlight with the holy image of Fudo, but shows a dragon's form when pointed at the setting sun; the radiance of the sunset glow on the waterfall and cherry-trees; the cherry blossoms scattering down petal by petal
- everything in the play exists for the sake of one woman, the beautiful, aristocratic Yukihime. There is nothing unusual about Yukihime's costume, the crimson silk robe customarily worn by young princesses. But a ghostly presence of snow befitting her name, hovers about this granddaughter of the great painter Sesshu, permeated with snow, may be sensed across the breadth of the scene; this phantom snow gives Yukihime's crimson robe its dazzling brilliance.
Masuyama loved especially the scene where the princess, bound with ropes to a cherry-tree, remembers the legend told of her grandfather, and with her toes draws in the fallen blossoms a rat, which comes to life and gnaws through the ropes binding her. It hardly needs be said that Mangiku Sanokawa did not 146
adopt the puppetlike movements favoured by some onnagata in this scene. The ropes fastening him to the tree made Mangiku look lovelier than ever: all the artificial arabesques of this onnagata - the delicate gestures of the body, the play of the fingers, the arch of the hand - contrived though they might appear when employed for the movements of daily life, took on a strange vitality when used by Yukihime, bound to a tree. The intricate, contorted attitudes imposed by the constraint of the rope made of each instant an exquisite crisis, and the crises seemed to flow, one into the next, with the irresistible energy of successive waves.
Mangiku's performances unquestionably possessed moments of diabolic power. He used his lovely eyes so effectively that often with one flash he could create in an entire audience the illusion that the character of a scene had completely altered: when his glance embraced the stage from the hanamichi or the hanamichi from the stage, or when he darted one upward look at the bell in Dojoji. In the palace scene from Imoseyama, Mangiku took the part of Omiwa, whose lover was stolen from her by Princess Tachibana and who has been cruelly mocked by the court ladies at the back of the stage saying, 'A groom without peer has been found for our princess! What joy for us all!'
The narrator, seated at the side of the stage, declaims in powerful tones, 'Omiwa, hearing this, at once looks back.' At this moment Omiwa's character is completely transformed, and her face reveals the marks of a possessive attachment.
Masuyama felt a kind of terror every time he witnessed this moment. For an instant a diabolic shadow had swept over both the bright stage with its splendid set and beautiful costumes and over the thousands of intently watching spectators. This force clearly emanated from Mangiku's body, but at the same time transcended his flesh. Masuyama sensed in such passages something like a dark spring welling forth from this figure on the stage, this figure so imbued with softness, fragility, grace, delicacy, and feminine charms. He could not identify it, but he thought that a strange, evil presence, the final residue of the actor's fascination, a seductive evil which leads men astray and 147
makes them drown in an instant of beauty, was the true nature of the dark spring he had detected. But one explains nothing merely by giving it a name.
Omiwa shakes her head and her hair tumbles in disarray. On the stage, to which she now returns from the hanamichi, Fun-ashichi's blade is waiting to kill her.
'The house is full of music, an autumn sadness in its tone,'
declaims the narrator.
There is something terrifying about the way Omiwa's feet hurry forward to her doom. The bare white feet, rushing ahead towards disaster and death, kicking the lines of her kimono askew, seem to know precisely when and where on the stage the violent emotions now urging her forward will end, and to be pressing towards the spot, rejoicing and triumphant even amidst the tortures of jealousy. The pain she reveals outwardly is backed with joy like her robe, on the outside dark and shot with gold thread, but bright with variegated silken strands within.
2 Masuyama's original decision to take employment at the theatre had been inspired by his absorption with kabuki, and especially with Mangiku; he realized also he could never escape his bondage unless he became thoroughly familiar with the world behind the scenes. He knew from what others had told him of the disenchantment to be found backstage, and he wanted to plunge into that world and taste for himself genuine disillusion.
But the disenchantment he expected somehow never came.
Mangiku himself made this impossible. Mangiku faithfully maintained the injunctions of the eighteenth-century onnagata' s manual Ayamegusa, 'An onnagata, even in the dressing-room, must preserve the attitudes of an onnagata. He should be careful when he eats to face away from other people, so that they cannot see him.' Whenever Mangiku wa
s obliged to eat in the presence of visitors, not having the time to leave his dressing-room, he would turn towards his table with a word of apology 148
and race through his meal, so skilfully that the visitors could not even guess from behind that he was eating.
Undoubtedy, the feminine beauty displayed by Mangiku on the stage had captivated Masuyama as a man. Strangely enough, however, this spell was not broken even by close observation of Mangiku in the dressing-room. Mangiku's body, when he had removed his costume, was delicate but unmistakably a man's. Masuyama, as a matter of fact, found it rather un-nerving when Mangiku, seated at his dressing-table, too scantily clad to be anything but a man, directed polite, feminine greetings towards some visitor, all the while applying a heavy coating of powder to his shoulders. If even Masuyama, long a devotee of kabuki, experienced eerie sensations ion his first visits to the dressing-room, what would have been the reactions of people who dislike kabuki, because the onnagata make them uncomfortable, if shown such a sight?
Masuyama, however, felt relief rather than disenchantment when he saw Mangiku after a performance, naked except for the gauzy underclothes he wore in order to absorb perspiration.
The sight in itself may have been grotesque, but the nature of Masuyama*s fascination - its intrinsic quality, one might say -
did not reside in any surface illusion, and there was accordingly no danger that such a revelation would destroy it. Even after Mangiku had disrobed, it was apparent that he was still wearing several layers of splendid costumes beneath his skin; his naked-ness was a passing manifestation. Something which could account for his exquisite appearance on stage surely lay concealed within him.
Masuyama enjoyed seeing Mangiku when he returned to the dressing-room after performing a major role. The flush of the emotions of the part he had been enacting still hovered over his entire body, like sunset glow or the moon in the sky at dawn.
The grand emotions of classical tragedy - emotions quite unrelated to our mundane lives - may seem to be guided, at least nominally, by historical facts - the world of disputed successions, campaigns of pacification, civil warfare, and the like -
but in reality they belong to no period. They are the emotions appropriate to a stylized, grotesquely tragic world, luridly 149
coloured in the manner of a late wood-block print. Grief that goes beyond human bounds, superhuman passions, searing love, terrifying joy, the brief cries of people trapped by circumstances too tragic for human beings to endure: such were the emotions which a moment before had lodged in Mangiku's body. It was amazing that Mangiku's slender frame could hold them and that they did not break from that delicate vessel.
Be that as it may, Mangiku a moment before had been living amidst these grandiose feelings, and he had radiated light on the stage precisely because the emotions he portrayed transcended any known to his audience. Perhaps this is true of all characters on the stage, but among present-day actors none seemed to be so honestly living stage emotions so far removed from daily life. A passage in Ayamegusa states, 'Charm is the essence of the onnagata. But even the onnagata who is naturally beautiful will lose his charm if he strains to impress by his movements. If he consciously attempts to appear graceful, he will seem thoroughly corrupt instead. For this reason, unless the onnagata lives as a woman in his daily life, he is unlikely ever to be considered an accomplished onnagata. When he appears on stage, the more he concentrates on performing this or that essentially feminine action, the more masculine he will seem. I am convinced that the essential thing is how the actor behaves in real life.'
How the actor behaves in real life ... yes, Mangiku was utterly feminine in both the speech and bodily movements of his real life. If Mangiku had been more masculine in his daily life, those moments when the flush from the onnagata role he had been performing gradually dissolved like the high-water mark on a beach into the femininity of his daily life - itself an extension of the same make-believe - would have become an absolute division between sea and land, a bleak door shut between dream and reality. The make-believe of his daily life supported the make-believe of his stage performances. This, Masuyama was convinced, marked the true onnagata. An onnagata is the child born of the illicit union between dream and reality.
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3
Once the celebrated veteran actors of the previous generation had all passed away, one on the heels of the other, Mangiku's authority backstage became absolute. His onnagata disciples waited on him like personal servants; indeed, the order of seniority they observed when following Mangiku on stage as maids in the wake of his princess or great lady was exactly the same they observed in the dressing-room.
Anyone pushing apart the door curtains dyed with the crest of the Sanokawa family and entering Mangiku's dressing-room was certain to be struck by a strange sensation: this charming sanctuary contained not a single man. Even members of the same troupe felt inside this room that they were in the presence of the opposite sex. Whenever Masuyama went to Mangiku's dressing-room on some errand, he had only to brush apart the door curtains to feel - even before setting foot inside - a curiously vivid, carnal sensation of being a male.
Sometimes Masuyama had gone on company business to the dressing-rooms of chorus girls backstage at revues. The rooms were filled with an almost suffocating femininity and the rough-skinned girls, sprawled about like animals in the zoo, threw bored glances at him, but he never felt so distinctly alien as in Mangiku's dressing-room; nothing in these real women made Masuyama feel particularly masculine.
The members of Mangiku's entourage exhibited no special friendliness towards Masuyama. On the contrary, he knew that they secretly gossiped about him, accusing him of being dis-respectful or of giving himself airs merely because he had gone through some university. He knew too that sometimes they professed irritation at his pedantic insistence on historical facts. In the world of kabuki, academic learning unaccompanied by artistic talent is considered of no value.
Masuyama's work had its compensations too. It would happen when Mangiku had a favour to ask of someone - only, of course, when he was in good mood - that he twisted his body diagonally from his dressing-table and gave a little nod and a smile; the indescribable charm in his eyes at such moments 151
made Masuyama feel that he wished for nothing more than to slave like a dog for this man. Mangiku himself never forgot his dignity: he never failed to maintain a certain distance, though he obviously was aware of his charms. If he had been a real woman, his whole body would have been filled with the allure in his eyes. The allure of an onnagata is only a momentary glimmer, but that is enough for it to exist independently and to display the eternal feminine.
Mangiku sat before the mirror after the performance of The Castle of the Lord Protector of Hachijin, the first item of the programme. He had removed the costume and wig he wore as Lady Hinaginu, and changed to a bathrobe, not being obliged to appear in the middle work of the programme. Masuyama, informed that Mangiku wanted to see him, had been waiting in the dressing-room for the curtain of Hachijin. The mirror suddenly burst into crimson flames as Mangiku returned to the room, filling the entrance with the rustle of his robes. Three disciples and dressers joined to remove what had to be removed and store it away. Those who were to leave departed, and now no one remained except for a few disciples around the hibachi in the next room. The dressing-room had all at once fallen still.
From a loudspeaker in the corridor issued the sounds of stage assistants hammering as they dismantled the set for the play which had just ended. It was late November, and steam heat clouded the window-panes, bleak as in a hospital ward. White chrysanthemums bent gracefully in a cloisonne vase placed beside Mangiku's dressing-table. Mangiku, perhaps because his stage name meant literally 'ten thousand chrysanthemums', was fond of this flower.
Mangiku sat on a bulky cushion of purple silk, facing his dressing-table. 'I wonder if you'd mind telling the gentleman from Sakuragi Street?' (Mangiku, in the old-fashioned manner, referred to his dan
cing and singing teachers by the names of the streets where they lived.) 'It'd be hard for me to tell him.' He gazed directly into the mirror as he spoke. Masuyama could see from where he sat by the wall the nape of Mangiku's neck and the reflections in the the mirror of his face still made up for the part of Hinaginu. The eyes were not on Masuyama; they were 152
squarely contemplating his own face. The flush from his exer-tions on the stage still glowed through the powder on his cheeks, like the morning sun through a thin sheet of ice. He was looking at Hinaginu.
Indeed, he actually saw her in the mirror - Hinaginu, whom he had just been impersonating, Hinaginu, the daughter of Mori Sanzaemon Yoshinari and the bride of the young Sato Ka-zuenosuke. Her marriage ties with her husband having been broken because of his feudal loyalty, Hinaginu killed herself so that she might remain faithful to a union 'whose ties were so faint we never shared the same bed'. Hinaginu had died on stage of a despair so extreme she could not bear to live any longer.
The Hinaginu in the mirror was a ghost. Even that ghost, Mangiku knew, was at this very moment slipping from his body. His eyes pursued Hinaginu. But as the glow of the ardent passions of the role subsided, Hinaginu's face faded away. He bade it farewell. There were still seven performances before the final day. Tomorrow again Hinaginu's features would no doubt return to the pliant mould of Mangiku's face.
Masuyama, enjoying the sight of Mangiku in this abstracted state, all but smiled with affection. Mangiku suddenly turned towards him. He had been aware all along of Masuyama's gaze, but with the nonchalance of the actor, accustomed to the public's stares, he continued with his business. 'It's those instrumental passages. They're simply not long enough. I don't mean I can't get through the part if I hurry, but it makes everything so ugly.' Mangiku was referring to the music for the new dance-play which would be presented the following month. 'Mr Masuyama, what do you think?'