Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement, and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater by William T. Vollmann (review)

Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement, and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater by William T. Vollmann
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I have a problem with authors of huge books - books which are not only too fat, but which also have been crammed full with odds and ends. Before sitting at their keyboard, such writers should get rid of their superfluous energy by an hour of jogging or so. Vollmann calls this 500 page book "small..."

But first the positive side: Vollmann modestly confesses that he doesn't know anything about the No theatre or Japanese culture, but his descriptions of No are some of the best and most riveting I have ever read (during a stay in Japan, he sees a great variety of No plays, has interviews with important actors and also meets a mask maker). He just describes what he sees, but he is a good observer who knows how to translate those observations into inspiring prose.

Then the negative side: in the No female characters are played by (often elderly) men with masks - those masks are perhaps the central aspect of No. Different from Kabuki, where the onnagata (male players of female roles) will move and talk in a feminine way, in No the players of feminine roles will speak, sing and move like the elderly men they are - the fiction of femininity is wholly in the mask (and the fantasy of the viewer).

This leads Vollmann to the teasing question to what extent femininity in general is a performance and the even more fundamental question: what is a woman? - a problem which takes Vollmann not only to transvestite bars in Tokyo and geisha in Kyoto, but also has him discuss Kabuki's onnagata, Greek cult statues, Norse sagas, transgender women, porn queens, Valkyries and Venus figurines. In other words, he jumps from one thing to another without any clear thread and fills the big book with only loosely related snippets and anecdotes. It is all too much like late night bar talk – I wish Vollmann would have concentrated more on the No theater (about which there is still a lot to say).

So if Vollmann's descriptions of the No theater inspire you, quickly find a book with translations of No plays to enjoy the real thing (see my article Japanese No Plays in Translation).

P.S. This hardcover book was published on such sub-standard paper that already within 10 years it is severely discolored...


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