Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater with Some Thoughts on Muses (especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines by William T. Vollmann (review)

Discussing the noh theatre, the kabuki theatre, contemporary drag queens, and the figure of the geisha, among others, this book is an ambitious work on femininity in Japan. Reading it immediately raised for me a critical question: Who speaks for whom and about whom? A question like this must have been more than expected by the author, who describes this volume as a “short book [which] is an appreciation, sincere and blundering, resolutely ignorant, riddled with the prejudices and insights of an alien, a theatergoer, a man gazing at femininity” (2).

Still, the question should be dully and duly raised, since the power of the act of “defining” is germane here. Postmodern investigations of performativity have effectively suggested to us that most constative statements—for example, “Japanese femininity is X”—are most likely disguised performatives: in the present example, “I pronounce that Japanese femininity is X.” And “defining that you are Y” and “ordering that you must be Y” are logically just a step apart.

Given this, I am curious why Kissing the Mask takes the noh theatre as the primary subject for its discussion of Japanese femininity. A medieval Buddhist theatre form consisting of dance and chant, noh is arguably the most respected traditional theatre genre in Japan, and yet the extent to which its highly abstract and meticulously stylized performance of women’s characters represents the concept of femininity in the broader culture is subject to dispute. For one thing, noh actors playing women—shite (main characters) actors in the noh lexicon—do not specialize in women’s roles alone, because shite actors are, by definition, expected to perform all five categories of noh’s main character types: deities, male warriors, women, the crazed, and demons. This is the defining characteristic that differentiates noh actors who perform as women from actors dedicated to the performance of female roles in other traditional theatre forms, such as onnagata—actors who specialize in performing women’s roles in the kabuki theatre (a brief interview with a contemporary onnagata, Ichikawa Shun’en, ¹ is included in the book [231–36]).

The book draws from a voluminous amount of material, ranging from many published works, to Vollmann’s own “cross-gender” ² makeover in Japan (222–28), to insights he heard and observed from practitioners, including noh actor Umewaka Rokurô and geisha Suzukasan. While Vollmann’s personal experiences and observations surely enrich the book, the way in which he uses his sources makes it difficult to categorize this book. The numerous published texts cited range from renowned noh treatises by Zeami to contemporary academic texts on noh, and beyond. In this sense, the book might appear too specialized for a trade book, but the way it references sources, directly and indirectly, is not meticulous enough for what is usually considered a scholarly book.

Throughout the volume, Vollmann juxtaposes countless performances of women’s characters in diverse contexts, including the shite in noh theatre, the onnagata in kabuki, contemporary drag queens, and the geisha, an ever-popular cultural icon of good-old Japan, the popularity of which was rejuvenated by Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha (1997) and its 2005 film adaptation, directed by Rob Marshall. This array of characters and genres delineates the range of concepts and images of “femininity” in Japan.

The wide variety of styles in this grouping reminds me of a comment made by an onnagata I worked with on several occasions in 2003, when I assisted him on his US performances. Responding to a question from the audience during a performance in Michigan, Onoe Umenosuke III categorically stated that onnagata were...