chapter 1 Masks and Memory

Noh is Japan’s masked theater. As theatrical props, the masks repre- sent characters in a classical drama. As sculpture, they reveal superb craftsmanship and refined artistic sensibilities, said to capture Japanese ideals of beauty and horror. As artifacts, they point to the antiquity of noh and testify to tradition. They are certainly the oldest sources for its early history, surviving from a time before performers began to write down their theories and plays. Yet, it is impossible to develop a chronology of their invention and evolution because few of the earli- est surviving masks can be dated conclusively. We cannot even know which came first, the mask or the drama. Scholars may debate the question of origins, but among actors the consensus has long been that masks predate the creation of noh.1 In fact, the oldest family of actors claims to own the most ancient mask. That family is the Konparu, and their mask is a hidden treasure, never used in performance, and rarely photographed or displayed. A book by the current family head of the Konparu, Nobutaka (b. 1920), claims that the famous mask is over a thousand years old and that it was carved by none other than the ancient statesman Prince Shōtoku (d. 622) expressly for the founder of the Konparu line.2 The legend of the Shōtoku mask is itself ancient, found in the first noh treatise, Zeami’s (ca. 1363–ca. 1443) Style and the Flower (Fūshikaden), which is approximately six hundred years old. However, this earliest written account differs from the modern claim on a key point, namely, the identity of the mask. According to Zeami, Shōtoku created a demon mask, not the Okina mask—which represents an old man or wizened deity—the one that the Konparu family now upholds as the “original.” The story of the Shōtoku mask is emblematic of how lore about 12 Masks and Memory masks has changed historically in response to performers’ understand- ing of their relationship to their art and livelihood. This chapter focuses on the role of masks as a medium for con- structing an ethos for noh in the late fourteenth century when it was beginning to take shape as a performing art and as an occupation. As we will see, noh actors adopted masks both for their theatrical value and for the lore surrounding them from earlier performing arts and traditions of object veneration. As a medium, masks not only assisted in the transmission of myths about noh but also shaped how that dis- course was recalled and presented. Noh’s earliest myths were insepa- rable from the masks used to convey them.

Noh Masks and Their Antecedents Noh was not the first performing art in Japan to use masks. The ori- gins of noh in earlier forms of theater are conjectural and a subject be- yond the scope of this book. Noh did, however, draw from earlier masked dance arts such as bugaku, which flourished during the Heian period (794–1185).3 Bugaku was performed to the accompaniment of the court music, gagaku. It arrived from the continent in the eighth century. Its predecessor was the dance form called gigaku, about which little is known since it quickly disappeared with bugaku’s arri- val. About 250 gigaku masks, dating from the late sixth to early eighth century, survive in the treasure repositories of the Shōsōin and the Hōryūji temple in Nara.4 These masks offer the best, and almost only, record for reconstructing gigaku. Scholars detect a strong continental influence in the surviving gigaku and bugaku masks and have con- cluded that most of these masks were either imported from China or Korea or made by craftsmen in Japan closely following continental models. Gigaku masks can be distinguished from their bugaku coun- terparts by their enormous size. Many gigaku masks would have cov- ered the entire head of the performer. Bugaku masks are much smaller and cover only the face or sometimes, in the case of the largest masks, the sides of the face as well. Both gigaku and bugaku masks are carved from wood and painted; hair was sometimes added to bugaku masks. Apart from these wooden masks, bugaku also makes use of cloth masks (zōmen) with faces and designs painted in black. Several noh masks appear to derive from bugaku models, but there is a puzzling gap of several centuries between bugaku’s heyday in the