Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines [Hardcover]

William T. Vollmann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 6, 2010

From the National Book Award-winning author of Europe Central comes a charming, evocative and piercing examination of an ancient Japanese tradition and the keys it holds to our modern understanding of beauty....

What is a woman? To what extent is femininity a performance? Writing with the extraordin-ary awareness and endless curiosity that have defined his entire oeuvre, William T. Vollmann takes an in-depth look into the Japanese craft of Noh theater, using the medium as a prism to reveal the conception of beauty itself.

Sweeping readers from the dressing room of one of Japan's most famous Noh actors to a transvestite bar in the red-light district of Kabukicho, Kissing the Mask explores the enigma surrounding Noh theater and the traditions that have made it intrinsic to Japanese culture for centuries. Vollmann then widens his scope to encompass such modern artists of attraction and loss as Mishima, Kawabata and even Andrew Wyeth. From old Norse poetry to Greek cult statues, from Japan's most elite geisha dancers to American makeup artists, from Serbia to India, Vollmann works to extract the secrets of staged femininity and the mystery of perceived and expressed beauty, including explorations of gender at a transgendered community in Los Angeles and with Kabuki female impersonators.

Kissing the Mask is illustrated with many evocative sketches and photographs by the author.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The performance of female characters by male Noh actors sparks a deeply researched, lovingly detailed, and obsessive discourse on the nature of feminine beauty by award-winning novelist and essayist Vollmann (Imperium). The book charts an increasingly peripatetic path through the meticulous yet ineffable art of Noh drama from the perspective of an enthusiast, all the while groping toward some definition of beauty and the feminine. But the feminine, and even the label female, is something widely claimed, and so the search takes him from a Tokyo transvestite bar to the feet of a master Noh actor—Umewaka Rokuro, scion of an ancient acting family—to the lips of the uncanny masks themselves, the kimonos of Kabuki geishas, and well beyond, traipsing far and wide across India, Babylon, the American fashion magazine industry, old Norse literature, the paintings of Andrew Wyeth, Yukio Mishima's Noh heroine Komachi, and a transgender community in Los Angeles, among other stops. The fervently reflective, probing narrative—replete with footnotes, glossary, illustrations, appendixes, and asides—demands patience, but rewards it on almost every page. (Apr.)
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Review

“Reward[s] the reader who stays with it for the long trip, the way a travel chronicle does.... Vollmann is not just a writer who admires. He is a writer who looks and touches.” (San Francisco Chronicle )

“[Vollmann’s] evocations of [Noh’s] death-haunted stories, its eerie masks, its male actors playing women...are so electric and strange, so enchanted, that they made me long for the very dramas that have often sent me toward the exit before the intermission.” (Pico Iyer, New York Times Book Review )

“[A] provocative inquiry into beauty and desire... [Vollmann] is a passionate and penetrating observer ... a daring, brilliant, and idiosyncratic quest astonishing in its discernment, scope, and feeling.” (Booklist )

“The performance of female characters by male Noh actors sparks a deeply researched, lovingly detailed, and obsessive discourse on the nature of feminine beauty....[A] fervently reflective, probing narrative...[that] rewards it on almost every page.” (Publishers Weekly )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 528 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; First Edition edition (April 6, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061228486
• ISBN-13: 978-0061228483
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #363,797 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A work of warmth and beauty., April 11, 2010

By 

Dmitry Portnoy (Studio City, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines (Hardcover)

It's difficult, perhaps impossible, to trace the development of Vollmann's style. It's almost certainly a bad idea. How do you, for example, weigh the prose in his fiction compared to his non-fiction? The threads don't just intertwine: they interpenetrate, in everything from "The Rainbow Stories" to "Europe Central." To unravel them is to destroy the pattern. Yet to mesh them together is to deny their separate nature. As tempting as it is for the reader to lump Vollman the novelist, Vollman the journalist, Vollman the critic, the historian, the memoirist, into one big fat Vollmann, say Vollmann the chronicler, Vollman the writer is constantly conscious of genre and adapts his writing to the material. He is not Thomas Wolfe, mailing mountains of prose to an editor to sift through and sculpt into a book or two. He is Dostoyevsky, systematically, methodically, professionally finishing one masterpiece after another, while vigilantly keeping straight the difference between, say, "Notes from the Underground" and "From the House of the Dead," even if the reader can't quite.

Another problem with tracing Vollmann's development as a writer is the long gestation of so many of his books, and his penchant for simultaneously pursuing several colossal projects. The seven volume treatise on violence "Rising Up, Rising Down" was almost certainly begun at the same time as the brief memoir "An Afghanistan Picture Show," though they appeared more than a decade apart. The multi-volume sequence "Seven American Dreams" still unfinished, is being published out of chronological order. The National Book Award winning "Europe Central" was first contemplated by Vollman as a teenager, though in a completely different form. His current book grew out of notes, observations, interviews, and writings over at least a decade.

So how can it be said to be new? Why read this Vollman book now, as opposed to another? (Whether you have read him before or not.) How can the writing in this book be different?

Well, for one, it isn't loud. Let me say it emphatically: it is quiet. It is soft. Without losing any of its precision or complexity, it is gentle. It is friendly. It is, in fact, charming (appropriately, the highest aesthetic quality attributed to what it is about.)

And what is it about? To some extent, that doesn't matter: like all Vollman books, this one is about everything, or a large hunk of it. But also like all of them, it is not undisciplined, and has a subject. Let me just say that to this reader, that subject, the depiction of femininity in Noh (a form of Japanese theater even more refined and incomprehensible than Kabuki), could not be more remote, fantastical or abstruse. It reads like science fiction, an exploration of the art, philosophy and psychology of dwellers of an alien planet, or a faery realm.

Paradoxically, perhaps because the topic is so alien, Vollmann's writing is the opposite of alienating. In this book more than any other a sense comes through of what I imagine (and have evidence to believe) the author is like as a person: warm, infinitely patient and profoundly curious, deeply caring, a friend. Granted, all these qualities are present in his other works. But they have never been this predominant. And Vollmann's writing has never been this approachable, this open, this appealing or (here's a word I never thought I'd use to describe it) delightful.

How odd that it would happen now, with this subject, this book, this title and subtitle and cover. But maybe not. According to Vollmann, Noh is about balance, selflessness, truth and charm, and Vollmann teaches it in perhaps the only way possible: by example. This book is a revelation and a treasure for readers familiar with his work, as well as those who've never heard of him.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An accessible Vollmann: Feminine Beauty and the Noh Theater, April 15, 2010

By 

Michael A. Duvernois (Minneapolis, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines (Hardcover)

Okay, the full title of the book is:

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.

Though it's a 34 word title, the 528 page book is quite short for Vollmann. Usually I'd talk about the author's previous work, especially given the diverse fiction and non-fiction that we have from Mr. William T. But not today. After reading "Kissing the mask" (and it took a long time to really get into the book, though I blame my distracted and traveling self rather than the author) it seems as though the book should stand by itself. Ignore the author's pedigree and just take the book as an example of an obsessive analysis on an interesting topic (there have been great books in the last few years on typewriter designers, the history of the pencil, moonshiners in Kentucky, and particle astrophysicists, so taking a look at Japanese Noh Theater and related topics is perfectly reasonable).

And we get more than just the obsessive analysis of porn stars, transgendered actors, and Norse culture, we also get Vollmann illustrations and photographs (including one of the author in drag that sits on me like a festering sore), traditional auteur topics such as prostitutes, the fundamental oddness of Japan, and elliptic digressions on any and all topics related to feminine beauty. So, there's more here than just "femininity in Japanese Noh theater."

It's a masterful piece of writing, and perhaps the most accessible introduction to Vollmann's writing. It's not easy exactly, but it is rewarding.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars One third of a terrific book, July 25, 2010

By 

J L Goldsmith (North Salem, New York United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines (Hardcover)

Ultimately a very frustrating read. The author is clearly an extremely talented writer, and the first third of the book, in which he delves into Noh theatre, is indeed fascinating. But he never ultimately answers his question of what it means to be feminine (as opposed to female, which is purely biological) and he winds up ignoring so many interesting approaches (William Hurt in 'Kiss of the Spider Woman', Western female impersonators, ala Charles Busch or La Cage au Folles, even female role playing by men in Shakespeare's England, that I felt as if he hadn't really examined his own issue thoroughly. He also wanders off into his own relationships in a self-pitying way that truly detracts from the work. I thought it would have made a great magazine article.