ONE
My memories of Paris are never too distant, the colors never too far removed. My palette runs with the blue of violets, the burnt red of sienna, and the saffron yellow of cadmium, yet I remain chalked in a gray-walled studio on the outskirts of Tokyo. Here, every surface is tacked with newsprint sketches and unfinished canvases, and every floorboard blackened by the dust of crushed charcoal. My mind is captured by a fingernail memory, caged by the fractured glass of a prism that refracts time and reflects only the past.
Burdened by my vision and displaced by my experience, I am bound. My journey prevented me from being Japanese; my face prevented me from being French. I am an artist who cannot belong to the tapestry of either country. But my misery becomes me. I exist with few friends and even fewer followers. I suppose I must be proud of this: like my father’s craft, my world remains appreciated by few.
* * *
My father was a mask carver. As a young boy I saw his craft overtake his face. While other boys see their fathers’ faces become a feathered maze of wrinkles, my father’s became a smooth sheet of stone. My father had a broad, flat face and skin stretched so thin that he appeared blue. He, a man who carried with him the faint green smell of cypress and the cool sting of steel, could stammer only a few words to me, yet could stare for hours from behind a pair of bottomless black eyes.
Father was a lonely and famous man, and I his lonely and confused son. He widowed, I motherless, we lived quietly near the Daigo mountain, within the walls of Kyoto. This mountain, the ancient tomb for the emperor Daigo’s spirit, served as the shrine of my childhood. As I crossed its earthen path each day, with the sand and rock dust beneath my sandals and the flaming orange gateway above my head, I knew that something was here in this burial ground of my ancestors and their rulers that breathed a rhythm into my own minor existence. It was also here that, as a young schoolboy dressed in my coarsely woven hakama, I first noticed the extraordinary beauty of the seasons.
I marked the seasons by the change in the mountain; perhaps this was the first palette I ever owned. From below the belly of the mountain, the fabric of autumn stretched high into the horizon. The colors, loomed by the threads of interwoven leaves, beamed yellow to screaming scarlet, then humbled to a fading brown. Winter ushered the dying leaves to the sepulchre of the earth’s frozen floor and blanketed the city and empty branches with a soft cotton rain. It was in those cold, dark months, with the color drained from the landscape, that I was most miserable. The brightest things I saw between late December and early February were my frostbitten ankles, which shot nakedly from underneath the cloth of my uniform, their skin always splashed crimson from suffering the bite of the bitter snow.
Every night my father and I raised a sliver of my mother’s dowry to our lips as we sipped fish broth from her dark lacquer bowls. Her ghost most often visited me on icy winter nights. She always came in silence, careful not to disturb my father’s solitude, arriving and then dissolving in the cloudlike formations of my soup.
She appeared and she was beautiful. She, my fleeting companion who encouraged me, who I sensed always understood.
Her death had prevented me from knowing her voice, yet her image was revealed to me when I was alone at night. She would come to me as I lay sleeping and lead me through what appeared to be just a dream, but in reality was the story that preceded my life.
* * *
Father’s arrival into the Yamamoto family was as strange and mysterious as our family itself. His arrival was unannounced. He carried with him no letter of introduction, no ceremonial gift reserved for first meetings. He simply arrived at the Kanze theater carrying with him nothing more than a furoshiki filled with masks.
Grandfather’s reputation, however, preceded him. Yamamoto Yuji. He was the most famous and most revered Noh actor in the Kansai region, the patriarch of the Kanze Noh family. People came to see him whether he performed by torchlight or within the walls of the Kanze theater. Having played the distinguished roles of both God and Spirit for nearly a half a century, his position had gone unrivaled. To many in that community, he was the closest thing to a living God.