J 314 Japanese Lit in Trans:
Enchi Fumiko
The writer Enchi Fumiko (1905-1986) is known for her deep familiarity with the Japanese classics, of which she makes skillful use in her works by means of intertextuality. A number of legends either born within oral or written tradition, have spread in Japan through classical theatre, like Kabuki or Noh.
Enchi was often inspired by feminine evil and abject archetypes from the ancient tradition, which became part of the Japanese imaginary, and were also represented on the Noh stage. It is interesting to ponder the feminine figure coming to the fore in Enchi’s works by analyzing the writer’s elaboration in modern key of the evil female archetypes of the Noh iconography.
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See also this summary:
Fumiko Enchi (pen name of Fumiko Ueda) is regarded as one of the most important female Japanese authors of the twentieth century, although, sadly, only a few of her novels and plays have been translated into English. One of the best-known of her novels is Masks, published in 1958. Masks is suffused with the literature and arts of Japan, and this is no surprise – Enchi (1905-1981) was the daughter of a linguist and philologist, and was introduced to both literature and traditional theater as a youth.
She had some early writing successes, but her real fame waited until after World War II. Spirit possession and shamanism, especially shamanism among women, became a focus of her work in the late 1950s and 1960s, including Masks.
Masks
As Masks opens, Yasuko’s husband Akio, a professor at Tokyo University who studied spirit possession in ancient literature, has been killed in an avalanche on Mount Fuji. Yasuko has decided to carry on her husband’s research while continuing to live with Akio’s mother Mieko, who edits a poetry magazine. Both Ibuki, another professor who is married, and Mikame, a psychologist and bachelor, are in love with Yasuko. While much of the novel is told from the perspectives of Ibuki and Mikame, it is clear that Yasuko and Mieko are the central characters and drive the action.
A Narrative in Three Parts:
Each of the three chapters of Masks takes its name from that of a mask from Nô (or Noh), the ancient theater of Japan.
1. The first chapter’s “Ryô no onna,” a mask of a dead woman or ghost, represents, according to one website, someone “whose beauty has been destroyed by the suffering she has experienced in hell for her passionate attachments.” The mask seems to represent Mieko. All the other main characters come to feel that they are under her spell. As Yasuko says of her, “She has a peculiar power to move events in whatever direction she pleases, while she stays motionless. She’s like a quiet mountain lake whose waters are rushing beneath the surface toward a waterfall. She’s like the face on a No mask, wrapped in her own secrets.”
Enter the Genji
An old article written by Mieko is uncovered, providing the opportunity for it to be situated in the novel as an "intertext.".
“An Account of the Shrine in the Fields” tells of the Rokujô Haven or Lady, a former wife of the Crown Prince who has an affair with Prince Genji in Murasaki Shikibu’s famous The Tale of Genji (between 1967 and 1973, Enchi translated The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese, a huge project encompassing ten volumes). The Rokujô Haven is also a shamaness whose spirit kills one of Genji’s wives.
Mieko (三重子) sees her as “an archetype” of woman as the object of a man’s “eternal fear, representing, perhaps, the shadow of his own evil actions.” It becomes clear as the book goes on that Mieko in some way identifies with the Rokujo lady. Whether consciously or not, Mieko is projecting a spirit that is influencing the lives of the people around her.
2. The “Masugami” mask of the book’s second chapter, according to Toyoichiro Nogami’s No Mask Commentary that Enchi cites, represents “a young woman in a state of frenzy.” This seems to refer to Akio’s twin sister Harume, who was born with severe learning disabilities and now lives with Yasuko and Mieko.
Ibuki has begun an affair with Yasuko. One fateful night, after his rival Mikame has announced his surprise engagement to Yasuko, Ibuki goes secretly to Yasuko’s home. They sleep together, yet when Ibuki wakes at one point, he mysteriously finds Harume next to him, her face twisted in the manner of the Masugami mask.
Mikame has done some research on the mysterious Mieko. He finds that Mieko’s late husband Masatsugu had a maid, and his mistress, Aguri, living with him when he married Mieko, and Aguri continued to live there after the marriage. When the pregnant Mieko later fell down some stairs and lost her child, it was apparently because Aguri had strategically placed a protruding nail near the stairs on which Mieko’s clothing got hooked, causing her to topple. Later, Mieko has her own affair, and she admits that she really wrote her article on the Rokujô Haven for just one person to see – her lover, and, as it turns out, the secret real father of Akio and Harume.
3. According to the Japanese Performing Arts Resource Center, the third chapter’s “Fukai” mask represents “a middle-aged woman torn by separation from a loved one,” a face “filled with a melancholy that comes from experience and feeling.” Ibuki continues to carry on his clandestine affair with Yasuko, even as it has been discovered that Harume is now pregnant, likely by Ibuki.
The family housekeeper Yu speculates that Mieko, or Mieko’s spirit, is somehow taking revenge on Akio and Harume, as well as her late husband Masatsugu because he was not their father. One article, though, speculates that what Mieko actually wants is a substitute for the dead Akio, a child with her lover’s and Akio’s blood. Harume, Akio’s twin, is to be that child’s mother, Ibuki the father, Yasuko the bait, and Mieko the manipulator of all. At the end of the book, Mieko receives as a gift the Fukai mask, and the final image is of Mieko contemplating it: “The mask seemed to know all the intensity of her grief at the loss of Akio and Harume – as well as the bitter woman’s vengeance that she had planned so long, hiding it deep within her…”
Enchi’s descriptions of places and moods are not only careful and precise, but also sensual. All the book’s characters are intellectuals to one degree or another, and so they, like the author, tend to see their situations and actions in the context of Japanese history, theater, and literature. While Enchi possibly presupposes some knowledge of these on the part of her reader, there is sufficient information to provide context for those who are unacquainted.
Masks is a most mysterious novel, with fascinating characters and motivations that are rooted in and haunted by the past, yet come to inevitable, painful manifestation in the present.
Adapted from https://32minutes.wordpress.com/2019/01/22/fumiko-enchi-masks
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More on Noh
The theories on Noh theatre’s origin are various, but one of the most accredited is that Noh’s previous form was born into the sarugaku tradition, which had developed from different forms of entertainment merged with religious rituals.
Under the guidance of the actor and theorist Zeami (1363?-1443?), sarugaku-nō (where nō means “ability”) established its form and started being appreciated by the military class, gaining the patronage of the shōgun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu. In
the course of time this highly refined artistic form became known simply as nō (“Noh” in the English transliteration). With the Ashikaga period, Zen Buddhism reached its peak and Noh plays, in origin already deeply linked to religious functions, took on strong Buddhist overtones.
There are different theories about the attitude towards females in Buddhism, either stressing or denying the misogynistic attitude of its doctrine. Apart from what Buddhism might have meant in theoretical terms, looking at historical facts, nobody can deny a negative attitude towards women in every-day life, generated among Buddhist culture starting from ancient times and worsening during medieval times.
A Buddhist-based belief in female moral and biological defilement could be considered at the same time cause and effect of the general social-economic background which brought to the subjugation of women. Buddhist expressions
meaning the obstacles to overcome attachments to life and to reach enlightenment, like “karma” or “passion” would be strongly associated to women, often referring to their jealousy or sexual temptation. In this panorama, the concept of evil in Noh has often been linked to the one of feminine.
1. Masks
Onnamen (Masks, 1958), which is reputed to be one of Enchi’s most representative works, has at its center the concept of feminine karma, and it is
focused around the drive for vengeance of the middle-aged protagonist Mieko (三重子) against her husband and in general towards patrilineal social system, one of the fundaments of female subjugation in Japan.
Shockingly, she makes her handicapped daughter -who was actually born out of an extramarital relation--have intercourse with a man and give birth to a child who has nothing to do with her husband’s lineage. Even if not without sense of guilt and internal conflict, Mieko decides to sacrifice her own daughter for the sake of vengeance, giving priority to the female empowerment gained through that act, instead of her motherly feelings.
Mieko, known for her ability of “possessing” other people’s minds and making them do what she wants, is often compared in the narration to a Noh mask for the ambiguous aura she emanates. Her figure is inspired by Lady Rokujô Miyasudokoro, the famous feminine character of the masterpiece of the Heian period (794-1185 A.D.) Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji, 11th century), which depicts the life at court through the amorous adventures of the womanizer protagonist Prince Hikaru Genji.
Lady Rokujô is also the protagonist of two Noh plays, first and foremost of the drama “Aoi no Ue” (Princess Aoi), which directly inspired the figure of the Lady emerging from Masks. In Masks, Enchi skillfully inserts her own ideas on the character of Lady Rokujô in the form of an intertext, a fictional essay written by Mieko in her youth.
It is a sort of apology of the figure of the Rokujô Lady, whose living spirit leaves her body out of jealousy while she is unaware of it, in order to possess the new wife of Genji, her former lover.
This phenomenon of the living spirit possession ikiryô was very common in Japanese tradition, and it was believed to manifest due to repressed feelings,especially in women. In the traditional interpretation of The Tale of Genji, Rokujô’s spirit --living or dead--had haunted more than one of Genji’s partners.
Despite the male-centered canonical interpretation, the essay in Masks stresses the
male responsibility in the vengeance of Lady Rokujô’s spirit in two forms. First, it is seen as a possible effect of what we would call today an unconscious reaction resulting from the woman’s suppression of a strong ego, and secondly it is also
contemplated that in one or more of the cases, it was Genji’s conscience itself-realizing his guilt- that would manifest in form of spiritual possession.
Using the literary device of the essay written by Rokujô’s modern alter ego Mieko, Enchi creates a sort of inducted apology of Mieko herself, suggesting that even if she is the heartless creator of a monstrous plan, she is at the same time
victim of the patriarchal yoke which suppressed her possibility of expression. In other words, while assuming the interpretation of the female karma emerging from Noh drama “Aoi no Ue”--which stresses the evil aspect of the feminine--Masks
denounces the androcentric system as the motivating factor of evil.
This is an adapted version taken from Daniela Moro, “Evil and Abject Women of the Traditional Japanese Theatre through the Reading of Enchi Fumiko’s Literary Works,” found in The Evil Body (e-book), ed. April Anson. Oxford, Interdisciplinary Press, 2011.
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