"Twin Blossoms on a Single Branch": Interpreting Masks

Getting to Know Harume (from Part Two, "Masugami"):

On pp. 70ff, we encounter Harume again, first as a disembodied voice singing the "Kanazawa Snow Song," where it is suggested again that there "was something vaguely disturbing about her face, a sort of incoherence" and that she is "destined forever to be a little girl."

It turns out that while in the womb with Akio, his feet kicked her repeatedly and put pressure on her head so that she experienced brain damage. Moreover, Akio seemed to bear an inborn hatred for his sister once they were born, so that she had to be removed from the home to protect her; she was sent off to live with Mieko's mother. Having no memory of her, Akio grew up not even aware that he ever had a sister until he became an adult.

Harume, then, was both simple and, at times, "beastly" in a raw, primitive, animalistic sort of way, especially when she gets her period. She shares facial features with Akio which is why Yasuko nearly fainted at the Yakushiji household showing of the Noh masks when Yoritaka put on the Zô-no-Onna mask. It was as though Yasuko was seeing Akio's face transform into Harume's--male into female--and then back again so it seemed for a moment as though Akio was coming back to life right before her eyes!

Interpreting Masks

Though only 141 pages, this novel is packed with ideas and it can be a challenge to interpret. Mieko has been following a certain path since she was 20 years old, after the Aguri incident. But what is her master plan? What is the nature of her plot?

Is it only about Revenge?

Let's think about it. What does Mieko actually do?

She does one unthinkable thing: she conspires to enable a man, the unsuspecting Tsuneo Ibuki, to impregnate her mentally impaired daughter.

Why would she do that?

And then, once Harume is pregnant, Mieko forces her to bring the baby to full-term and to give birth even though she is unlikely to survive the ordeal. And, in fact, she does not. She is a victiom who has been sacrificed for Mieko's endgame...but what is her endgame?

We first learn about the pregnancy when Ibuki's wife, Sadako, hires a private investigator to find out what her husband is up to. This step is considered crass and aggressive by others, and she is described as a hardened woman. (115)

She sees Ibuki and Mikame as puppets being manipulated by Yasuko. The whole house is like a Witch's Den and the two men appear to have fallen under Mieko and Yasuko's spell what with their long-standing interest in spirit possession. The two women have some kind of bond that is so strong--they are even likened to lovers! (117)

The investigator discovers that Ibuki has been going to the house in Meguro where Mieko and Yasuko live with Harume and Yû, and Ibuki and Yasuko have been making love in Akio's old study, a room in which a painting of Mieko by Minoru Shimojô, hovers over the bed. Weird!

As Harume's pregnancy develops, she looks increasingly haggard and more like her mother, Mieko. Yû calls out Mieko for all the plotting and manipulating she is up to. Yû begs her not to go through with her plot, not to make Harume have the child, suggesting it is far worse than what her husband and Aguri had done to her so long ago!

"Your revenge has come full circle."(122)

"Don't compound the evil you've already done," Yû implores, but Mieko is unyielding. Yû just bows her head and cries. (123-125)

Yasuko knows that what Mieko is doing is inhumane but she confesses to her own excitement at "the prospect of a baby with Akio's blood in its veins." So, in fact, they are accomplices in "a dreadful crime--crime that only women could commit. Having a part to play in this scheme of yours, Mother, means more to me than the love of any man." (126) They both want the baby!

Meanwhile, Mieko sat there and

meditated on the deep and turbid feminine strength within her that had all but taken possession of Yasuko, wondering silently what power on earth might deliver her from the heavy load of karma that weighed upon her. The road down which she must blindly grope her way, helplessly laden with that unending and inescapable burden, seemed to stretch before her with a foul and terrifying blackness. (126)

Oh my goodness. There is so much packed in here!

At the very least, Mieko is conscious of all that she has done, and she knows it is unforgivable. She realizes that she still must traverse the road ahead of her while she being weighed down by her karmic burden. And this is a burden from which there is no escape. The road stretches out before her and she has no choice but to grope her way along it, dark and terrifying though it may be.

A vision comes to her reminiscent of the goddess Izanami from the ancient myths and her anger at Izanagi, the male procreative deity. (127)

Does Mieko's spirit vacillate between lyricism and spirit possession like the Rokujô Haven's?

Meanwhile, Ibuki, on a trip to Kyoto, goes out to visit the Nonomiya Shrine and at Jikôji, a nearby Buddhist Temple, he hears a voice singing the "Snow Song" and catches a glimpse of a pregnant Harume, whose beauty--despite the blankness of her face, her lack of vivacity--is striking. He stands for a while staring in reverence until Yû takes her in from the veranda where she was sitting. (135)

The scene then shifts to Mieko and Yasuko's house in Meguro, where they are all packed up and ready to move out to Kamakura, an hour outside of Tokyo by train, where the two women will raise Harume's son, starting there a new life together.

Toe Yakushiji comes by bearing a gift from her late father--who has finally succumbed to stomach cancer. The gift is one of his favorite Noh masks, one that he especially wanted Mieko to have.

It is the Fukai mask: yellowed with age, hardened and grief laden. Just like Mieko? The mask has the depth brought by experience and understanding--and Toe's father liked to see it "as a metaphor comparing the heart of an older woman to the depths of a bottomless well--a well so deep that its water appears to be totally without color." (138)

The Fukai mask represents the heart of an older woman, a woman who has known the pain of losing a child. It is a sorrow-stricken face with a look of lonely solemnity. Mieko takes the mask and holds it. "What an exquisite sad sort of beauty it has. Women today have lost this quiet gracefulness." (139) But maybe not Mieko?

Here is how the novel ends:

Mieko is kneeling on the floor in the slowly deepening dusk. She lifts the mask Fukai from its box again, and studies it in solitude.

She is almost like the consummate Noh actor studying the mask in the "mirror room" before donning it. She and the mask clearly commune. The text continues:

The pale yellowish cast of the mournful thin-cheeked mask in her hands was reflected on her face, the two countenances appearing faintly in the lingering daylight like twin blossoms on a single branch. 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 vengance that she had planned so long, hiding it deep within her...

The crying of the baby filled her ears.

 

What a scene! We can picture that eerie light as the late-afternoon sun bathes everything in a pale yellow hue. The mask itself has its own yellowish cast, so it mirrors the quality of light which permeates the scene. As Mieko stares directly at the mask, the two faces hang there, suspended, "like twin blossoms on a single branch." Might we conclude that Mieko is virtually merging or even vanishing into the Fukai mask she is confronting?

What occurs next is, the sound of the baby crying fills her ears:

In that moment the mask drops from her grasp as if struck down by an invisible hand. In a trance she reached out and covered the face on the mask with her hand, while her right arm, as if suddenly paralyzed, hangs frozen, immobile, in space. (141)

 

OK, isn't this another of those powerful but indeterminate ending, an open-ended freeze-frame moment? Yes, the women are moving out of the Toganô house in downtown Tokyo to Kamakura by the seaside--"a healthier environment for the baby"--where some kind of new life will begin. Mieko, Yasuko, the baby and presumably Yû.

It is not clear how much Mieko will be an active participant in this new life, given all that she has just gone through. Unless, perhaps, we choose to believe that by being transformed or transfigured in that final scene, she has been healed and is finally free of the burden she has carried for so long.

Does staring into the face of the Fukai Mask bring her face-to-face with all that she has done? Is she now fully conscious of just who and what she is? A grieving mother who understands full well that she has sacrificed her own mentally retarded daughter...but to what end?

Can we think of Mieko at all as someone like Sensei in Kokoro, who has done something pretty horrific and then must live with the consequences of his actions? We do know what happened to Sensei but it is "I" whose future we are uncertain about.

In a similar way, we don't know for sure what lies ahead for Mieko, Yasuko and the child. There is the distinct possibility that Mieko may have died, or is near death, or is incapacitated...but we have no reason to think that Yasuko will not raise this child--the child with Akio's blood in its veins--and continue to live her life.

For some of these ideas--and those coming up below, I am indebted to Doris Bargen who has written a very engaging essay on Masks, which she titles "Twin Blossoms on a Single Branch," borrowing language directly from the text.

She opens her essay in this way:

The novel Onnamen [Masks], by Enchi Fumiko (1905-1986), is a complex work about love and hate, bereavement and mourning, liminality and transformation.' Structurally, Onnamen can be imagined as a series of discoveries, as a set of triangular relationships, or as a modern parallel to a major episode in the Genji Monogatari.

Thematically, it involves the reader in a meditation on revenge, sacrifice and self-sacrifice, and atonement.

Seen anthropologically, the novel suggests that the obliquely aggressive strategies adopted by Heian women in response to their situation in a polygynous society may still be effective in our time. Enchi is an accomplished woman writer who bridges the gap between the Heian and the modern feminine sensibility. (147)

So, we can look at Masks structurally, thematically, or anthropologically. Bargen starts to formulate her argument in a section with the heading "Masking" by noting that:

As the title of Onnamen [Masks] indicates, the single most important symbolic concept uniting all the intricate strands of the action is that of masks, specifically a wide range of women's masks used in the noh theater. In Enchi's novel, masks are not worn as artistic devices for stage acting. Although they figure in the story as significant artifacts, they are, more importantly, associated with the characters for the role that each mask brings to life on the stage. To the theater-goer, the actor's off-stage personality may be of no little consequence, but to the reader of Enchi, Onnamen dramatizes the relationship between character and role with the sophistication of metacommentary.

Symbolically, masking can hide or disguise the self; it can also be a form of self-disclosure or revelation. Sometimes masking is associated with twinning in that the doubled face has the effect of blurring or confusing identities. Masking also has the potential for making a face both more elusive and more expressive.

No matter what the interpretation, the 'effect of this double exposure is central to the aesthetics of Noh'. It can also create the impression of immutability, thereby claiming universality.

Finally, in philosophical or religious terms, the process of masking and unmasking corresponds to the process of Buddhist enlightenment by ascending and descending the mountain. Thus the layering and piling up of experience contributes to the refinement and, ultimately, the enlightenment of the human heart.

Within a ritual context, masks become instrumental in the dramatization of liminal crises and foreshadow the eventual transcendence of conflict. Masks epitomize character and signify 'categorical change'. Thus the concept of masks in this novel spans a whole range of meaning from the mundane to the religious....(148-49)

And after visiting the Yakushiji family's storehouse of Noh treasures, Bargen notes that:

Deeply impressed by the masks they have seen, Yasuko confesses that the female Zô mask when worn by the male member of the Yakushiji brother-sister team had made Akio's spirit come alive (just as, apparently, the seance had). It is as if masks were either oblivious to gender distinctions or were able to transcend them: 'male and female had suddenly become one. . .' (25/34). For the Noh this assumption is in keeping with the tradition that requires an all-male cast. Yasuko's train of associations puts her late husband in the category of androgyny.

As has yet to be revealed, Akio's sexual otherness is causally tied to his female twin Harume. In the moment of epiphany, when the dead come alive, Yasuko perceives his true form to be both male and female. Later, when Yasuko attends to Harume's toilet, she has the vivid optical illusion of the superimposition of the twins: 'the two faces of Harume and Akio coming together as one before her eyes' (73/95). Inspired as it is by masking, the metaphor employed (kasanaru 重なる, to be piled up, to lie on top of one another) introduces the crucial concept of twinning--the illusory notion of two in one.

Yasuko's vision furthermore has the quasi-religious effect of returning her husband from the dead in the figure of his female twin.

Although the technique of substituting the lost loved one with another reached its literary zenith in the Genji Monogatari, it is spun to its logical extreme by Enchi through her literary use of twins. Thus, biological anomaly allows for the comforting confusion of the presence of the dead in the living. (152)

One thing to rmember is that the term Yakushiji begins with the character Yaku 薬 which means medicine or healing, suggesting that the power of Noh Theatre may be to transform and heal the character, and, by extension, we the audience can be healed at the same time when we participate in this performative art form. What I appreciate about her essay is that Bargen argues convincingly that if Mieko's motive had simply been revenge against the Toganô's, then she had accomplished that already, way back when she conceived Akio and Harume with another man. Bam! Not a drop of Toganô blood there; Toganô bloodline is ended.

But she could have told him the truth on his deathbed and gotten all the satisfaction she desired, right? That would have been a decisive blow, completely 'In your face'. But she didn't do that, did she?

Bargen points out that:

Mieko did not vent her aggression openly as Aguri had done, because that strategy had failed. Instead, Mieko adopted an oblique strategy....Like the Rokujô Haven, Mieko is a highly sophisticated, proud, and lonely figure. Rather than voice her deepest resentments directly to a confidante, she resorted to the indirections of art. Through artistic sublimation she immersed herself in the study of poetry, Noh theatre, and the Genji. Her medium for coming to terms with a reality too harsh to endure is the literary medium that magnifies conflicts and employs a powerful creative imagination to resolve them. As a literary critic, she created an intellectual forum in which to discuss obliquely her psychological traumata. (156)

So, in this reading, "Mieko is not merely a petty and vindictive woman who seeks to give Toganô what he may well deserve." She may well have a grander design in mind, a much more subtle, ingenious power play!

She may aiming for the destruction of male supremacy and the reconstruction of female power independent of the patriarchy, out there in Kamakura where the two (or three?) women will raise a male child free and clear of the worst patriarchal influences.

I find this interpretation persuasuve! It is strong, well-argued, powerful and convincing. But...Bargen is not content to stop there. She goes on to suggest that:

...it may be Mieko's own miscarriage that becomes central to the reconstitution of lost power. The loss of her first child becomes the driving force of Mieko's struggle, the mysteriously ruthless quest for a child conceived in a macabre kind of innocence. Harume's baby can be a hope that carries forward into future generations. As a purified male, the child will paradoxically continue Mieko's bloodline.

If Mieko's original grievance was the loss of her baby due to the "miscarriage" aided by Aguri, this makes it her mizuko--(水子), literally her "water child," which is a Japanese term for an aborted, stillborn or miscarried baby, and archaically for a dead baby or infant--and if this is the driving force of the novel, what is the function of Yasuko's subsidiary role? While Mieko's final goal is to reconstitute the lost child through the generative scapegoating of Harume, Yasuko's motivation for becoming Mieko's accomplice is to 'have' a child with Akio through surrogate coupling (Harume and Ibuki). She confesses to be entranced 'by the prospect of a baby with Akio's blood in its veins' (126/ 164)....

Yasuko and Mieko are thus united in their quest for a child. Even though the child born to Harume embodies two different, generationally defined meanings for his grandmother and his foster mother, he is the essence of the mask come alive in so far as he inherits the 'ambivalence [that] is central to masking.' The child is a personification of 'the greatest paradox of all . .. creation and destruction, birth and death. In these most moving and most difficult of all transitions, the use of masks illustrates the continued attempt to confront paradox by recourse to personification, to state that mutability is a precondition of personality rather than an aberration.'(167)

This is impressive! It adds to her already very thoughtful interpretation of Masks the idea that there is also a possible avenue for healing in this text:

What initially appears to be a war between the sexes gradually takes on a medicinal aspect, the passionate pursuit of healing. Male figures who half-unwittingly inflicted almost incurable wounds, foremost among them, Toganô Masatsugu, are counterbalanced by those with varying capacities for healing: spiritualists and academics, doctors and artists. It is from the group of artists that Mieko is able to derive the energy to live through the violent ordeal of the cycle of retribution, and to extract the elixir of life.

As the fate of the twins clearly demonstrates, healing involves suffering, in extreme cases, death....Just as there is a triangle of female actors, based on Mieko as the shite--the "doer" or lead person in a Noh Performance--so Mieko's lover, Ibuki, and Mikame seem to form a complementary triangle of male actors whose various functions combine to help achieve the climax of Onnamen.

Confronting the mask, Mieko sees a mirror image of the inner self she had concealed from others as well as from herself. Whether she has matured enough to endure this insight is a rhetorical question. The moment of recognition is as precious as it is brittle, ready to collapse at the first sign of life's eternal cycle: the disruptive cry of the baby. Mieko's solution is too perfect and cannot but clash with mundane reality.

It is suggested that Yasuko inherits Mieko's previous role and mask when she agrees to raise Harume's child. Conversely, Mieko can be seen to hand over to Yasuko her 'curse' as well as her technique of transformation and transcendence. If the child comes to transmit the 'endless river of blood, flowing on from generation to generation' (127/164), he also symbolizes hope compressed into a single tear. He represents the sacred child born from a mythically incestuous union, making possible 'the rebirth of the ancestral soul.'

In hindsight it appears that Akio, well aware of the Japanese shamanistic tradition and its symbolic representation by mountains, may have sought the redemptive union with his twin. Although individual pain and conflict may be transcended, the victory is elusive for universal ambivalence will remain.

...Can Mieko in the end be said to have exorcised the trauma that held her in its grip? Does she achieve peace when she takes possession of the Fukai mask? Have spirit possession and mizuko been successfully incorporated into a healing ritual? The novel does not permit unambiguous answers... In accord with the unfinished quality of Noh performances, which present a never-ending cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, Onnamen too 'ends' with the suggestion of a new beginning. (170)

 

This is quite amazing! The idea of spirit possession joins with the notion of a healing ritual which cleanses and transfigures Meiko. Somehow. It is the wonder, the mystery and the power of Noh Theatre.

But Bargen pushes her ideas even a little farther:

At the end of the novel, we see Mieko study her new mask like an actor who is expected to have mastered many roles. Yet her life falls short of art: hers is the confused ambivalence of a mother who is 'reunited' symbolically with her mizuko (a baby lost through abortion, miscarriage, or stillbirth), her lost child, but must, at the same time, mourn the death of her twins. Her loss cannot be overcome without suffering new loss. (170)

When Mieko drops the mask, in a final Noh-like gesture, one is reminded of the liminal hovering of Rokujô's foot on the threshold of the torii at Nonomiya [as in the Noh Play]. Mieko's unorthodox behavior in response to her past rules out any sudden concession to conventional moral judgment. The astonishing events of Onnamen cannot convincingly be reduced to 'Mieko's empty feeling' as mirrored in Enchi's 'treatment of the theme of female revenge.' (a reference to an article by the scholar Yoko McClain)

Rather, Mieko is caught in an existential dilemma between lingering on in this world and achieving enlightenment. She appears to be still in the limbo of trance, one hand covering the mask at the sound of the crying baby, the other frozen in mid-air. She has become the Japanese female version of a shaman who 'is not only a sick man; he is, above all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself.' (170-171)

(Bargen cites Hiromi Sodekawa, 'Enchi Fumiko: A Study in the Self-Expression of Women', M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia)

This is certainly a creative way to interpret the ending of Masks. In the ending of a typical Noh play, we usually see the shite is transformed (or in this case, healed) and her spirit or soul is freed up to merge with the universe, or enter Nirvana/Paradise. So it would seem to apply to Enchi's novel, steeped in Noh as it is.

But....

Alternatively, we could also think that Mieko does indeed die, metaphorically, in the sense that her tormented ego dies, so that she can enter a new phase of reincarnation in Yasuko, a phase of less intense passion. [In this interpretation, then,] Does Yasuko become Mieko's 'migawari '身代わり(literally, one body substituted for another), one who suffers on behalf of others, like a Jizô Buddha? (171)

Okay, I like that, too!

Bargen goes on to point out that:

...we may not be able to know the answers to questions like these because the transformative medium of the mask permits only ambiguous glimpses. But Enchi has created a mode of thought in Onnamen that provokes religious ecstasy by perforating the mysterious boundaries between birth and death, beauty and sadness. (171)

So, as we read Masks we might want to think of it as representing a "mode of thought," one that is capable bringing about "religious ecstasy" by breaking down the boundaries between life and death, beauty and sadness, and yes, between this world we know and the next one, that we don't. So Bargen's argument is replete with ideas for us to ponder.

This concludes my rather unsatisfactory recap of some of Bargen's main arguments; but please do not blame Professor Bargen for it's shorcomings! You are free to read the complete article which is in the Resources folder, if you want, but I am not asking or expecting you to do so.

But, sometimes it is just good to see how someone else has done some difficult and creative interpretive work on a text, and to expose yourself to some of his or her ideas and conclusions.

So, besides this summary, there are also some similar comments on this page. But you will need to scroll down quite a bit if you go there.