花のような顔の上に顔を重ねた

flower like face piled/layered on top of a face

The basic meaning of kasaneru (重ねる) is to pile up, the lay one object on top of another.

So 顔の上に重ねる would be to pile, or layer one face on top of another. . .Like masking?

Interesting Side Observation:

Mi-e-ko's name is written with these 3 characters: 三重子 = 3 Levels Child?

Notice how the middle character is the same as the character used above for the verb kasaneru (重ねる) suggesting at the very least that Mieko is a character of multiple levels. therefore a person of considerable depth and complexity. One level piled or layered on top of another!

The image we might get from this scene in Japanese, then, could be that Ibuki is leaning over Yasuko to rest his face upon hers, therefore to kiss her, but at that very moment we are thinking about his face "layering" on top of hers, we may also be reminded of how the Zô-no-onna mask transformed before Yasuko's eyes at the Yukushiji residence in the opening section of the novel. There, she saw the mask turn into Akio's and then Harume's face and it disoriented her and made her woozy.

AND, of course, we may think of the layering of Harume's face over/on top of/substituting for Yasuko's face as Ibuki made love to her.

Consider some of Doris Bargen's ideas on this in her "Twin Blossoms on a Single Branch" article:

The relationships among artist, actor, and medium (that is, work of art) closely resemble the figural tensions in spirit possession, where possessing spirit, possessed person, and, in a different but related sense, the medium interact. In both the noh and spirit possession, ordinary individuality is transformed as the actor or the possessed person is united with the aggrieved spirits of the dead (shiryo) or the living (ikiryo or ikisudama). The audience witnesses a liminal state of two personalities in one. The transformed appearance of the possessed person resembles that of the masked actor of the noh. Mieko and her daughter-in-law Yasuko are spellbound by the spectacle of masks and robes, especially by the Zô no onna and Ryô no onna masks.

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be piled up, lie on 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 Genji Monogatari, it is spun to its logical extreme by Enchi through her literary use of twins.

Mieko and the Rokujô Lady: Account of the Shrine in the Fields

Mieko's moral stance toward the most sophisticated lady in Genji is one of sympathy to the point of identification; in fact, the entire essay amounts to nothing less than an apologia. It is, moreover, no coincidence that the author dwells on the scene of reconciliation between Genji and Rokujô at the temporary Shinto shrine for the Ise priestess, who is Rokujô's daughter. It is significant that in Nonomiya, Rokujô is not, as in the play Aoi no Ue, represented by the formidable mask of the jealous woman, the Hannya, but by the Waka-onna mask, or, more rarely, the Fukai mask.

Fundamental to Rokujô's past is her hurt pride and ambition. As the widow of Crown Prince Zenbô, she might some day have become empress had her husband not died. Genji's courtship of the older woman is a tribute to her charm but does not forward her political ambition; nor does it cure the hurt her husband inflicted upon her because Genji has no claim to the imperial throne. Worse still, the affair quickly and inexplicably fades, putting the lady in a worse position than before. Her unrequited passion motivates Rokujô's possessing spirit, not in order to do harm to Genji's wives but, obliquely, to haunt Genji's, and perhaps by implication, all men's conscience, beginning with her husband's….

Like Rokujô, 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, and 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.

There is little point in openly challenging a patriarchal society that tolerates Toganô's concubines and 'Minoru's' anachronistic view, allegedly representative of Japanese male opinion, that menstrual blood is polluting. Mieko's revenge begins with her refusal to make public her grievance.

This first step, motivated by pride, required the sacrifice of whatever female sympathy might have been gained by a show of pain. The second step required further self-sacrifice. Mieko's own children became, like Medea's, an instrument of revenge. Whether she willed Akio's death is uncertain, but her use of Harume to seduce Ibuki is unambiguous. As she contemplates the long-preserved letter, she can look from the window and see smoke rising, as from a Heian funeral pyre or a burning house, foreshadowing her daughter's death in love. She has become a shaman, a person whose trauma has resulted in a privileged position as regards the world of spirits. Mieko's contemplation of the letter, 'the text of a sutra learned nearly by heart' (106/136), constitutes the climactic scene of contemporary shamanism.

From the moment of the initial traumatization, her miscarriage, Mieko has traveled a long arduous journey of redress. To recover her lost child, she undergoes a painful series of hardships: the trials of her secretive love affair, the birth of the twins, the loss of her lover, the death of her husband, followed by the more recent tragic death of the male twin and culminating in the present sacrifice of the female twin. At this moment of sacrifice, at the height of her trance, she exorcizes herself of what possessed her, her miscarriage, in a vision of her daughter's face at what may be imagined as the moment of conception. It is her daughter Harume who becomes the medium for achieving the shamanistic epiphany of birth and death as a symbolic unity. For Mieko, it is a moment that can bring catharsis only at the cost of another life: the death of the mother, her daughter.

To achieve a shamanistic evocation of the dead child's spirit, Mieko employs her innocent daughter to perform the role of miko, a Shinto priestess and medium. Since high priestesses and mediums in ancient Japan experienced sexual intercourse sinlessly in a state of trance, Harume, owing to her mental state of indifference, naturally conforms to the miko image of undefilable femininity. But Mieko's plan can be executed only because Yasuko, too aware of carnal desire to fulfill this role herself, is able to provide a male bait. Thus, through mediation, through the double mediumship of daughter-in-law and daughter, Mieko recreates what had been immediately impossible: a new 'life source'.

We know that Mieko's past has been an endless chain of wounds: passion, betrayal, jealousy and retribution. 

Her retaliation for her Aguri-orchestrated miscarriage—itself a response to Aguri's two forced abortions--was to bear two children, twins, by another man.  So Mieko never vented her aggression openly as Aguri had done because that strategy had failed. Instead, Mieko adopted an oblique strategy.

This oblique aggressive strategy allowed her a more profound and enduring control over the men and women in her circle.  She fought and still fights, without words or nails, to be treated honorably by a society that condones the double standard for men’s sexual behavior in her day as it did in Heian times.

Mieko uses the Rokujô Lady as a masked version of herself--so past trauma gets "masked" as objective scholarship.  But her maskless, unprepared face is preserved in Portrait by Shimojô Minoru which hangs over Harume's substitution/impregnation.  The virginally pure Mieko of the painting looks down as witness as older Mieko tries to reconstitute her lost female reproductivity. 

In a moving scene, the practical Yû, usually a model of submissiveness and self-effacement, overcomes class barriers to appeal to the impassive Mieko with her bold and tearful supplications in favor of an abortion for Harume. Mieko, however, resists the suggestion. Mikame's heartfelt sympathy for Mieko's imagined 'torments' (121/156) represents a total misunderstanding of Mieko's motivation. Perhaps her refusal to have an abortion thirty years earlier, when she bore the twins against Yû's advice, provides a clue for her present decision. It is extremely unlikely that she would feel compelled to defy the public's notion of a shameful pregnancy by cruelly putting her daughter's life at risk.

Rather, to attain the metaphysical objectives inspired by the mystique of spirit possession in Genji and noh, she must expose herself to the incisive moral critique of the rational world. Hence she must endure Yû, who can point her finger at Akio's tragic death and his twin sister's tragic pregnancy. In sure anticipation of Harume's death, Yû grimly states that Mieko's 'revenge has come full circle' (124/160).

But wait....

An altogether different explanation for Mieko's refusal to allow Harume to have an abortion is inherent in the logical consequence of a whole chain of severed ties and of substitutions: the twins for Aguri's two abortions; Yasuko for the twins; Harume's baby for Mieko's miscarriage as well as for Akio. The most compelling symbolic identification in Mieko's mind between her mizuko and Harume's baby is conveyed through the timing of Mieko's miscarriage and her decision against an abortion for Harume, dramatic events that both occur in the third month of pregnancy. That the fruit of Harume's forced impregnation refers back to Mieko's tragically deprived womb is strongly suggested when Enchi refers to Harume's 'severely retroflexed womb' (124/161). Finally, it is no accident that the same doctor attends Aguri's two abortions, Mieko's miscarriage, and Harume's baby.

So, the point of the oblique aggressive strategy is to mortify and torment one's oppressor.  One cannot challenge the patriarchy that tolerates Toganô's concubines directly. So, Mieko's revenge begins by her refusal to make her grievance public. 

Then she must sacrifice her own children as well---they are instruments of revenge.  Mieko has become a shaman, her trauma has put her in a privileged position as regards the world of spirit.  At the height of her trance, she exorcises herself of what possessed her, her miscarriage, in a vision of her daughter's face at the moment of conception. Harume is the medium but it means her death as epiphany of symbolic unity of birth and death. Yasuko provides the male bait, but Harume is the miko, the medium--that's why her mask is Masugami. Ibuki has little choice but to abandon himself to confusion in identity, piling face on top of face which is another reference to masking.

…Enchi does much in her novel, from the opening scene of triangular love and courtship surrounding Yasuko to the incorporation of the quintessential passionate lover in the literary figure of Rokujô in Genji, to focus on unrequited love and female jealousy. Yet it is precisely this focus that skillfully masks Mieko's true raison d'etre for her most heinous act: the 'killing' of her retarded daughter. The view commonly held concerning this crime implies that it is grounded in female jealousy and thirst for revenge, and that Mieko's 'grand child . . . is the living symbol of her love and revenge.' Mieko fulfills her dark plan by creating a Toganô heir who is not at all related by blood to the Toganô family. But Mieko had already achieved this feat with her birth of the 'beastly' twins, who are certainly not her husband's and are therefore not Toganôs.

Had Mieko's aim been revenge, she would have told her husband the horrid truth on his deathbed. She did not. Neither is it Mieko's betrayal that leaves her so deeply unsatisfied and restless. Mieko's quest runs deeper. She is not merely a petty and vindictive woman who seeks to give Toganô what he may well deserve. For Mieko, mere revenge is too easily accomplished.

It is not so much the destruction of male supremacy as the reconstruction of female power that is at stake. While the twins may be seen as a kind of indirect retribution for Toganô's mistress's two abortions, it is Mieko's own miscarriage that becomes central to the reconstitution of lost power. It is the loss of her first child that becomes the driving force of Mieko's struggle, the mysteriously ruthless quest for a child conceived in a macabre kind of innocence.

Yakushi: Healing

Mieko's justification for her action lies in her hope for a living memento of her original loss, a hope never fully realized in the twins because they are primarily instruments in closing the cycle of retribution. Harume's baby, however, is a hope to be carried into future generations. As a purified male, the child paradoxically continues Mieko's bloodline. It is no coincidence that her lover's identity remains a matter of hypothesis, as if the male contribution to reproduction were secondary at best. Nonetheless, the male protagonists of the novel, selfish and ineffective as they may be as individuals, form a forceful collective that must be accounted for. It is no accident that Mieko's so-called dark plan is strategically embedded in memorial rites and lustration ceremonies.

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 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. For the male healers this condition holds true as well. On the esoteric end of the spectrum is the anonymous spiritualist of the seance; more lucidly helpful are academics such as Saeki and Makino, and doctors such as Morioka and Mikame. Mikame's comparative detachment from the action allows him, like the chorus in noh drama, to participate as a thoughtful intellectual in Ibuki's emotional experience. The two allies and rivals fulfill their complementary roles much like Yasuko and Harume in their double mediumship. Just as there is a triangle of female actors, based on Mieko as the shite, 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.

It is interesting that Mieko's strongest bond may be with Yakushiji Yorihito. As suggested by his name, this artist, actor, and collector may also be a former lover, the healer on whom she must rely in the end. In an uncanny analogy to Harume's sacrificial death, Yakushiji, who suffered from stomach cancer at the time of the fall airing of his robes and masks, died in the following summer, foreshadowing Harume's death. He leaves behind, in analogy to Harume's child, his supreme legacy to Mieko, the Fukai mask, which definitely replaces the earlier association of Mieko with the Ryô-no-onna mask. In yet another compelling analogy, the legacy is delivered by a daughter rather than a son: the child by Harume (not Akio) and the mask by Yakushiji Toe (not Yorikata). In psychosomatic empathy with these dramatic events of giving birth and issuing a treasured mask, Yasuko too anticipates a version of conception as a 'stabbing pain reached through the pit of her stomach' (76/99).

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. At the end, Mieko, Yasuko and the baby are to leave the Toganô house in Tokyo. The move to Kamakura implies that Mieko has finished her mission and that all that remains of her old self, through 'the lyric exfoliation of identity',48 is the mask of Fukai. She has moved from the role of disillusioned lover, as the Ryô no onna in Nonomiya, through traumatic loss to the mother's search for the lost child, as the Fukai in Sumidagawa and Miidera, two plays with a sad and a happy ending, respectively.

At the end of the novel, Mieko studies 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 but must, at the same time, mourn the death of her twins. Her loss cannot be overcome without suffering new loss. Finally, her strategy of twinning (Aguri's two abortions with the twins and the mizuko with Harume's baby) and, analogously, her technique of masking can only be successful liminally. Similarly, the concept of 'two in one' rests on an illusion, albeit an illusion that is alluring because of its near perfection.

In the end, Mieko virtually vanishes into the Fukai mask she is confronting: 'the two countenances appearing faintly in the lingering daylight like twin blossoms on a single branch' (141/184). While reality (Mieko's face) cannot be abstracted or overcome by art (the mask Fukai ), ideally the two epitomize each other in the story that they embody and share. Confronting the mask, Mieko sees a mirror image of the inner self she had concealed from others as well as 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.

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 vengeance that she had planned so long, hiding it deep within her. . .
         The crying of the baby filled her ears.
         In that moment, the mask dropped 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, hung frozen, immobile, in space. (141)

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. 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.' 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.'

Or does she die, metaphorically, in the sense that her tormented ego dies, to enter a new phase of reincarnation in Yasuko, a phase of less intense passion? Does Yasuko become Mieko's migawari '身代わり, one who suffers on behalf of others, like Jizô?

At the end, Mieko has been transformed—her old self is left behind as epitomized in the mask she gazes at. She has mastered many roles. . .yet her life falls short of art. Confronting the mask, Mieko sees an inner self she had concealed from others, and herself. She tries to cover—shield herself from?—the mask, the baby cries, her other hand is frozen in mid-air—like a Noh gesture. Is she paralyzed? Is she having a stroke? 

Or, did she fulfill some religious rite of solace, like a mizuko kuyô?  Was Harume like a jizô through whose sacrifice, violence is turned into compassion? Her death purifies the newborn substitute for the miscarried child. Therefore her death is like a ritual death linked to birth and revivification.

If it is impossible to know the answers to these questions, it is because the transformative medium of the mask permits only ambiguous glimpses. 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.

Truly, masks have the power to create a vision of 'twin blossoms on a single branch' (141/184).