Essay

The point of noh return

By Kit Pancoast Nagamura

My father, an architect who spent time teaching and studying in Kyoto, loved Japan to a degree that was infectious. He designed for our family in Florida a sukiya-style house with engawa, ukiyoe on the walls, and huge windows that blurred the distinction between indoors and nature outside. My mother, talented at carving Japanese-style woodblock prints, filled our new little home with the smells of wood shavings and print inks, adding another element to my early fascination with Japan.

However, I am particularly indebted to two women I feel as though I know, but to whom I have never spoken. One evening when I was about 5 years old and we had just moved into our new home, I first glimpsed their faces peering down at me. Ghost-like and silent, they hung disembodied, their delicate features glowing in the dark.

To a child, moving house can have spooky moments. Items appear here and there unexpectedly—a sudden sofa, an old lamp in a new location, an odd new painting on the wall. These two women came out of nowhere and they gave me a fright. "They are noh masks from Japan," my father said. "Do you mean not masks?" I asked. "No, noh," he said, laughing, briefly explaining the form of drama.

One afternoon shortly after, as shadows from palms moved quickly through the house, I could have sworn the women came alive, and at times, depending on the light, they took on utterly different expressions. When I pointed this out to my father, he gave a knowing nod, and explained that the master who made them had had that effect in mind.

To me, the two women appeared similar, like sisters, but as I grew older, my father encouraged me to look more carefully. "They are an understated Japanese expression of comedy and tragedy," he said. I gradually came to suspect that the masks, one waka-onna and the other a zoh-onna, were in fact evocations of women at different stages of their lives. Their egg-shell beauty and subtle suggestion of how time might change a woman's countenance convinced me Japan was a country I had to visit.

When my father passed away, the masks came back home with me, to Japan. In the process of writing this short essay, I discovered that their creator also has passed on. The two women the master coaxed from cypress caught the heart of an architecture student, crossed the Pacific, convinced me to explore Japan, and finally returned with me to live in Tokyo. I have discovered that the carver's grandson is a third-generation carver. I'd like to introduce him to two beauties his grandfather spent time with.

Shukan ST: May 23, 2008

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