The Fourth String. Janet Pocorobba
who invented kabuki in the sixteenth century but whose shows had, apparently, been shut down for lewdness. Now men acted women’s roles onstage.
“Women can’t play on stage at the kabuki,” Denise said. “No matter how good they are.”
“Such a feudal society. That’s why I don’t like,” Sensei said.
Today’s show would be danced by an onnagata, a female impersonator.
“Hengemono,” Sensei instructed, as we settled into front-row seats in the balcony. A female transformation play. “Most popular.”
We had opted not to buy earphone guides. We were there for the music anyway. Sensei passed out cream puffs and tea and looked around. A smattering of foreigners and Japanese sat in the balcony. Below us were three floors of seats, the first of which hugged a raised walkway that cut through the audience at stage right. This was the hanamichi, “flower path,” Denise said, for dramatic exits and entrances.
Sensei scanned the stage with binoculars as the curtain rose. There were two, a heavy formal one that rose automatically, and underneath a thinner one pulled open by stage hands.
“Lead singer is my sensei’s favorite,” she whispered. “And the drummer?” She indicated a silver-maned man whose drum ropes were violet, not orange, like the others. “Very womanizer.”
The musicians were kneeling on a vermilion carpet in two tiered rows at the side of the stage. I counted eighteen in all: shamisen players, drummers, a flute player, and singers who had the little fan closed at their knees and were the only ones with music stands reading a score. There was no conductor. All musicians faced front, unmoving. A shamisen began a slow tattoo, and a singer released a throaty howl. The spareness—the spookiness—cast a hush and we, too, stopped moving to listen.
Soon we heard the screeching of curtain hooks and a collective gasp as heads turned to look. Applause rose like a wave, and finally, creeping into our view, on the hanamichi, was the dancer, white-faced, in a flat red hat, dipping and swooning her way to the stage. She (he?) took her time, advancing, retreating, letting her long ornately stitched kimono tease over the edge. “For his patrons,” Sensei said later.
The theater remained in half-light, the color of late afternoon. People ate lunchboxes and drank small cans of tea. They stepped out and returned. The box seats were lined with ladies in kimono, and a few men, too. It all had a festive feel, like an extended picnic.
Every so often, a male voice from the rear shouted, “Matte imashita!” “I was waiting for that!” Or “Yamatoya!” (an actor’s guild name). These people were plants, Sensei said. People today did not know the plays well enough to play this role anymore. For kabuki was a collaboration between the audience and the actors, who traversed the space between them, eclipsing it, and expanding it, in dizzying spontaneous howls. In this way tradition was alive: an ongoing conversation between the living and the dead.
From time to time Sensei’s hands rose to her lap and tapped out drumbeats. I could feel the force of her concentration as her small hands pat-pat-patted, sometimes crossing each other and landing noiselessly in her lap. I think that’s when it began to hit me that Sensei was composing a life in this music. It was her personal choice. Her day job only gave her the freedom to love it all the more, to devote herself to it without question.
It took time. There was no substitute when everything was learned—“stolen”—through exposure to the art in discreet moments of witnessing or observation. The most important thing you could do, then, was to show up, to prepare yourself for learning. Even my codified gestures—legs folded, eyes down—were setting up a kind of condition so that something might sink in.
At one point, the dancer paused and knelt in the middle of the stage, her long sleeves crossed on her lap like a butterfly’s wings.
Sensei whispered, “Hikinuki, special technique … ”
A man dressed in black scurried onto the stage and disappeared behind the dancer. The shamisen entered a drone, the singing stopped. The man was moving, arms flying quickly, and then everything stopped and the dancer burst forward, as from a cocoon, her shed layer in the hands of the man now ferrying it off stage.
The risk of such a trick made me dizzy. I swooned at everything that could have gone wrong but didn’t. I was still swooning as the dancer mounted the bell in the last scene, in a silver kimono patterned with triangular “scales,” waving a demon’s trident, her white face leering at us as the curtain was pulled across the stage.
The image remained with me as we filed down the stairs with the crowds of people and stood out front to take a picture. A drum boomed and a festival flute trilled. Women in kimono were rushing to find taxis. I felt like everything was moving and nothing was moving at all, like the dance, a series of stops and starts of still life tableaux. Mostly, I didn’t want to leave the theater. I had an inexplicable longing to go back in and see it all again, to maybe never leave, as I watched Denise line us up in the viewfinder.
Sensei stood behind me, one step up, in pedal pushers and a raincoat cinched at her waist. I leaned forward on my umbrella in an Edwardian blazer, giddy. In yellow-lit windows above, I imagined the actors rubbing greasepaint from their cheeks, maybe sipping a whiskey. They would be in cotton robes and soon they would leave the theater for dinner, or home, for tomorrow they would return to do it again. Somewhere up there, too, was an old man with a needle and thread, who would stay late into the night to sew those kimono back together, stitch by stitch, until all the layers were invisible.
“Hai cheezu!” yelled Denise.
And then, somewhere between Denise’s signal to pose and the click of the flash, Sensei did something I would never have expected her to do, knowing as I did, something of Japanese life. I had visited families for maple-viewing or hot-pot suppers and found them absent of pats on the hand or kisses on the cheek, any touching, in other words, or evidence of affection.
And yet that is what she did. As the shutter clicked and the crowds found their way to trains or bars, Sensei placed her hand on my right shoulder.
How to describe the significance of this? The gesture, so small but so radical. It is hard to convey. I continue to study the picture, to see again what she meant for me. Was she claiming? Anointing? Letting me know that she wanted Western familiarity, not Japanese?
Sensei never wanted to be called a teacher, literally “the one who came before.” But that is what she was, if learning in Japan was an intimacy with strangers, those people you would never meet or know, who had, long before you, created the forms, the gestures, the kata, that you would fill. Everyone had a role, even the man in black, a propsman coming to the aid of the actor. It wasn’t important what the role was, but having a role at all.
Perhaps, this, too, was my benkyo, and what her hand meant to say.
4
… her tabi looked ecstatically shabby …
The reason Japanese students are pushed to perform too early, it has struck me, is to experience helplessness and panic. Only then, pinned in fear and shame, is the kata tattooed on the heart.
It is one theory anyway, and it was like this for me. Held in place by the starched silk sash pressing at my ribs and restricting me to only shallow sips of breath, I made sounds on stage that day too soft for anyone to hear. I felt small, swallowed up. But the music was holding me in place, as were the memories of the kabuki cream puffs, the rehearsal at Sensei’s, the practice tape, the sea, and Larry, all infused with the voices and shamisen, darting and diving. I was part of something already.
Hours before settling on my knees on the vermilion carpet, before my calves began their prickly descent into sleep, we were breakfasting at Mister Donut. Sensei wore a handkerchief in her obi as a bib and craned her neck over a bowl of egg drop soup. Savory dumplings and egg rolls were available alongside the glazed donuts and powdery crullers that Denise, Douggie, Lisa, and I ordered.
Sensei