The Mask Carver's Son Read Online Free Page A

years later. The words the priest uses are unfamiliar to him. “Without knowing it,” he tells the boy, “you have entered the world of Noh.”
    *   *   *
    “Close your eyes,” the priest whispers to the boy, “and I will offer you all that I know.”
    He begins with a story. It is a legend that has been handed down from master to disciple, from actor to actor, from father to son.
    The story begins in the ancient capital of Nara, where the wooden shrines are black with age, where torches illuminate the vestige of the great Bronze Buddha, where deer run wild and eat from the palm of your hand. It is here, in a city that stands as a testament to the past, that the ghosts of emperors roam, that the voices of fallen warriors boast their glory, and that love-struck maidens bemoan their broken hearts. And it is here that the great Pine of Noh still grows.
    They say that over five hundred years ago, an old man performed a dance under the crooked boughs of the Yogo Pine, a tree that grows at the base of the Kasuga shrine. They say that this man danced in such a way that he awed the people into silence. His limbs floated like wings, his feet slid like sleighs, and his hands extended before him like small paper fans. They say that through his dance he ceased being a man, a divine spirit possessed him, and the gods directed his movements. They say that through his dance he was briefly transformed.
    And centuries later the great pine still stands. Its trunk still twists, and its branches still blossom from Nara’s ancient soil. And on every Noh stage it has since been painted. For it was beneath the great Yogo Pine that Noh was channeled from the gods in heaven to the humble world of men.
    *   *   *
    “Noh is a dance,” the priest declares. “Noh is a recital of poetry. It is a performance incorporating sound and stage.” But the boy continues to look blank; he continues to be unmoved.
    It is only when he hears the priest whisper, “Noh was created to pacify the troubled dead,” that he hears the message and is forever transformed.
    *   *   *
    Before the boy ever began to carve, he had heard voices in his head. He saw the whitened corpses of his parents; he heard their piercing shrieks and their wails.
    But the carving has made this all stop. He no longer hears the wails of his parents’ ghosts; he no longer feels the anguish of his guilt.
    Has he placated their tortured spirits through his carving? Has he entered the world of Noh, this esoteric world of transition, where mortals channel the voices of the dead?
    “There are spirits trapped in your masks,” Tamashii tells him. “You are a son of Noh.”
    The priest speaks of Noh as a rare and selective family, saying that it was a privilege to be allowed within its walls.
    “The carver holds the fate of Noh in his hands. Noh begins with a mask, and the mask gives birth to Noh.”
    “The gods have channeled the spirits through your hands, and you in turn infuse the wood with their presence. Only the actor can release them into the world.”
    Tamashii breaks a branch from the pine tree that grows behind him. “Consider the forest our stage,” he says as he circles the soil around him. “I will teach you the plays of Zeami. I will describe to you the faces of the stage!”
    *   *   *
    The boy becomes his disciple. The priest shaves the boy’s head and dresses him in the robes of an ascetic. He teaches him to fear the dead more than the living. He teaches him to love nothing but the wood.
    Within the grounds of the monastery, the two live in a makeshift hut built from bamboo and straw. Every morning after their ablutions, they carve. They do not stop for meals; they barely speak between themselves. They simply carve until their hands cease to move, till their chisels cease to meet the wood.
    The boy consumes the wood; the craft consumes the boy.
    “We are driven by our ghosts,” Tamashii tells him.
    “I feel nothing when I carve,” the boy