He rises at dawn, more or less at the same time as the birds; he is a bad sleeper, only falling asleep is easy for him – in the evenings this happens quite often, although afterward there are frequent startled awakenings, where he’s drenched in sweat, worn out from a dream, and it goes on like this till dawn, when finally the skies begin to turn grey in the neighbourhood of Kita, located above the Koetsuji Temple in Shakadani, after each difficult night he gets up in the large house in which he lives alone, and it’s as if he is not only living alone in the house, but in the entire vicinity, as this is one of the most expensive residential areas in Kyōto, the expensive neighbourhoods are nonetheless always the quietest, the most depopulated, in a word the most inhuman as well, there is no sign at all that people live in the buildings next door, even more solitary than his; at times, now and then, a car passes by very cautiously and quietly, someone is going somewhere, someone is returning home, but it is as if they too were alone, if there even was anyone at all like him; he has lived for long, indeterminable years alone in the enormous, impeccably outfitted and tidy house; very frequently three or four days can pass without him talking to anyone, or wanting to talk to anyone, and even then it is usually by telephone; he has no domestic animals, he does not use any devices to play music, he only has a battered TV, and an even more battered computer, and a little garden in the tiny courtyard behind the house, he lives, in a word, in total silence, it seems fairly likely that he wants to live in total silence, and the reason why is an enigma, just as his entire life is an enigma, which means that he is entirely concealed between the early evening slumber and the awakening at dawn, something is barricaded off, inasmuch as the inclination, the unconditional demand for complete silence, for solitude, for cleanliness and order definitely creates the impression that there is a story behind it, but then what this story could possibly be is a secret which he conscientiously watches over, if at times he takes on a few students for a short period, or if now and then on some evening or another an occasional friend spends some time with him – nothing from the story can ever be glimpsed, everything is well concealed: the early slumber, the bad nights, the awakenings at dawn, then a quick breakfast, often taken standing up in the Western-style kitchen facing out onto the garden, and he goes up already to the first floor, where he has set up his studio in a little room facing south, as the light there is the strongest, at times even excessively strong and excessively sharp, so that during the long summers, which last from May to September, he must frequently draw the curtain across the window, and he sits down in the middle of the studio in a work-box carpentered by himself and the work-box faces the windows, he sits, then, from early morning to early evening in this box, where – you could say – everything is within arm’s reach; he puts on his glasses, draws his legs together and lowers himself down; then he takes a piece of hinoki cypress into his lap, he looks at it, turning it around, he prepared it already yesterday, that is to say he cut it to measure, to the desired rectangular size, indeed, he has, using the cardboard stencil, already drawn the chief contours onto it, and it is these now that he is looking at, as well as the two little photographs of the model, placed in the work-box in front of him near his legs, in the photographs a hannya mask can be seen, a mask, with its demonically terrifying features, known as the shiro- hannya mask, used in the Aoi no Ue Noh drama, this is the ideal to be sought, he must, in his own way, be up to that task, the creation of which he plunges into automatically, which for the most part tends to last one and a half or two months, maybe a little shorter for a hannya mask – it always depends on how much work he gets done in a day, and how successfully this work turns out – a month and a half, so, roughly, that much time, here on the tatami placed in his work-box from early morning to early evening, and as for speaking, he doesn’t speak, not even to himself; if he makes any sounds at all, it’s only that he is lifting the piece of wood and quietly blowing off the wood shavings chiselled off the mask, and sometimes when he changes his physical position in the work-box and sighs while doing so, and once again he bends toward the block of wood, for at first it all begins with the Okari wood-merchant located in the one-time Imperial Palace, below Gosho to the south, in the person of Okari-san, who is of about the same stature as he, therefore very short, a good fifteen years older, and fairly gloomy, Okari-san, from whom he has been buying wood for years – he just bought this newer piece – he trusts him, the price is always good, the annual rings are thin and dense, the lines are without defects, namely the hinoki from which the chosen block of wood originates grew slowly; in addition, the wood is delivered from Bishu, in the prefecture of Gifu, from a forest that has the highest reputation, from a forest renowned for the quality of its material – the whole thing is a simple rectangular-shaped block of wood, that is how it all begins, with the circular cutting with the saw on the basis of the stencil to the desired proportions; he does not think, because he doesn’t have to, his hand moves by its own accord, he does not have to control its direction, the saw and the chisels know by themselves what they have to do, so it is no wonder that this first, this very first phase of the work is the fastest, the most free from the later, frequently tormenting anxiety; the saw, the large chisel, the mallet, then the vacuuming up of the wood shavings, just like that, he sits in his work-box, using a small vacuum cleaner adapted to his own needs, so that nothing will remain outside of the work-box, no dirt whatsoever on the sensitive tatami, that is what the work- box, where he is sitting, is for, from where, reaching out, he vacuums, and in which the level of wood shavings is growing ever higher; it is so that in the midst of working he can somehow keep up a little cleanliness, he removes the larger pieces with the saw, then with the large chisel and mallet, but this occurs only in the first few days; later, beginning the third or fourth day, he naturally uses ever smaller chisels, varying in degrees of sharpness, and he no longer strikes the chisel with the hammer, but holds it in his hands, and in this way, holding the block of wood tightly in his left hand, he chisels into the soft material, using tiny, accurate, certain and quick movements with his right hand, but always in such a way that he simultaneously holds up the exact stencil needed – taken from countless others – up to the surface being worked upon; he prepares an enormous quantity of stencils in advance from the so- called original, which is usually lent to him under a tight deadline, that is, for a maximum of two or three days, by the owner – then he takes down, let’s say, the measurements, as he cuts out an enormous quantity of cardboard sheets based upon this original, so that there are specifications accurate within a hair’s width, for the forehead, the eyebrows, the eyes, the nose, the cheeks, the chin, and every other single detail of the face, horizontally and vertically, diagonally, and in relation to all the other parts as well, in a word, from every possible dimension, every important angle of vision, these are the stencils, only the stencils, so that in the first two weeks only the outlines of the stencils – taken and drawn from the original, then cut out from cardboard – assist the chisel in his hand, so that their significance is, accordingly, huge, and that is why if someone were able to look at him from afar, which of course would be impossible, as there is no way this could ever happen, then that someone would see something like a person such as Ito Ryōsuke of the Kanze school, the Noh master mask-maker, who just now is chiselling something, and is already trying out the necessary stencil to see if things are proceeding in the right direction – was this last bit of stencilling correct, how much is still missing for this and precisely this proportion – proportion to the whole! – to be completed, to see consequently how much there is still to be carved away, so that the expression will then faultlessly emerge in the Noh mask, made from the block of hinoki-cypress, the original expression as seen upon a hannya mask on the theatre stages of the Kanze-school in Kyōto or Osaka is what he has in mind; he saws, he chisels, he cleans up, then he just chisels and blows away the shavings of the soft hinoki, and if he is making it for the Kanze ultimately – as for a commission, there usually are none – the matter begins with him seeing a Noh play, and he sees in the Noh – for instance, as in this case – he sees Aoi no Ue, and in that he sees a hannya mask on the main character known as the shite, then he pictures a different mask from the one he saw, and from that, the feeling that he has seen a Noh mask arises, but he doesn’t want one like that, but another one of that sort has just come into his mind, well, then, he wants to carve one himself, but for this naturally he needs a mask that is as close as possible to what he wants, and naturally he needs a hannya mask from his master, the famous Hori Yasuemon, hence he needs one to prepare the stencils from and the other to use as a model; he has hardly begun, here it is already the third or fourth day when the piece of wood he is working on is now drawing toward the imagined end result, he can essentially tell less and less what is going to happen on a given day, in terms of the coarsened view of things, his life is filled with successive imperceptible changes, all the while with every tiny, exact, certain, and quick carving, he gets closer and closer to the mask he has sensed, it’s just that until that point, so very many days and so very many hours, so many early mornings and noontimes and evenings are yet needed, roughly a month and half’s worth of them, perhaps two entire months; he may be uncertain, and with the details burnished together with more difficulty; or – as does occur now and then – he may make a mistake, and have to correct it, it is a loss of time, although he works quickly, as mostly he works by natural light, he chisels, he lifts it up, he blows away the shavings, he tests the stencil, and he chisels again, the silence is great, inside the house it is complete, and from outside only very rarely do sounds filter in, so that it is he in the first place who breaks the silence, and most often, amidst his rapid movements, by putting down now and then the chisel on the floor of the box, or little further away, but still next to him, he puts it outside of the work-box, on the tatami mat; he puts it down, or rather in the vehemence of movement he tosses it down, he lets drop a chisel in order to exchange it for another, or holding it away from himself he looks at the mask from a distance, and at such times it happens that the chisel he has tossed down makes a loud clattering sound as it hits against the others, but usually there is just the sound of breathing, a dull thump, as he sometimes changes his bodily position in the box, and he sighs, there are no other sounds, essentially he works in total silence, from early morning to early evening, that is to say more precisely, first from early morning until noon, as he then takes a short break for so-called lunch-time – this cannot exceed one half-hour, although in contrast to breakfast he sits down at lunchtime, either inside, in the kitchen, or if the weather is good, by the little table set up in the shady garden; he eats for the most part, only vegetables, meat almost never, perhaps fish, but for the most part vegetables and more vegetables, he starts with some kurama vegetables, cut into thin strips and marinated in sour brine, then a miso soup follows, then with his favourite gemma rice, three or four fried avocado halves, fried mushrooms, fried tofu, cooked bamboo, or he makes an udon or a soba, with perhaps yube, that is, tofu-skin, soybean sprouts, or clustered edamame beans, finally there may be a little natto – fermented soy bean – then a little sour plum, namely the umeboshi, which he particularly likes; all the while just mineral water and mineral water, and all of this of course within the space of only one half-hour, because he has to work, he has to go back to the studio, because in the meantime, while he has been eating, he didn’t even really break away from that phase of work or that problem to be solved, from which he only somewhat distanced himself during lunchtime, so that already he is up there, on the second floor, he lowers himself down into the work-box, he picks up and holds the mask he’s preparing at a distance, and he looks, slowly turning it around in his hands, he looks, at last, with a sombre face; he begins again, he takes the chisel, he blows away the shavings, he raises the mask, looking at it, then he takes it and chisels into it again, he holds the stencil up to it, and he chisels and he blows, and he looks, then he chisels into it again, he holds the stencil up to it, and he chisels, and he blows, and he looks, and in the meantime, he doesn’t, as it were, think about anything, particularly not about whether he is now preparing a wonderful hannya mask, or just a satisfactory one, within him there is no desire for the exquisite; if there ever even was, his master taught him in his youth – or rather fulfilling the prophecy of his master, his own experience taught him that if there is within him the desire to create an exquisite mask, then he will unavoidably and unconditionally create the ugliest mask possible, this is always, and is unconditionally always so, hence for a long time now that desire has not been within him, to put it precisely, there is nothing at all within him, the thoughts don’t whirl around, his head is empty as if he had been stunned by something; only his hand knows, the chisel knows why this must happen; his head has become empty, but in a sharp way, however, it is sharp when his hands hold up the mask under preparation, and he looks at it to see if things are proceeding in the right direction, only then is his head clear, but only while he is still looking at the mask under preparation; then he lets it fall back into his lap, and his hand, holding the chisel, sets to the task again, then again his head is not clear, but rather completely and immediately empty; various thoughts extinguishing each other do not twist and turn, whirl and swirl, do not wriggle here and there, only the complete emptiness in his head, there is the complete emptiness in the house, and there isn’t even anything in particular to think about, for there is emptiness in the house, and there is emptiness in the neighbourhood, and if someone were to inquire of him, as the students, taken on for short periods, in every single instance are wont to do, asking for example, how from this piece of hinoki there will emerge a mask – it is free, in his view, from all mystical intervention; that is, after a series of not particularly special sculptural operations, the mask will in his judgment be completed – a Noh mask that will terrify people; in other words what makes something like this spellbinding, what makes it not spellbinding – what are the fine or not-so-fine differentiations that decide this question, particularly, by the comprehending eye, unequivocally and immediately – whether the work here has been successful and the mask is splendid, or just an awkward, a painfully unskilful ignominious disaster, and thus not even worthy of mention; finally, what does the Noh want, what is the Aoi no Ue, by chance, all about, and so on, such questions, in his studio inside his work-box, visibly trouble him, not only because the mere fact of someone asking him any question at all troubles him, but in his completely empty head, there is really nothing with which, even if he were to rely on it, he could, for that matter, reply, he does not occupy himself with such questions as what is the Noh, and what makes a mask “spellbinding,” he merely occupies himself with doing the very best he can within the limits of his abilities, and with the aid of prayers recited secretly in shrines; he only knows movements, methods of work – chiselling, carving, polishing – that is to say the method, the entire practical order of operations, but not the so-called “big questions,” he has absolutely no business with those, no one ever taught him what to do with that, so that this empty head always was and always remains his only response, a head that contains nothing in response to questions that contain nothing, but how can this be stated, there’s no way, especially to the students coming from the West, so that at such times the situation is such that an empty head stands facing the seemingly weighty, unexpected, and – due to their unexpected nature – even too crudely grasping questions, and not only does he not have any answers, but it is also very hard for him to cope with having to break the silence to say something, so that he begins to stammer, in the strict sense of the word he stammers when he speaks, as if he were searching for the English word in the language of his visitors, he would, however find it faultlessly and quickly if he were in the habit of using language, any language; he stammers out something, but it is, as he himself knows full well, not even audible, and he himself sees that it can’t go on like this, the students mutely, a little dumbfounded, prod him on to say something already, something essential, but well, what can he do, nothing essential to reply to the posed question comes to mind, his head is buzzing, he tries to step out of the vortex in which he lives, he tries to understand the glances of the visitors who have questions and who would listen, and it seems that he is hoping that finally he won’t have to say anything at all, but then it appears that well, this hope is in vain, for the gazes – curious and insistent, urging him to say something already, for god’s sake – are fixated upon him; then he pulls himself together, and he says something in reference to the given question, very cautiously and circumspectly, with elegant restraint, and refraining from using big words, he says something, something about the mask, that here is such and such a mask, and in a certain play, it more or less means this and this, but when it comes to what does the Noh want, or what is the essence of the Noh, and so forth – the dreadfully tactless questions – he doesn’t know what to do, he genuinely doesn’t understand, he can’t even understand how someone can even ask such a question, the kinds of questions children ask, if at all, not grown-up people, there is no place for such questions here, in the simple studio of a simple maker of Noh masks, as he calls himself; for that, Ito Ryōsuke says, stammering, we would have to ask the great masters, not him, he just does what he can within the limits of his abilities, but he doesn’t want to hurt their feelings when he sees, on the faces of these Western students admitted to his studio for a brief time, obvious disappointment, he doesn’t want – and not because of them, but rather because of himself – to see this disappointment, it is unpleasant, he still has to say something, so he pulls together with great difficulty a few sentences to answer one of the complicated questions, he musters up something from his memory of what he heard from some great master, and he presents it, haltingly, in his own particular way of speaking, and then the relief in him is far greater when he sees that those around him are satisfied with the response, as this satisfaction can be seen on their faces, so much for that, he leans back again over his work, then looks up occasionally to see if the signs of satisfaction really can be seen on their faces, then he can hardly wait for the visit to come to an end, or for the time that they decided upon to come to a close, but the entire visit has unsettled him so, that when they have finally gone, and he has decided that he will never again, as much as possible, admit anymore Western curiosity-seekers, he is for a long while incapable of returning to his work, he does not sit back down in the work-box, just paces up and down, straightening an object now and then in the studio, then he begins to put things in order, he vacuums up, he arranges the tools around himself as if that were meaningful when he has no need for that now, the proper time for straightening up is at the end of the day; he rises, and he puts everything in order, packing up and cleaning, he is so discomfited after such a meeting that everything in his head churns back and forth, the questions swirl around there in larger and smaller broken fragments: what is the Noh, and what is the meaning of the hannya mask, and how can there be “something sacred” from a simple hinoki tree, but what kinds of questions are these – Ito Ryōsuke shakes his head despairingly – how can this be; and he sighs; when everything has been put back he sits down in his place, takes the piece of hinoki being worked on, holds it at a distance with his left hand and as much as possible, leans back in the work-box, so as yet to see it from the greatest possible distance, he looks at it then lets it fall again into his lap, takes the appropriate chisel in his hand, and he chisels, and he lifts it up, and he blows the wood shavings away, and that night he finishes a little earlier; he packs up again, he puts things in order, he cleans up, so that the next morning the studio will await him as it should every morning; then he goes out of the house, he takes his specially designed bicycle, and sets off before dinner to cycle out of himself all the assembled disturbances of the visit, for that, the bicycle, is his one recreation, and his is a completely particular model, not simply a mountain bike, but a specially designed bike that can do anything, or almost anything, its gears, its ease, its fittings, everything about it is satisfactory – at one point a long time ago, he decided to get one and to begin cycling in the mountains – he turns out from the house, and he is already racing down the steep slope of Shakadani, then within ten minutes he is out by the northern mountains, and now the hardest part begins, the drive to the top, and he gets properly sweaty, he just keeps pressing the pedals going uphill, the perspiration streams down from him by the time he reaches the point he has decided upon that day, but then comes the downward run, and the wondrous, the inexpressible tranquillity of the forest, its refreshing beauty, its inconceivable monumentality, its silence and purity, and the fragrance of the air, and the muscles at rest and the speed, as he only has to glide along going down, glide, gliding back into the city, at such times he would be happy not even to use the brakes; this descent is so good, for it takes him back once again to the emptiness that is within him, and which was disturbed; but it has been restored by the time he gets back and puts the bike in its place against the wall of the house, the peace within him is complete, there is no trace whatsoever in his head of confusion or nervousness; he sits outside in the garden or sets the table inside in the kitchen, and he has dinner, so that early tomorrow morning he can sit again with the hannya mask in his hand, holding it at a distance, leaning backward, and looking at it, then taking it into his lap, with his left hand and with his right, he begins to chisel, now with only completely minute movements, just as delicately as he possibly can, for now even a single cut that is too deep or too long can ruin it; so in part he makes ever smaller cuts, in part he still tries out the stencil frequently – at short intervals – to see how much, how much yet he needs to remove in order to finally reach that phase when it is not merely just the stencil, just the stencil, that is when the use of stencils is not enough; this is the point from which he is no longer able to decide if he should remain in the work-box and look at it in his outstretched hand, when it is already not enough for him to turn the mask around as frequently as is possible, slowly, first to one side, then to the other, once looking at the front, and once in semi-profile – the time has arrived, he determines at such moments – as it occurs now – for him to come out of the work-box, and to look at the mask in the special system of mirrors that he has set up; it is hard to decide when a day like that comes, but it does come; when he is leaving off work on an early evening, he feels that it is close; maybe tomorrow, he thinks, then the next day, early in the morning, taking the mask again into his hands, it is clear that it is not maybe, but now, this is the morning, now he must look at it, or to put it more precisely, the time has come to look at it in the mirrors, which are set up in such a fashion that he sits with the mask in his hand, and he faces the open door of the workshop that looks out onto a narrow hallway, as does the small tilting mirror already set up on the tatami behind him but highly visible from his work-box; and then facing him at the end of the narrow hallway, thus a good ten meters away, is a large mirror covering the wall; then there is roughly in the middle of the hallway, temporarily installed, a little tilting mirror, or rather a mirror that can be adjusted to the desired angle; there is also a little mirror on the hallway’s ceiling, exactly above the little mirror placed in the middle: this is the system, and he, facing the large mirror, accordingly displays with his right hand the mask to the large mirror, picking it up with greater caution than before and lifting it above his right shoulder; he sees first of all in the large mirror what he is displaying, what he has been doing during these long days, and of course he also sees his own face too and above his right shoulder, the mask at this point in the work-process – but he doesn’t look there, of course, but only and exclusively at the mask – slowly, along an invisible central axis – he turns to the right, then suddenly he pulls the mask back, so that, held at a moderate angle, it shows the left profile, as a Shite might do very frequently later on upon the Noh stage, and generally he is not very pleased with these first inspections in the system of mirrors, something is not really right in the face, that is, on his face, his features grow even more sombre, if that is possible; he almost speaks, saying something, but then not even that, only the sombre face remains, and he sits back down in the work-box, and continues carving at a different tempo, this is therefore always an essential development, this first and then second and third reflection in the mirrors, for a fundamental error always emerges only, but only, in this way, which does not mean that the problem will be solved, just that he suddenly sees that he is going in a wrong direction: something there beneath the eyes, as is the case now, has been deepened too much, or not deepened enough, this must be fixed; he takes up a different kind of chisel than the one he was working with before, but then he stops to think, and he exchanges this chisel for a third one, he bends a little bit forward, and in this different, somewhat more feverish tempo, again he begins to work, at times displaying – so as to check his work – the mask in the little tilting mirror facing him on the tatami, above which, as well, as in the double mirror on the hallway’s ceiling, he displays the part to be fixed, he shows it there above his shoulder, but in a curious fashion, as if he weren’t even looking, as if he weren’t even really examining it again, he holds it up and glances into the little mirror, and he lets the mask fall back already into his lap, as if knowing automatically where the problem is, he does not need the little mirror for that, as if he were saying that he doesn’t need any helping devices, he automatically knows that something is not good in the creases under the eyes this time, they are not deep enough, or they are, precisely, too deep, he is perceptibly nervous, only he knows why, that here, in this workshop, one movement can destroy everything, and until he fixes it, it will not be clear if it can be fixed at all; now, however, yes, this time it can be fixed, it is clear as the minutes pass how he takes in air in a more tranquil rhythm, and now really he just casts a glance from time to time, as he holds it up to the little mirror, then he switches to a completely fine chisel, then to sandpaper, and finally he smoothes the detail being worked upon only with his hands, then once again he stands up and sits down facing the large mirror, holding the mask up above his right shoulder, again he turns it slowly a little to the right, then a little to the left, it really is clear that this time he was able to correct the mistake, and how far away the end still is, how many more times shall he make an obvious mistake, the whole thing is as if he were coming down from Nakagawa-cho on the serpentine path, but without braking even once until the end, coming down from the border of Nakagawa- cho, let’s say from the bridge over the brook, all the way to Golfu jō mae – there, where a famous Noh actor lives, if he passes by the Golfu jō mae, which occurs often as this is one of his favourite bike routes into Nakagawa – he often thinks of this Noh-Shite, that he lives here – just that, never anything else – in a word, that route is from Nakagawa to Golfu jō mae, well, and who could believe it, that it would be possible to come down from there, from the bridge over the creek to the city – completely freely, without braking – impossible, he would say, the path is so steep, there are so many turns, and the bicycle would accelerate so much, that in seconds the whole thing would be a labyrinth of speed, and a hairsbreadth wrong movement with the handlebars, for just a split second, and that would be it, the thought itself is unimaginable, this would be the general consensus, and even he wouldn’t take it on, even with the special mountain bike; this example, however, frequently comes to mind and not by accident, for even this workshop with its own speed, is at the very least, such a labyrinth, at the very least such a life- threatening, perilous labyrinth, where in every single movement of every single phase of the work there exists the possibility of error, beginning with the question of whether he picked out the correct tree at Okari-san’s, whether he ascertained correctly the line-structure of the hinoki – for one must know with utter certainty where the individual lines are placed in the tree, because everything, but everything has to be determined on the basis of these lines, as this decides the location of the central axis, and through that, every single line to be drawn from the stencils – but then comes the drawing of the contours, the decision as to where the tip of the nose will be, then the eyebrows, the forehead, the nostrils of the nose, the depth of the chin, and the ear, he cannot err in any single moment with a single stroke of the chisel, and then where is the end to this – here he isn’t even close to the midpoint, when he must deepen the individual contours of the mask, when he can begin carving the surface of the eye socket, the nose, the cheeks, the ears and the mouth, and where is the end to all of this, he isn’t even at the midpoint, because the days just come one after the other, and he has to carve out the completely concave back half of the mask, then bore through the place where the eyeballs will be, he must attend to the formation of the mouth and the teeth, and only then can he say that he has arrived more or less at the midpoint of the work, and then comes the point when he takes a small nylon bag filled with lacquer and soaks the mask, as well as the horns, which have been carved in the meantime; then he has to wait a good long while, then take the whole thing out of the lacquer, and then place it in boiling water, then dry it, fit the horns into the right points on the forehead and fasten them into place, and only then comes the gilding of the eyes, then the overlay of the teeth with copper, the entire process now requires a different kind of sensitivity and aptitude from a person who suddenly must be a goldsmith and coppersmith, he must have at his disposal these sensitivities and these aptitudes, just as when the inner surface of the mask is being scraped clean, then painted, first with lacquer, then after drying, with the famed and dangerous urushi, then the whole thing is placed in a special drying appliance, then it is removed from the drying appliance, for then what follows is the actual painting: that is, the spraying of the mask’s surface with a white pigment of his own mixture, and then there is the restoration of the gilding of the eyes and the copper overlay of the teeth through the process known as reburnishing, then the application of red paint onto the lips; and in general the operation of the painting of the mask is complex and many-sided – he must paint the hannya mask as well, and he must paint the hair, indeed the individual strands of hair must be painted individually – he must be able to form, on the surface of the mask that is painted white, the blemishes of the skin, its gentle pock marks, and only here, at this point can he say that he is able to begin the last phase of the work, that is, he has to sew from silk, and again, just by himself, the protective pouch for the mask: first to cut out the inner casing from thin white silk, then to prepare the proper lining from torn felt, giving the pouch the soft, thick lining; and finally he has to be able to select, and to select correctly, from the gorgeous woven silks of varying patterns, the one that is truly suitable, the one that will be fitting for this mask and this mask only, then to cut that out as well, and sew the whole thing together, and all of this without a single mistake, but this is impossible: I frequently make mistakes, he has acknowledged to his students – who are admitted again and again into his studio for only brief periods, only from time to time – frequently, he says to them, smiling and nodding; he does not in general show his worry, yet it is perceptible that, at such times, he is angry, in vain does he smile, because one cannot make any mistakes at all, he explains, and despite that, he always and frequently makes mistakes, not to mention the one instance that really threatens him with complete nervous collapse, when the entire completed mask is a mistake, if he may explain it like that, namely that when he has been looking at a mask for two or three days with pleasure, when he feels that he can inspect it with satisfaction, because this mask – clearly thanks to chance – has been successfully completed, then suddenly he just senses a chill around his heart, and he is looking at it with a cold and impartial feeling, he immediately sees that it is bad, that he has ruined it, and do you know why, he then raises his eyebrows, and he himself immediately supplies the answer, at this point he never stammers, he looks around at the students, who are there only occasionally: because no one can make a good mask by chance, to make a good mask by chance is impossible, chance has absolutely no role whatsoever in this, all the while you can’t know of course what does have a role; maybe, he lowers his voice, practice and experience have a role, and only these two things, nothing else, because the mask is just a piece of wood, a painted and carved piece of wood, on the surface of which we glimpse a face, and he can even say this now, and he feels this now too, when the day arrives, pronouncing his latest work, known thus by its exact name, shiro-hannya, the demon-head created for the Noh play entitled Aoi no Ue; he sets to sewing the silk pouch and then he sews it, and he looks for a while at the terrifying creature, at the monster with its huge gaping mouth, its bulging eyes, and the horns on its forehead; he looks at it, he examines his latest masterwork, then he carefully puts it into its final place, into the silk pouch, and he doesn’t even suspect yet – the thought never even occurs to him – that in the space of hardly more than a month and a half, what his hands have brought into the world is a demon, and that it will do harm.
[This piece excerpted from Seiobo there Below, forthcoming from New Directions in September 2013.]
László Krasznahorkai was born in 1954, in the town of Gyula in the east of Hungary, close to the Romanian border. Having studied law first then literature in Budapest, he went on to publish a series of novels and other writings. His works include Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, War and War, Animalinside, and Seiobo there Below. His books have been translated into several languages and have received international prizes. The first two of his novels have been made into films by Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr and they have co-operated on a number of films.
Ottilie Mulzet translates from Hungarian and Mongolian. In 2014, she won the Best Translated Book Award for her translation of László Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below. Upcoming translations include Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens by László Krasznahorkai (Seagull, 2016) and The Dispossessed by Szilárd Borbely (HarperCollins, 2016).