Geisha wear makeup so elaborate that it completely masks their ordinary appearance. And of course everyone knows kyogen and noh are performed with masks. But this is not enough to account for the western proclivity to talk about ‘the Japanese mask’. Robert Craigie entitled his memoirs Behind the Japanese mask a British ambassador in Japan, 1937-1942. Roland Barthes devoted a peculiar chapter, The written face, to Japanese masks (faces, that is) in Empire of signs. In A circle round the sun, Peregrine Hodson talks about foreigners developing a different person living within themselves and thinking different thoughts, hidden behind the mask of their face. He later talks about the key concepts in Japanese culture, koto-dama, sabi, wabi, shibui, but as elements in a mask; not revealing, but concealing. Further into the book his original mask idea resurfaces, as it were. Now Hodson feels that his mask is the reality, and that if he were able to remove it there would be nothing behind it, he would ‘lose face’. In possibly the worst book about Japan that I have read, The art of being Japanese, Robert Dunham talks of blank walls and empty rooms behind the vacantly smiling inscrutable faces of simple-minded Japanese people. I only hope he was trying to be funny. The lesson seems to be: don’t try to look behind the mask, there is nothing there. Japan is the mask.
When the Japanese write of masks, there is a subtle difference. In Snow country, Kawabata Yasunari has Shimamura seeing the face of his old lover, Komako, as a mask, floating in the dark of a starry night. But this time the mask is a symbol of a relationship that has died inside and exists in appearance only.
Something tells me that many outsiders have been diverted into a very obvious dead-end cliché.