Seiobo There Below (16 page)

It was horrible to pick his way down from the Acropolis, horrible to admit that this whole Athens trip had, due to such a ridiculous, commonplace, ordinary detail, turned out to be an ignominious failure; he stumbled downward, shielding his eyes with both hands, and he would have been very happy to kick apart the ticket booth, but of course he didn’t kick anything apart, he only wandered, meandered slowly downward on the path in the merciless heat, he reached the traffic of Dionysiou Areopagitou below, and decided that he would head in the other direction around the Acropolis, which he didn’t even feel like looking up at anymore, although now he was recovered enough that his eyes down here could bear the light; he could of course have gone back in the same direction that he had arrived from, but he had no desire to, just as he had no desire for anything else from this point on, he was not interested in the National Museum, he was not interested in the Temple of Zeus, he was not interested in the Theater of Dionysus, and he was not interested in the Agora, because he was no longer interested in Athens, and because of that he was not even interested in those points along the way from which he could have had a view from down here of the Acropolis; I spit on the Acropolis, he rashly said to himself aloud, he said it, but it was only the sadness speaking in him, he knew that himself as well, it was sadness for all that was imperceptible here, for he now interpreted it like this, as at first he sought and found a profound symbolic significance in what had happened to him, and rightly so perhaps, so he could somehow endure it, so he could in some way comprehend the events of the past hours, that is his own farewell, the meaning of which was only now slowly beginning to take shape within him, and he only looked at the sidewalk beneath his feet, and everything hurt, chiefly his eyes were still hurting, but his feet were hurting a great deal as well, he had blisters on his heels from his shoes, at every step he had to try to place his weight on his right, and then his left foot, so that they would slide forward a little in the shoes, so his heels wouldn’t touch them, and his head was still hurting terribly, as he was hungry, and his stomach was also hurting terribly, he hadn’t had a sip of anything for hours, he proceeded in this direction on the narrow sidewalk of the Dionysiou Areopagitou, which seemed longer, indeed unbearably long, and he didn’t and didn’t look up, because
up there
— as he now began to call the Acropolis so that he wouldn’t have to utter the name itself — nothing more remained which, in the course of another attempt, whether tomorrow or tonight, he might see, he knew that it would be futile to return, he would never ever see the reality of the Acropolis, because he came here on the wrong day, because he was born in the wrong time, because he had been born, it was all wrong from the very beginning, he should have known, should have sensed, that today was not the day to begin anything, nor was tomorrow, there were no days before him now, as there had never even been any, just as there was not and never would be a day — as opposed to this one — in which he could have ascended successfully on that upward path of cunningly packed limestone, why had he even embarked upon this — the corners of his mouth were turned down — why was it so urgent, and he berated himself, and hung his head, and, utterly weary, he went on with his bleeding heels in the loathsome shoes along the foot of the Acropolis, and it took a very, very long time until circling it, he went back into a street where he was once before, early that morning, he had turned into it coming here, Stratonos was the name of the little street, then he continued into the Erechtheos, and from there it immediately took him out onto the Apollonos and across to Voulis at the Ermou intersection — and he already saw his companions from that morning on the other side, he hardly wanted to believe what he was seeing, but almost all of them were there, only the one girl, Ela, was missing, he could make out that much from here, from the other side, they noticed him as well, and they were waving at him already, clearly he had the effect on them, when they recognized him, like that of some kind of refreshment in a scorching heat, and it was unspeakably gratifying for him, after so much torture, after so much unnecessary torture up there, to return among them, for as he glimpsed them and his heart began to throb, finally it had somehow been resolved, what it was that made the entire company so attractive, it was, well, precisely the fact that they weren’t doing anything and didn’t want anything, and that they were good, he thought now, rather moved, in his exhausted state, as he looked at them, and waved across to them, so that, well, it seemed so obvious that the only sensible thing to do was to sit down with them, here in Athens, where this company had accepted him from the very first moment: to sit in their midst, to order an ellinikos kafes, and to become lost here, in Athens, what’s the point of wanting anything, so that now, after this dreadful and dreadfully laughable day, nothing seemed quite as ridiculous as when he thought back on how much he had wanted something here this morning, how ridiculous was this entire wanting, when he would have been so much happier staying among them, and drinking yet another ellinikos kafes, and watching the traffic, as the cars, the buses, and the trucks rushed by frenziedly here and there; he felt dead tired, so there was no question of what he was going to do from this point on, he was going to sit down among them, and do nothing, just like them, and eat something and drink something, then there could be another ice-cold ellinikos kafes, and then that sweet, slack, eternal melancholy, and he was going to take off his shoes and he was going to stretch out his legs, and after narrating what had happened to him up there — not sparing self-ironic observations — he himself would take part in the general mirth as to how could someone be such an idiot as to come to Athens in the summer, and then, on the very first day climb up to the Acropolis in the strongest sunshine, be amazed that he saw nothing of the Acropolis, someone like that deserves it, Yorgos was going to say amidst all the laughter, someone like that really demands the title of imbecile, Adonis would add, without a trace of offense, someone like him who on a scorching day goes up to the Acropolis and doesn’t even bring sunglasses — they would laugh at that for a while, he thought, here at the intersection: this adventurer of the Acropolis, and perhaps it would be at this point, namely, that he would say why he had set off without sunglasses, it was because the Acropolis in sunglasses has nothing to do with the Acropolis; they waved to him again to stop dilly-dallying, to come over already, he, however, from a feeling of joy that actually here he was a little bit at home, at home among his new friends, set off without a thought into the dense traffic toward the terrace on the other side, and was immediately, in the blink of an eye, struck down, and crushed to death on the inner lane by a fast-moving truck.

13

HE RISES AT DAWN

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 gray in the neighborhood 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 Kyõto, the expensive neighborhoods 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 cyprus 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 has 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 chiseled 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 of 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 Ryõsuke of the Kanze school, the Noh master mask-maker, who just now is chiseling something, and is already trying out the necessary stencil to see if things are proceeding in the right direction — was this last bit of stenciling 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 theater stages of the Kanze-school in Kyõto 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 word 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 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 somber 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 is 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 neighborhood, 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 unskillful 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 to 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 — chiseling, 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 Ryõsuke 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 Ryõsuke 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 tranquility 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 somber, if that is possible; he almost speaks, saying something, but then not even that, only the somber 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 Gorufu jõ mae — there, where a famous Noh actor lives, if he