(fic) Zoh-onna Omote by Vega
Zoh-onna Omote
By
losyark
Characters: Miko Kusanagi
Pairing: None
Disclaimers: “Stargate Atlantis”, and all affiliated characters and concepts are copyright MGM Studios. This work of fiction is for entertainment purposes only, and no profit is being made. Spoilers up to and including 2x01 "The Seige Part Three"
Rating: PG-13
Author’s Notes: Information on Noh theatre can be found here, and information on female Noh omote can be found here. All the other information is gleaned from my years living in Japan - I tried not to sound too much like a bitter gaijinn.
First in the Nihongo Series.
A big thank you to
pearbean, my late-night emergency Beta.
Edited on July 18th for spelling and gramatical errors.
2007 Stargate Offworld Zine winner for "Best Short Story"
ETA: June 1st, 2008:
***
In Japan, it is not too much to say that everything is about appearances.
It is a habit cultivated over a life-time, and not one easy to break.
***
Miko Kusanagi’s grandfather was a great master of Noh Omote. He was so great that, while he was alive, the Japanese government had named him a Ningen Kohuko, a Living National Treasure. Only the greatest of artisans and actors are so named.
This meant that Miko’s grandfather was the pinnacle, the very height of talented makers of the very rare, very difficult, very expensive masks that the main actor of the Noh Dramas wore. They were carved from a single piece of malleable wood, and took anywhere between weeks and months to perfect. A single flaw rendered the mask fit for nothing more than to feed the fire that kept the workshop warm in winter.
When her grandfather was named a Living National Treasure, there had been a great ceremony. The Prime Minister of Japan - resplendent in his pinstripe pants, black tailcoat, and white gloves - gave Miko’s grandfather a speech, a certificate, a gold medallion, a large cheque, and the deepest bow the man in charge of the country could offer.
Little Miko-chan sat very still in the front row and tried very hard not to fidget, which was difficult due to the newness and therefore scratchiness of her tights, but it wouldn’t do for the grand master’s family to behave inappropriately.
Miko’s grandfather’s greatest skill lay in making the deceptively plain-faced masks used to represent the young women characters. He could carve the wrinkles and canyons on the masks of the old men and women, the fantastic horns of the demons and devils, the nirvana and grace of the divinities, and the wisdom of the sages with equal aplomb; but it was the onna omote - the women’s mask that represented cuteness, calmness, innocence and purity, beauty and kindness - that was his highest art.
Sitting flush on the floor, the simple white face and high, hazy black eyebrows of the small-mouthed mask held no life, no expression. Frozen and blank. But on the head of an actor, the black edges of the mask hidden in the strands of a wig, the masks’ chin just resting below the actor’s bottom lip, the mask was alive.
A head angled up to catch the light of the torches on the underside of the features widened the eyes, made the white paint sparkle with promise and hope. A coquettish tilt and a half-turn to the left and the mask was sly and grinning, eyes sliding teasingly. Pointed downwards, the thin red lips pouted in anger.
It was the mark of a truly talented artisan that a mask could be so expressionless as to encompass all emotions.
Which is why it was a shame that Miko’s grandfather never had any sons.
Miko’s mother was the youngest of four girls. In times past, when people still wore kimono on a daily basis and English was the strange tongue of the pale outsiders and not something to splash across a graphic tee-shirt, Miko’s grandfather would have adopted a yoshi. A young boy from the community, with a good name but poor prospects, probably the youngest, would be severed from his family and bought by a man with no sons. The man would raise the boy as his own heir, give the boy his name, his profession, and his household on the understanding that in return the boy would marry one of the man’s daughters.
Such things, however, went out of fashion with the American Occupation, and so Miko’s aunts had all married smart young suitors with business suits and yes-man jobs. None of these boys wanted to do anything so urbane as to sit in a cold workshop all day carving masks when they could make money, climb ladders, smoke machine-rolled cigarettes with Americans in deafeningly loud bars.
Miko had two cousins who were boys, but grandfather and Aunt Eriko did not speak any longer because grandfather disapproved of Aunt Eriko’s husband, and so she refused to allow her sons to study under their grandfather. The old ways were dying, Aunt Eriko said, and her sons would better fill their bellies as salary-men.
A long time ago, before Miko discovered her love for the stars, for numbers and math, for wormholes and what-may-bes, Miko loved the old ways. Every summer since grandmother died, when Miko was too young to remember her smell, Miko and her mother would go to grandfather’s very old, traditional house in Kyoto for the hottest weeks. The walls were pine and shoji, paper screens, the floor tatami, and the cooking done in a new, plasticky kitchen that grandmother had insisted on adding in the ‘40s. The inori, the in-floor hearth, was then and is now only used as a heat-source in winter. Miko and her mother would wear the cool, loosely-woven cotton yukata, the summer kimono, all day, and open the shoji just in case some brave breeze decided to cut through the sweltering August humidity.
They ate dark fleshy watermelon on the walkway beside the garden. Grandfather could spit his seeds into the pond every time.
At night they would go to hanabi matsuri, firework festivals, or parades, or to the theatre, or just sit in one room together under the old green meshed, red-boarded mosquito netting and tell chilling ghost stories to stave off the heat. Miko would sleep on top of her futon, as far away from her mother as the netting would allow, because it was too hot to touch another body.
Miko would close her eyes, listen to the piercing hum of the cicadas in the garden, and dream about what her life might have been like if she had just been born a boy.
***
In Japan, it is rude to help someone up when they have fallen down in the street. They are embarrassed enough, and you do not embarrass them further by calling attention to them or asking “Are you okay?”
For the same reason, you do not offer your seat on the train to an old woman standing.
Nor do you smile at anyone, because showing your teeth is extremely aggressive. You do not eat in public places, unless it is a restaurant.
Meals are served in gorgeous small dishes, with creative, seasonal garnishes. In shopping centres each purchase is wrapped in gift paper, in bubble wrap, then in a plastic bag, then a paper bag. If it is raining, the paper bag receives a special clear plastic cover.
***
In Japan, appearing to be busy is far more respected in the work place than actually doing work. Salary-men come into work at seven in the morning and leave at seven at night, not because they are earning overtime pay (because they’re not), or because they are swamped, but because it shows loyalty. Extra hours are often spent drinking tea, napping, playing solitaire, having cigarettes with coworkers, or reading the newspaper.
Quantity over quality.
A man died of a sudden heart attack at work once, and nobody realized for three days, thinking he was merely staying very late and arriving very early every day, and napping at his desk in the afternoons.
Every morning, Miko Kusanagi rises at five am (Atlantis Time), and goes to the Alpha Physics Lab. She restocks Doctor McKay’s supply of powerbars, throws away Kavanaugh’s manky damp teabag from the day before, tidies Simpson’s ever growing collection of random wires, and waters Zelenka’s potted plants. She boots up the main computer, checks the database download update, brews two pots of coffee, then fetches a plate of muffins from the commissary, still steaming from the oven.
Zelenka and Simpson prefer something with fruit, Kavanagh isn’t particular, and McKay likes chocolate chip. Back when they had enough rations to make two dozen of the chocolate ones every morning, Miko got a second for herself, a little guilty pleasure. When supplies began to run low, before the Deadalus came to save them, the commissary only made one dozen, so Miko went without.
Miko also used to put one steaming cup of milky tea and a banana walnut muffin on the seat of the Gate Console station on a small black tray.
She doesn’t do it anymore.
***
Japanese people rarely say “I love you.”
That one loves one’s spouse or koibito (lover), is considered obvious, and it is rude to state the obvious. Of course your husband loves you - he married you, didn’t he? And if he doesn’t love you, if he only married you because of family pressure or it was about that time in his life to be getting a wife, or if he fell out of love, well then, it was rude to say that, too. Marriage in Japan is forever, none of that messy Western divorce stuff, and if you find another woman’s perfume clinging to his dress shirts while you do his laundry, then you smile and rejoice that he has found some comfort.
Women show their men that they love them with food. They get up early to cook a full breakfast - rice, natto, grilled fish, miso - and simultaneously make their lunch boxes. They time dinner so that it is waiting and hot for when their husbands get home. Every day, salary-men eagerly look forward to their bento lunch boxes, the most elaborate ones earning teasing congratulations from coworkers for having the most satisfied wives. Almost every bento contains a portion of sticky white rice, and sometimes little hearts will be picked out in pink food dye, or words spelled in dried seaweed nori.
Every morning Miko used to fold the napkin beside the banana walnut muffin into an origami panda bear, or a turtle, or a crane. If you fold a thousand paper cranes, your wish will come true.
Miko never made it to a thousand.
***
The thick face-paint of the geisha - the traditional Japanese entertainers - is purposefully expressionless.
A geisha’s job is to make certain that their male customers are having a good time. They pour tea and sake, instigate drinking games, tell ribald jokes, dance, play the three-stringed shamisen, sing, talk politics, listen sympathetically, and look resplendent. Their job is to do everything the ideal Japanese woman would do, but wives cannot because they must have babies, clean house, cook meals.
Geishas are the unattainable fantasy woman, not prostitutes as Western cinema would have the world believe. They are not touched by their male customers unless they specifically desire it, or a customer chooses to become a danna, a man who pays for the geisha’s apartments and extremely elaborate and expensive wardrobe in return for the odd sexual favour and her full attention when he is paying for her services at the tea house.
The famous hostesses of the racy snack-bars are the modern equivalent, dressed in cocktail gowns and curled hair, laughing at salary-men’s jokes, but their morals are looser - the modern world is grittier and pockets empty quickly.
The geishas wore face paint that resembled the onna omote mask. White, black, flat and featureless, with a pouting, cupids bow red mouth. It was a visage that held no emotion, and the geisha kept their faces statuary-still, so the men could interpret as they liked, could mould the expressionless-expression to match their fantasy and wishes, and paid through the nose for the privilege.
When she was a girl, Miko used to dress up in her grandmother’s best kimono and practice the onna omote face. She had staring contests with the masks on her grandfather’s shelves.
She has put that practice to good use on Atlantis, putting on the onna omote face when McKay yells, when she is supposed to be paying attention at boring meetings, when Parrish babbled about those new spores again, when they make that grey-purple meatloaf in the commissary, when Kavanaugh vents, when the puddlejumper came back from the space platform mission one expedition member short.
***
Japanese fashion ranges from the wild, over-stimulated colours of Shibuya and the neon strips of the cities to the stately black formal kimono of the married women. In between are the Loli-Goths of Harajuku, the surfers, the Brit Punks, the cosplayers, the school uniforms, an ocean of business suits and pointy dress shoes for either gender, Converses and cowboy boots, leg warmers, leggings, bow clips in the hair, traditional or funkified kimono, and the classic garments for temple-workers, cultural activity participators, and special occasions.
For her one personal item, Miko brought the thirty thousand yen formal kimono that her parents had bought for her twentieth birthday.
For Coming of Age Day, the second Monday of January, every person in town who will turn twenty that year dons the most elaborate version of the kimono, and attends a ceremony at city hall to commemorate their entry into adulthood. Now the young men and women can vote, drive, buy alcohol and cigarettes, and get jobs.
The long sleeves of the girls’ kimono indicate that they are unmarried. The sleeves are very colourful and light, so they dance in the wind and catch the eyes of the young men. The obi belt is wide and embroidered and tied to resemble a butterfly or a flower, in a knot so elaborate that only professional kimono-tiers know how to make all of them, rather than simply the plain and serviceable drum-knot of the married woman.
Miko wore the kimono at the memorial service held after the siege of Atlantis, tied the obi as best she could alone, and hoped that the mainland breeze caught her sleeves and made them dance for the people who were only there in memory.
She hoped that he had been watching.
***
Christmas is a holiday meant to be spent with friends or lovers, a glitzy veneer of the deeper Western religious holiday. If you are single, you go out and have a party with friends. If you have a koibito, then you make reservations at a swank restaurant. If you have a family, then you order a Christmas cake from the local bakery, a gorgeous, colourful confection made especially on the twenty fourth of December.
On the twenty fifth, the left over Christmas cakes are sold half price because they are stale, past their prime, worthless.
Women who are not married by age twenty five are called “Christmas Cakes.”
Miko was twenty eight years old when Elizabeth Weir offered her a spot on the Atlantis Expedition. She loved science more than marriage, stars more than housework. She feels she made the right choice, even when she’s lonely at night, because she has Atlantis and her secrets during the day. That’s enough for now, though once she used to have more.
Miko is the only woman from Japan on the Expedition, and she pretends she doesn’t hear it when Takahashi-san and Kurasuwatsu-san whisper “Kanojo wa Kurisumasu kehki desu yo,” every time she walks into the commissary. It stung before but does so more sharply now that they are into their second year in the City. Even two years is not enough time to remove life-long habits. Miko remains the only Japanese woman in Atlantis, even though the Daedalus brings more people with each trip.
She doesn’t mind. She has girl`s poker night.
None of the Japanese men would want her anyway, because she is a Christmas Cake and clearly too headstrong, too educated to make a good wife, and she doesn’t mind because the only man who she could have seen herself marrying isn’t available anymore.
***
Every night, Miko Kusanagi leaves the labs last.
She wakes up Doctor McKay and sends him off to his bed, empties the damp coffee grounds, shuts off the main computers, gathers the paperwork scattered all over the desks, the chairs, the whiteboards and window sills and floors, and puts them in neat piles on counters or into their proper places in folders on the shelves.
She thinks off the lights, asks Atlantis politely, in keigo - the language used for one’s superiors - to shut the windows and thanks Atlantis and wishes her sweet dreams when the city complies.
Then Miko walks back to her quarters through night-cooled hallways, nods to the Marine stationed by the transporter on sentinel duty, and has a nice hot, relaxing bath. She puts on her pyjamas, has a cup of tea, and lights the thick candle that burns through the night so that the ghosts of her grandfather, her grandmother, her father, and those roaming the Pegasus Galaxy can find her, stay with her in her dreams.
Then Miko goes to sleep.
(end)
To Part Two: Tadaima