Hannya

Halfway through the play, the woman comes back. She went off the stage in her own face, pale and composed, the face of a lady of rank. What returns down the bridgeway to the drumbeat is the same woman with horns. The eyes flash with metal when the lamps catch them. The mouth is open to the hinge and there is gold in it, and fangs top and bottom, and above all that, untouched, the neat parted hair of someone who was beautiful an hour ago.

That face is the hannya, and it is one of the best known objects in Japanese theatre. It is a Noh mask, carved for the second act of a handful of plays, and it shows a woman whose jealousy and hatred have finished making her into a demon. The Japanese art dictionary JAANUS calls her a female serpent-demon. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which holds a fine Edo-period example, describes her in nearly the same terms. She is not a creature that wandered in from the mountains. She was a person, and the mask is built to keep reminding the audience of it.

Noh itself took its classical form in the fourteenth century under the actor Kan’ami and his son Zeami, and masks were part of it from the start. The hannya came a little later. Nobody is quite sure where its name comes from. The account most museums prefer credits a mask carver called Hannya-bo, said to have worked in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, who perfected the type and lent it his name. A second account takes the name from the play Aoi no Ue, where a demon recoils at the sound of a voice chanting the Heart Sutra, the scripture of hannya, the Buddhist perfection of wisdom. A third suggests the name honours the wisdom a carver needs to make one. A face of pure rage named after wisdom is either a coincidence or a very old joke, and the record does not say which.

The craft is precise. The London mask, made somewhere between 1650 and 1750, was carved from a single block of hinoki, Japanese cypress, then coated thick with gofun, a white paste of ground shell, as the ground for the paint. The horns are separate pieces, pushed into sockets in the upper forehead, and their ends can be seen from inside. Veins stand out on the brow. The ears jut and the chin juts, marks of how far she has travelled from the human. The eyes sit deep, lined with plates of gilded metal, and the teeth are gilded too, touched with black ink. Inside, the wood is bare and stained dark, still carrying the fine chisel marks, and the holes for the cord are worn smooth where the cords rubbed the paint away over generations of performances. With its horns, the whole thing stands about twenty-three centimetres tall.

The colour of the face is information. A pale hannya belongs to an aristocrat, a woman of the court. A red one belongs to a woman of lower birth. The darkest red is kept for true demons who only wore a woman’s shape to get close, the kind that appear in Kurozuka and Momijigari. The hannya also sits on a ladder of masks that track a woman’s fall. Below it stands the namanari, a woman only partway changed, with short stubby horns. Above it are the jya and shinja, the serpent faces, in which she has gone further still. The hannya marks the middle of that road, fully demon but still a woman underneath.

Lady Rokujo wears the white one. Aoi no Ue is drawn from The Tale of Genji, and its subject is Genji’s wife Aoi, lying sick. Aoi never appears. A folded robe laid at the front of the stage stands for her and her sickbed, which is one of the boldest pieces of staging in Noh: the whole play is fought over a piece of cloth. A diviner plucks her bowstring and summons the spirit that is tormenting Aoi, and it proves to be the living spirit of Rokujo, an older lover of Genji’s who has been humiliated and cast aside. In the second act, when a holy man from Yokawa is called to drive her out, she returns in the hannya mask. The struggle is between prayer and fury. The sutra reaches her, and she is calmed.

Dojoji is darker. The play, by Kanze Kojiro Nobumitsu, rests on an old tale of a young woman from Manago who believed a travelling mountain ascetic had betrayed her. Her resentment turned her into a snake, and she chased him to the temple of Dojo-ji in Kii Province. He hid under the great bell. She coiled round it and burned him inside with her breath. Years later the temple has recast its bell and women are barred from the dedication, but a dancer talks her way in. She dances toward the bell to a strange rhythm, pulls it down and vanishes beneath it. The priests learn the temple’s history, understand who she is, and pray until the bell lifts. Out comes the serpent in full, horned and fanged, and in many performances that face is the hannya. After a fierce struggle she sets herself alight and is gone into the deep water of the Hidaka River.

There is a trick in the carving that actors use. Held level, the hannya is all rage. Tipped slightly down, so the light falls differently across the brows and mouth, the same face seems to weep. In one motion of the head the demon and the grieving woman trade places, and a skilled actor can move between them in a single phrase of the chant.

What the hannya can do is entirely a matter of the stage, and it is considerable. It lets an audience see an inner state that nobody could otherwise see, and it grades that state so precisely that a glance at the colour of the skin says what kind of woman this was and how much of her is left. It turns a living person’s grudge into a thing with horns that monks can stand and fight. Its limits are written into every play that uses it. The hannya is never the victor. Prayer and scripture press it back, a bell can be lifted on it, a river can take it. And the mask cannot speak for itself. It needs a story and an actor, and without them it is a carved piece of cypress with a worn cord and a very bad temper.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a hannya mask?

A hannya is a Japanese Noh theatre mask that shows a woman who has been turned into a demon by jealousy and hatred. It has two horns at the temples, gilded metal eyes, and a wide mouth with gold teeth and fangs. It is worn by the lead actor in the second half of plays such as Aoi no Ue and Dojoji.

What does the colour of a hannya mask mean?

The colour of a hannya mask shows the social rank of the woman it portrays. A pale or white hannya represents an aristocratic woman, such as Lady Rokujo in Aoi no Ue. A red one represents a woman of lower rank, and the darkest red is used for true demons who disguised themselves as women, as in Kurozuka and Momijigari.

Where does the name hannya come from?

The origin of the name hannya is uncertain. The most widely accepted account credits a mask carver called Hannya-bo, active in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. Another links it to a line in the play Aoi no Ue about the chanting of the Heart Sutra, since hannya is the Japanese reading of the Buddhist word for wisdom.

Which Noh plays use the hannya mask?

The hannya mask is worn in the second act of Aoi no Ue, Dojoji, Kurozuka and Momijigari. In Aoi no Ue and Dojoji the character is a woman betrayed or rejected by a lover. In Kurozuka and Momijigari she is a demon who first appears in human form to lure people in.

Why does the hannya mask look sad from some angles?

The hannya mask is carved so that its expression changes with the angle of the actor’s head. Held level, it looks furious. Tilted slightly downward, the same face appears to be weeping, which lets the actor show both the demon and the grieving woman inside it.

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