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The Death-Mask of the Ginza
Jan. 17th, 2007 01:21 amThe Ginza is, as any traveller who has passed a few fevered hours in that district of Edo will attest, a velvet-hushed, sinister and somnambulant place, traversed by silent, unresponsive geishas, decayed flapper girls, and yellow-toothed kabuki actors deep in their dotage. The great dim grid of its faded streets is as likely to induce a grim shudder as a quickening thrill; once-fashionable department stores seem to creak, like abandoned ships cresting a dead wave, and all vital business, all mingling has long since moved West.
But nothing can strike so profound a chill into the heart of the susceptible traveller as the hideous white face, floating like an impasto eldritch moon above the Ginza -- there! look! look! behind you! opposite the kabuki theatre! -- of Sonoko Suzuki.
Sonoko, manufacturer and marketer of ladies' toiletries and cosmetics, departed this world in December 2000. Some will tell you that this walking corpse -- an old lady in her 70s when she perished -- wore her own death mask tightly clasped to her face for more than twenty years, so thickly was her visage plastered with her own-brand cosmetics. Impervious to decay, her face now survives her physical death, floating above the headquarters of the company she founded like a skull moon. Just as the moon seems to follow us from street to street, so Sonoko can seem to hover like ectoplasm over the alleys and avenues of Ginza, grinning down perhaps from a reflection opposite, seeking out the inverted, horrified face of the passerby, hovering uninvited upon the shoulder of an intrepid commentator. Brightly illuminated, taut and tight, there it is, that vast grim face, haunted by a perpetual strained, anxious smile -- a smile that threatens every moment to break Sonoko's deathmask clean in two, revealing some mottled, medusan skull beneath.
Her life was not without tragedy or pain: gaining fame through a book which emphatically endorsed a recklessly radical fat-free diet, Sonoko was condemned to watch her own son perish slowly and in great suffering from an eating disorder. "That girl", her name means, but she acquired another title: "Queen of The White Skin". To watch one of her television commercials is to suffocate in a world of a livid, all-smothering skeletal whiteness -- a whiteness white as bones. "White is beautiful," comes the frightful refrain, as electronic wind moans and hateful chords resound. So white are these ghastly images, that we are sunblinded, and see nothing, like legionnaires dying in the desert, seeking -- and failing to find -- one final vision of life before forever expiring and turning, ourselves, to bleached and brittle bones.
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No longer do invocations of the witch Sadako frighten recalcitrant children -- and yet a mere glimpse of this masklike face, a mere whisper of the name of Sonoko will suffice to tame all excesses of vitality, reducing the most noisome child to a pale, juddering urchin. To drive the poor creature to stark, whimpering extremes of unreason, all you need do is let the miscreant glimpse this image (even to attempt a description of its horror would be madness on my part). If the child has passed through puberty, perhaps some combination of lust and dread will cure him of that loathsome slime-handed habit which will inevitably be his solitary resort.
I must confess that, when I wish to frighten my beloved -- my wayward betrothed! -- it is the name of Sonoko that, in a last resort, I invoke -- calling up by means of that spirit medium we call "the internet" images of her stringent, emaciated face, as if already stiff with rigor mortis. The leaden hue, the lustreless eyes -- these abominations swiftly do their work. Informed that Sonoko lives in the cellar below our house, and is merely waiting -- with free cosmetic samples -- for my inamorata's next descent to our dank, dark, spider-infested storage closet, the poor girl is quickly set a-gibbering with terror. These fits will characteristically take hours to subside, only ebbing away in fits and starts, and ending, inevitably, in an affectless, completely dreamless sleep. Please do not call me cruel. No, I am merciful. When she revives, I shall be smoking a briar pipe, the antimacassars will all be smoothed, the candelabra clean and re-lit, and a young fire will flicker in the grate. There will be no more talk of Sonoko, and a calm silence will reign in this house, broken only by the click of my fiancée's knitting needles, the sombre tick-tock of the grandfather clock and something -- something distant, like a horror we do not attempt to name -- scratching below the boards, in that place of ultimate whiteness which awaits us all.
But nothing can strike so profound a chill into the heart of the susceptible traveller as the hideous white face, floating like an impasto eldritch moon above the Ginza -- there! look! look! behind you! opposite the kabuki theatre! -- of Sonoko Suzuki.
Sonoko, manufacturer and marketer of ladies' toiletries and cosmetics, departed this world in December 2000. Some will tell you that this walking corpse -- an old lady in her 70s when she perished -- wore her own death mask tightly clasped to her face for more than twenty years, so thickly was her visage plastered with her own-brand cosmetics. Impervious to decay, her face now survives her physical death, floating above the headquarters of the company she founded like a skull moon. Just as the moon seems to follow us from street to street, so Sonoko can seem to hover like ectoplasm over the alleys and avenues of Ginza, grinning down perhaps from a reflection opposite, seeking out the inverted, horrified face of the passerby, hovering uninvited upon the shoulder of an intrepid commentator. Brightly illuminated, taut and tight, there it is, that vast grim face, haunted by a perpetual strained, anxious smile -- a smile that threatens every moment to break Sonoko's deathmask clean in two, revealing some mottled, medusan skull beneath.
Her life was not without tragedy or pain: gaining fame through a book which emphatically endorsed a recklessly radical fat-free diet, Sonoko was condemned to watch her own son perish slowly and in great suffering from an eating disorder. "That girl", her name means, but she acquired another title: "Queen of The White Skin". To watch one of her television commercials is to suffocate in a world of a livid, all-smothering skeletal whiteness -- a whiteness white as bones. "White is beautiful," comes the frightful refrain, as electronic wind moans and hateful chords resound. So white are these ghastly images, that we are sunblinded, and see nothing, like legionnaires dying in the desert, seeking -- and failing to find -- one final vision of life before forever expiring and turning, ourselves, to bleached and brittle bones.
[Error: unknown template video]
No longer do invocations of the witch Sadako frighten recalcitrant children -- and yet a mere glimpse of this masklike face, a mere whisper of the name of Sonoko will suffice to tame all excesses of vitality, reducing the most noisome child to a pale, juddering urchin. To drive the poor creature to stark, whimpering extremes of unreason, all you need do is let the miscreant glimpse this image (even to attempt a description of its horror would be madness on my part). If the child has passed through puberty, perhaps some combination of lust and dread will cure him of that loathsome slime-handed habit which will inevitably be his solitary resort.
I must confess that, when I wish to frighten my beloved -- my wayward betrothed! -- it is the name of Sonoko that, in a last resort, I invoke -- calling up by means of that spirit medium we call "the internet" images of her stringent, emaciated face, as if already stiff with rigor mortis. The leaden hue, the lustreless eyes -- these abominations swiftly do their work. Informed that Sonoko lives in the cellar below our house, and is merely waiting -- with free cosmetic samples -- for my inamorata's next descent to our dank, dark, spider-infested storage closet, the poor girl is quickly set a-gibbering with terror. These fits will characteristically take hours to subside, only ebbing away in fits and starts, and ending, inevitably, in an affectless, completely dreamless sleep. Please do not call me cruel. No, I am merciful. When she revives, I shall be smoking a briar pipe, the antimacassars will all be smoothed, the candelabra clean and re-lit, and a young fire will flicker in the grate. There will be no more talk of Sonoko, and a calm silence will reign in this house, broken only by the click of my fiancée's knitting needles, the sombre tick-tock of the grandfather clock and something -- something distant, like a horror we do not attempt to name -- scratching below the boards, in that place of ultimate whiteness which awaits us all.