The Face: A Time Code

Ruth Ozeki

• Publisher: Restless Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781632060525
• eBook ISBN: 9781632060150
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

"Ruth Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist priest, sets herself the task of staring at her face in a mirror for three full, uninterrupted hours; her ruminations ripple out from personal and familial memories to wise and honest meditations on families and aging, race and the body." —Minneapolis Star Tribune

What did your face look like before your parents were born? In The Face: A Time Code, bestselling author and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki recounts, in moment-to-moment detail, a profound encounter with memory and the mirror. According to ancient Zen tradition, "your face before your parents were born" is your true face. Who are you? What is your true self? What is your identity before or beyond the dualistic distinctions, like father/mother and good/evil, that define us?

With these questions in mind, Ozeki challenges herself to spend three hours gazing into her own reflection, recording her thoughts, and noticing every possible detail. Those solitary hours open up a lifetime's worth of meditations on race, aging, family, death, the body, self doubt, and, finally, acceptance. In this lyrical short memoir, Ozeki calls on her experience of growing up in the wake of World War II as a half-Japanese, half-Caucasian American; of having a public face as an author; of studying the intricate art of the Japanese Noh mask; of being ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest; and of her own and her parents' aging, to paint a rich and utterly unique portrait of a life as told through a face.

Alternately philosophical, funny, personal, political, and poetic, the short memoirs in The Face series offer unique perspectives from some of our favorite writers. Find out more at www.restlessbooks.com/the-face.

Princess Upside-Down Hair

I still have the two masks I carved in Japan, a ko-omote, the young girl, and a semimaru, a mask that takes its name from one of the most tragic plays in the Noh repertoire. Semimaru depicts a blind young aristocrat, with a pale visage and eyes that are just the merest slits, downcast and unseeing. Oddly, though, Semimaru is not the lead role in the play that takes his name. That part is played by his sister, Princess Sakagami, or Princess Unruly Hair, which is more literally translated as Princess Upside-down Hair. Their story is simple. Blind from birth, Semimaru is a prince, who for some unknown reason has been banished by his father, the Emperor Daigo, to a distant mountain pass. He is accompanied there by a loyal attendant, who shaves his master’s head in priestly tonsure, and then, after much lamenting, abandons the young prince in a grass hut, where he will live alone, with only his lute for company.

Banishment from the capital is a tragic cliché in Japanese narrative, but in this story, Semimaru is a far less tragic figure than the mad Princess Upside-down Hair. She enters the stage wearing not the ko-omote of a young girl in the blush of youth, but the mask of zō-onna, a slightly older woman, whose face has lost its plumpness and whose gaze has turned inward and melancholy. Refined, solemn, and otherworldly, the mask is often used to portray a celestial being or goddess who keeps a certain distance from the human realm. She is my favorite mask, and one that, according to Udaka, “demands a certain nobility of character in the maker.”

Sakagami sings,

Though born a princess, some deed of evil

From my unknown past in former lives

Causes my mind at times to act deranged.

And in my madness I wander distant ways.

My blue-black hair grows skywards;

Though I stroke it, it will not lie flat.13

Village children laugh at her upside-down hair, and she berates them, fending them off and then lapsing into a wonderful philosophical monologue about the inverted and non-dualistic nature of reality, a riff that is pure Zen.

How extraordinary it is that

so much before our eyes is upside down.

Flower seeds buried in the ground rise up

to grace the branches of a thousand trees.

The moon hangs high in the heavens,

but its light sinks to the bottom of countless waters.

My hair, rising upward from my body,

Turns white with the touch of stars and frost:

The natural order or upside down?

How amazing that both should be within me!

[She enters the stage.]

The wind combs even the willows’ hair

But neither can the wind untangle,

Nor my hand separate this hair.

[She takes hold of her hair and looks at it.]

Shall I rip it from my head? Throw it away?

I lift my sleeved hands—what is this?

The hair-tearing dance? How demeaning!

Mad and deranged, she begins to dance the hair-tearing dance as the chorus chants, telling of her many travails and hardships and ending with a description of her arrival at the same mountain pass where her brother has been left. Sakagami hears the sound of a lute coming from a grass hovel, and she recognizes her brother’s elegant style of playing, so out of place in these rude surroundings. She approaches and recognizes Semimaru, and he recognizes her. Joyously they speak each other’s names, profess their love for one another, and weep at the cruel turn of fate that has brought them to this pass. They share memories of the fine life they used to live at court, and then for no apparent reason, Sakagami announces she must go. Their leave-taking is drawn-out and tragic. She turns, hesitates, walks,...

Table of contents

• Prologue: a Koan
• Time Code 00:00:00
• The Experiment
• Time Code 00:10:12
• Optical Orientation
• Time Code 00:17:28
• Original Face
• Time Code 00:34:12
• Jumpers
• Time Code 00:49:02
• Silence
• Time Code 00:55:43
• Zen
• Time Code 00:57:26
• Obsessions
• Time Code 01:00:19
• Masks
• Time Code 01:05:24
• Princess Upside-Down Hair
• Time Code 01:13:57
• Public Face
• Time Code 01:39:03
• Ordination
• Time Code 02:00:07
• Humor
• Time Code 02:25:17
• Deathbed
• Time Code 02:31:11
• Face-to-Face
• Time Code 02:38:41
• Mise En Abyme
• About the Author
• Colophon