The Mask Carver's Son by Alyson Richman

as gray as a ghost, his skin ashen.
    Clutched tight to his side he held in his right hand a shard of wood. Had he been thirty years younger, he would have appeared identical to the image of himself as a young boy after the death of his parents.
    She told me he grasped the wood so firmly that the skin around his knuckles betrayed his bones. The flesh under his eyes had slackened, his cheeks sunken like two valleys. He stood there, a man deflated. That which had existed underneath his skin had been consumed.
    When Grandmother asked him if he would like to hold his child, his first instinct was to decline. His son, his heir, lay in a long basket lined with white cloth, crying for an embrace.
    “He is your son,” she told him, her voice suddenly firm, “and, Ryusei, you have told us that you wish to raise him. How, may I ask, do you intend to rear a child you are incapable of holding?” For the first time in her life she seemed to reveal her anger.
    “I do not wish to betray my son with an embrace,” he replied vacantly.
    “What ever do you mean?”
    “Should I raise him to depend on me, to love me, as I let myself love his mother, when I die he will only feel betrayed. Should I raise him to love nothing but the wood, that which he will know will never leave him.”
    He paused. His body felt heavy and dead around him. He would now live his life and rear me as his master Tamashii had urged him.
    “Your son needs to know that he has a family that cares for him!” she cried.
    He looked at her, his eyes suddenly aflame. “My child needs only to know that he is a son of Noh!”
    With those words, Grandmother fell silent. There were certain boundaries that she knew were forbidden to trespass. This was one.
    “But, Ryusei,” she said, her frustration curling inside her like a snake, “your son has no name.”
    “I’m so tired, I can hardly think of such things.” He brought his long white hand over his brow and sought the support of the banister.
    “I am afraid that you have little time. By law, we must name him by the fourteenth day after his birth.”
    He stood there for several moments.
    “Call him Kiyoki,” he told her finally. “Use the Chinese characters
kiyo
meaning ‘pure’ and
ki
meaning ‘wood.’”
    “Yamamoto Kiyoki?” she asked, trying to disguise her disapproval. In her mind she had always hoped that he would let her choose my name. She would have chosen something stronger and more lyrical like Shotaro, with the characters meaning “shining first,” or Zenkichi, meaning “the very luckiest of names.”
    “Kiyoki is a fine name!” he said. “He should have a name that evokes the strength of wood and the purity of his mother! Those are the two forces from which he was born.”
    Grandmother fell silent again. The son-in-law who had become her adopted son by law was a difficult man to comprehend. There were so many opposing forces enshrined within him. She had seen him fall in love with her daughter right before her very eyes. He had arrived at their house as stiff as a wooden doll, but over the months spanning her daughter’s pregnancy, he appeared to have been transformed. His gaze softened, his touch no longer sounded like the dropping of lumber. She believed he had changed. That love had penetrated a heart that had petrified long ago.
    She had not anticipated that death would propel him back to his original state. She would have never guessed that a young man could grow ancient in a day. But here he was, standing before her. Had she never met him before, she would have mistaken him for a mountain pilgrim, hoary as the snow.
    Undoubtedly, her daughter’s passing had a severe impact on her, too. She held herself personally responsible for her death. Had the gods been so vengeful that they would not overlook her mistake with the hairpins? Had her own criteria for a husband been so strict that she could not have divulged to her husband that she suspected Etsuko had burgeoning affections for