Okina Mask

The okina mask, most often carved in the hakushikijo, white old man, or kokushikijo, black old man, forms, is worn in Okina, the oldest surviving piece in the Noh repertoire and one performed as a ritual invocation of peace and abundance rather than as dramatic storytelling in the ordinary sense. Unlike the masks used in narrative Noh plays, which represent specific characters within a plot, the okina mask represents no single dramatic figure at all; the performer is understood to become, briefly, a vessel for an old man deity associated with blessing and long life, and the piece has no plot conflict, no villain and no resolution in the way conventional Noh drama does.

Ortolani's history of Japanese theatre traces Okina back to shamanistic ritual antecedents that predate formalised Noh drama as an art form altogether, arguing that the piece preserves, embedded within a later theatrical tradition, something closer to the older ritual performance out of which Noh itself eventually grew, which is part of why performers and scholars alike have long treated Okina as standing slightly outside the rest of the Noh canon rather than simply as its earliest example. Photography and even casual sketching of the mask itself is treated cautiously by some troupes, another mark of the reverence given to this single piece among the many masks a Noh company otherwise owns and uses freely.

Reflecting this special status, the okina mask is treated with a degree of ceremonial care well beyond that given to an ordinary Noh mask, historically stored separately from the rest of a troupe's mask collection, presented to the performer through its own small rite before the performance, and in some lineages purified with salt or through other rituals of the kind more usually associated with Shinto shrine practice than with a stage prop. The performer who will wear the mask traditionally undergoes a period of ritual abstinence, monoimi, in the days before a performance of Okina, avoiding certain foods and activities in a manner far closer to preparation for a religious rite than to an actor's ordinary rehearsal.

Carved from cypress wood and finished in lacquer and pigment with attached horsehair for the beard and eyebrows, the mask's physical construction follows the same craft traditions as other Noh masks, but its treatment before, during and after the performance marks it out as functioning less as costume than as an object through which the invoked blessing is understood to become present, a distinction Noh practitioners themselves have maintained across many centuries of continuous performance.