Having tackled such topics as prostitution, the nature of violence, and the Imperial Valley, author William Vollmann‘s certainly navigated a few of the world’s darker corners.  His just-released work of non-fiction, Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement, and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, seems like it’s going to strike that typical Vollmann balance between the bleak and the beautiful.

Here’s how Vice describes it:

As its title suggests, it is a sociological exploration of the strange, veiled world of Noh and its practitioners.  The book is filled with transvestites, geishas, sex fiends of the red-light Kabukichō district, and many other interesting characters both elegant and perverted.  It also marks the first time that we have read the word “neovagina.”

Vice is also carrying an excerpt from the book’s Chapter 16, “They Just Want To Look In The Mirror.”  In it, Vollmann recounts his session with a makeup artist (see above photos) whose clientele includes a large number of cross-dressing Japanese businessmen:

Only about 10 percent of her customers dare to go out.  They often wear femme-executive or businesswoman outfits when they come to her; a few play with lingerie, but never here; some keep secret apartments furnished with their woman things, so that their families will never know.  They tend to order clothes on the internet, a circumstance which requires them to buy repeatedly before discovering a garment which actually fits; but anonymity remains infinitely more important to them than cost or convenience.

“Why do they do it?”

“Stress,” she replies. “And they have the pleasure of hiding something secret.”