BY THE LIGHT OF THE LANTERNS
My vermilion girl’s hair is brilliant black with blue lights, and shining where it is stiffened and gummed in loops and bands till they seem to reflect the gold lacquer and coral-tipped pins that bristle round her head. Yes, she is like some wonderful fantastical tropical blossom, that vermilion geisha-girl, or like some hitherto unknown and gorgeous dragon-fly. And she is charming; so sweetly, simply, candidly alluring. Every movement and gesture, each rippling laugh, each fan-flutter, each wave of her rice-powdered arms from out of their wing-like sleeves, is a joyous and naïve appeal for admiration and sympathy. How impossible to withhold either! The geisha-girl is an artist: I am an artist: we understand each other.
My geisha-girl brings out her dainty lacquer-box, and under the gaze of all sits down to decorate herself with a frank joy in the pleasure she knows she is going to give. And she knows too what she is about. She knows the value of a tone in a lip. Something suggests to her that you, an artist, may have found the vermilion lip not quite in harmony with the plan, and she changes it to bronze. Three times this evening does my geisha-girl change her lip; she frankly takes it off with a little bit of rice-paper, which she rolls up and tucks into the folds of her kimono, to be thrown away later, and the bronze lip is substituted. By and by it seems to occur to her that the bronze lip has become monotonous, and she will change it again to vermilion. No doubt before the evening is over there will be a series of little bits of rice-paper folded away ready to be got rid of when the bill is paid, the supper eaten, and the festival at an end.
It is through the geisha-girls that there is still a living art in Japan at the present day in the designs of the silk dresses that they wear. They are so modern, so up-to-date, and yet so characteristic of Japan. The women are very extravagant in their dress, and some of the leading geisha-girls will often go to the length of having stencils, with elaborate designs and an immense amount of hand-work, specially cut for them, the stencils and designs being destroyed when sufficient material for one dress has been supplied. For such a unique and costly gown the geisha will of course have to pay a fabulous sum, and a sum that would astound the average English woman of fashion. But then when a geisha orders a costume she thinks it out carefully; she does not go, as we do, to a dressmaker, but to an artist. It may be that she has a fancy for apple-blossom at sunset, and this idea she talks out with the artist who is to draw the designs.
A STREET SCENE, KIOTO
A Japanese woman chooses her costumes, not according to fashion but to some sentiment or other—apple-blossom because it is spring-time, peach-blossom for a later season,—and many beautiful ideas are thus expressed in the gowns of the women of Japan. But although the geisha has plenty of latitude in which to display her artistic feeling, there are some little details of etiquette and fashion that she must adhere to, which show themselves in a few details of the Japanese women’s attire, as, for example, in the thongs of her little wooden shoes and the decoration of her jet-black hair. Not only is the kimono of the geisha, its colour and design, thought out by the artist, but all the accessories of her toilette, such as the obi, the fan, and the ornaments for her hair. It is the artist’s ambition that she should be a picture, perfect in every detail, and the geisha is always a picture, beautiful beyond description.
How different she is from the geisha of fiction, of operettas, and of story-books, which is the only geisha that the stay-at-home Englishman can know! That she is beautiful to look at all the world agrees; but quite apart from her beauty, or the social position that she happens to occupy in Japan, take her as a woman, a real woman, stripped of all outward appearances and of her own particular nationality—take her as a woman, and she will be found as dainty in mind as in appearance, highly educated, and with a great sense of honour, while her moral code would compare favourably with others of her sex all the world over.