The Secret Keepers of Kyoto

I took a deep breath. The world felt small again. I knew that Kyoto lay somewhere beyond the hills, that shrines and hot springs dotted the mountainous countryside like a string of beads blessing the city, but from the window of the teahouse, none of that mattered. It opened onto its own world: a stone lantern on the left balanced by the twisting branches of a maple tree on the right, and in the distance, the wooded hills that demarcated the edge of this miniature world. Somewhere nearby, out of sight, a brook murmured, and inside the teahouse I heard only hushed voices and the shuffle of slippered feet. 

I had been feeling a strange sort of excitement when I first arrived, the sense that I was privy to something I wasn’t supposed to see, feeling like I was taking up too much space as I knelt in a corner, but in the span of a few breaths, that admixture of curiosity and anxiety had ebbed away, and I took comfort in the balance in the geometry of the space and the rhythm of the garden outside. 

Geometry, space, and balance were on my mind, for it was my work had brought me to Japan. I had come to study its jewelry traditions, which were so different from the purely decorative arts found throughout the rest of Asia and Europe. Everything here had a purpose beyond ornamentation: hair pins and rings, combs, mirrors, cases meant for holding small objects and the decorated straps that fastened them to belts.  

I was here in search of netsuke—those little sculptures of metal, horn, or wood that served a variety of functions in traditional Japanese dress—but it was silk that had captured my imagination. While browsing one of the many used kimono shops that lined the shopping streets of Kyoto, places where you were just as likely to hear German or Korean or Australian-accented English as you were Japanese, I struck up a conversation with the owner of a shop in whatever bits of English, French, and Japanese we could conjure up to make ourselves comprehensible to each other, our translation apps filling in the gaps.  

Though I found myself at this teahouse, far from Kyoto’s historic tourist attractions, at the invitation of that shop owner, I still felt like I didn’t belong. That changed when a young woman in wide-legged jeans and a flowing top appeared before me and gestured for me to follow. She looked like any of the other fashionable young women I would have seen walking in groups on the streets and in the shops of Kyoto; she looked just as out of place and out of time as I did.  

She led me to a room where a woman who seemed to be about my age sat in a hairdresser’s chair, studying the lines of her face in the mirror. Without exchanging a word, the young woman ran her fingers through the other woman’s hair, letting it flow through her fingers as though she were testing the temperature of her bathwater. 

It is strange now to describe the experience that followed. More than the dinner or the tea or the dance accompanied by shamisen they performed that night, I remember the transformation I witnessed, like a whispered secret, as I was ushered from one room to the next.  

It began with the woman’s hair: thrown about, tempestuous, tossed about as the wind would. Brushed and separated, twisted, whipped to the side, over the face. Lashed in bows and string. Quickly the younger woman worked, at the pace of an expert, never rushed but fluid, adept. I saw only a confusion of black lines and curves in motion, but soon, the familiar shape of the geisha’s hairstyle, the nihongami, emerged: fringe, wings, top knot, the ornamentation, the particulars of the style itself a language I did not understand but could feel on some level.  

Then, the makeup: With a mirror in one hand, the woman dragged a wide paintbrush across her neck and shoulders, painting in broad strokes from the hairline to the shoulder blade. The throat and chin. The cheeks and forehead. The nose. A calligraphy of the body, just as intentional and practiced, her skin the page on which a new character would be written. Not a covering-up but the emergence of an archetypal self.  

And in another room, another woman, the one they called onē-san (“older sister”), knelt as though in prayer, folded rectangles of fabric arranged on the floor all around her like holy relics. The dressing proceeded with the same deftness of touch as the hair and makeup, all the more impressive for the strength required to lift and wrap the geisha in her long, heavy obi, the kimono’s wide belt.  

The geisha—for now I could think of the woman as one—spread her arms wide and accepted the silken embrace of layers of white fabric, before being cocooned in the kimono. Like the hair and makeup, the kimono spoke its own language, gray silk sparsely decorated with a simple motif of falling leaves suggesting the age and experience of the wearer. 

Wrinkles were smoothed, hems were draped and positioned with precision. This itself was a dance, a ritual performance, the geisha holding her arms up or out, placing a finger against this piece of fabric or that, as onē-san twirled about the woman she dressed. And the final piece: the long obi, deep red and shining like wine, wrapped, smoothed, tightened here, loosened there, wrapped again, adjusted, unfurled, and finally, tied in a bow, its shape telling a story, like the hair, like the makeup and the color and size of the kimono, a story I had not yet learned to read. 

What I had witnessed was a transformation into an archetype, the embodiment of an ideal, at once the aggregate of every woman and something that stands apart from the rest of humanity. She inhabits a spirit for a while, and when it is over, we all keep a piece of it with us. This is the power of ritual, the life that inhabits our most precious works of art, whether a silk kimono or your favorite necklace. This is the secret that was revealed to me.