This girl is weird. She doesn’t blacken her teeth, doesn’t pluck out her eyebrows, prefers caterpillars to butterflies, makes pets of insects others shudder to see. Her parents don’t know what to make of her. Let them stew in their bewilderment. She goes blithely on her way, sowing confusion and reaping her own kind of happiness, known and knowable only to the weird.
“The Lady Who Loved Insects” is a 12th-century fiction fragment, author unknown. It breaks off in the middle. A second chapter is promised but, if ever written, does not survive. What became of her? Did the young man who was drawn to her in spite of (because of?) her eccentricities follow up his initial advances? As his wife or alone, did she live happily ever after?
The Heian Period (794-1185) ranks among the most elegant civilizations the world has ever known. It carried refinement to extremes that are apt to strike us as outlandish: every day a stately dance through intricately prescribed motions, every occasion a ceremony, every passion ritualized, every feeling stylized, beauty the highest and indeed only ideal, to which everything — happiness, truth, moral goodness, comfort, wealth, power — is sacrificed, in theory if not always in practice, in appearance if not always in reality.
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. One beholder’s beauty is another’s disfigurement. A custom common to many east Asian cultures down the centuries is known in Japan as o-haguro (teeth-blackening). Japanese grave statues from the third to fifth centuries show traces of it. For Heian aristocrats of both genders it was de rigueur. In the Edo Period (1603-1867) it marked the married woman and the geisha. The West-obsessed Meiji Period (1868-1912) more or less brought an end to it, government fiat confirming a shift in popular taste.
Think of it as dental nail polish — a compound of powdered iron, sake and tannin from sumac-leaf gall, applied with a soft feather brush, the beauty achieved likened by admirers to that of black lacquer.
The “lady who loved insects” (the only name we know her by) would have none of it. “She hated anything that was not natural.” The young man who, somewhat ambivalently, admired her, found, when observing her secretly from a distance, that “when she smiled her white teeth gleamed and flashed in a manner that rather disgusted him, for there was something wild and barbaric about it.”
In the same custom-defying vein, she refused to pluck out her eyebrows. “Her thick, very dark eyebrows gave her face a rather forbidding air,” thought the young man, intrigued and repelled at the same time.
She was a scientist before science’s time, a proto-entomologist. The daughter of a minor provincial official, she turned her room at home into a kind of research center, employing as assistants boys of the neighborhood who answered readily to the insect names she gave them: Centipede, Locust and so on. Delighted to do her bidding, they captured for her all kinds of bugs and reptiles, bringing them to her in little box-cages. “I want to inquire into everything that exists,” she said, “and find out how it began.”
“So morning, noon and night she tended her insects, bending over them with a strange, white gleaming smile.” It is very silly of people to dislike caterpillars, she said; are caterpillars not merely a stage in the growth of the lovely and admired butterflies? Of a snake she said, “Do not be frightened! Remember that any one of you may have been a snake in his former existence.”
The thousand years that separate her from us have not dimmed her freshness. Neither prickly nor yielding, she embodies in her person the lonely struggle to be oneself. Every age sounds its variations on the theme — sometimes condemning, sometimes admiring. The monk Yoshida no Kenko (1283-1350), in his miscellany “Tsurezuregusa” (“Grasses of Idleness”), offers the following sketch without comment: “The daughter of a certain lay priest ... was reputed to be very beautiful, and many suitors asked for her hand, but this girl ate nothing but chestnuts, and refused to touch rice or other grains. Her father therefore declined the men’s proposals, saying, ‘Such a peculiar person is not fit to be married.’”
Monks and artists are society’s zestiest cranks, misfits, free spirits. Convention has no hold on them. The straitlaced Kenko seems an exception; the Zen monk Ryokan (1758-1831), happy beggar, inspired poet, gangling playmate of little children and writer of odes to the lice in his chest hair, seems more typically unique — his manner of living justifies the oxymoron. Older contemporaries of Ryokan’s were the husband-and-wife artists Ike no Taiga (1723-76) and Tokuyama Gyokuran (1727-84). Acknowledged artistic geniuses both, they seem to have been as famous in their own day for eccentricity as for painting, he so contemptuous of wealth and the wealthy that, wallowing in poverty, he welcomed wealthy clients with a urinal bucket at his front gate; she, ahead of her time in ways suggestive of ours, not only pursued her individual (and highly successful) artistic career but used her maiden name after marriage, disdained cosmetics, housework and cleanliness generally — and didn’t blacken her teeth.
Speaking of teeth — white teeth — our tale here takes a surprising turn, to a member of a class hardly known for flashing teeth. A samurai, it was said, smiled three times and three times only in the course of his life: when he was born, when he married and when he had his first son. The smile at birth is odd — do newborns smile? In any case, the samurai were a stern and dour breed — the more reason for astonishment upon viewing a portrait painted in 1837 by the samurai-artist Watanabe Kazan (1793-1841) of a samurai grinning broadly enough to light up a room.
Perhaps he’d just had a son. Even so, it seems a most unsamurai-like flaunting of high spirits. “Lighten up, Japan!” he seems to be saying. We’ll never know his mind and heart. His identity is unknown. There is said to be no portrait like it in Japanese art.
A thousand years ago, a young lady loved insects and was branded weird. Many down the ages owe her much — the unsung mother of eccentricity Japanese-style. Among her heirs today are those styled otaku, many of whom love not insects but manga and anime characters — love them literally, with all their hearts, in some cases wanting to marry them.
Otaku author Toru Honda in 2005 proclaimed a “love revolution.” In “Denpa Otoko” (“Radiowave Man”) he wrote, “For people who have grown up with the ‘common sense’ that love equals the 3D world, it may be impossible to convey the point I’d like to make” — that “2D love,” virtual love, is no less, possibly more, fulfilling. Our insect lady might have raised her hairy eyebrows, flashed her gleaming teeth and thought, “To each his own!”
Michael Hoffman’s latest book is “Cipangu, Golden Cipangu: Essays in Japanese History.”
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