In the summer two or three years ago, I was walking through the bustle of Ginza when I spotted two beautiful women walking ahead of me. They were not, by any means, conventionally attractive. Their figures clashed more than any I’ve seen together. One, who I shall call the heron, was long-necked and willowy, while the other had a physique that requires a bit of unpacking to truly appreciate. In China, the ideal female body has been depicted as tall and lithe since ancient times, epitomized most famously by Han Empress Zhao Feiyan. Her shape is traditionally compared with that of the august Yang Guifei, the plump concubine of Emperor Xuanzong. The heron’s companion, who was fleshy without being rotund, fell into this latter class. Her size did nothing to detract from her perfectly proportioned frame, which was guided along with the roll of her hips as she walked, somewhat like a mandarin duck’s swaying steps.
The women were dressed in the same way, with stylish sashes of silk ribboning the waists of their kimonos. Those kimonos were striped and printed with tiny red fawns. When I saw that even their parasols were the same (folded up and stored in the sleeves that were in style at the time, but which are now collecting dust), I suspected that they were sisters. As I followed them closely, poring over every aspect of their bodies, gestures, and clothes, as if they were models before an artist, I thought of a certain quip (perhaps a truism) that has haunted the pages of women’s magazines for the better part of thirty years–
All bodies are beautiful.
With this truism in the front of my mind, I passed in front of the women to get a look at their faces, seeing that their hair was arranged in wide braids, and that they matched each other even there. Seeing their faces up close, I felt almost certain that they were sisters, both about twenty years old. Judging them thus fleetingly and without much consideration, I thought that the beauty of the mandarin duck was inferior to that of the heron, but only by the slightest degree. And then I forgot about them, and continued on my walk.
As I said before, all this happened on a bustling street in the heart of Ginza on a scorching summer day. That those two beauties slipped my mind with such rapidity was not because I lack the aesthetic sense of an artist, but rather because I was distracted by the blinding summer heat. I dabbed sweat from my brow with a handkerchief and used my hat as a fan.
Not more than ten minutes later, I was in my seat on the train about to depart Ginza when the pair suddenly scurried onto the train just as the doors closed. Although the carriage wasn’t crowded there was only one free seat, which happened to be the one to my right. The heron, with all the pompous presumption of an older sister, plopped down onto the seat as the mandarin duck stood nearby, timidly gripping the strap overhead. I opened my book and set out to slog through a biography of Mahatma Gandhi. Sadly, I couldn't focus enough past the sweltering heat to absorb even a single page of this book, which was rapidly becoming my nemesis. When the train started moving, the mandarin duck briefly lost her footing. I stood and offered my seat as a gentleman should.
Before either sister could thank me, I dashed off into the neighboring carriage.
The fact that someone like me, who is uncommonly selfish and egotistical, would commit this seeming act of chivalry was in no way strange. Mere moments before, I had looked up at the mandarin duck as she'd stumbled and seen bushy black hair pushing out of her nostrils. The heron, too, was grimy and unwashed on closer inspection: her hair smelled like it hadn't been washed in weeks. And to add insult to injury, the two women were discussing their menstrual cycles and those of other women they knew in painstaking detail. I did not act out of kindness when I gave up my seat; rather, I escaped.
Unhappily for me, ever since this incident, the saying “all bodies are beautiful” has become something portentous. My judgment of the women's beauty was incomplete when I first encountered them on the street. No matter how divine the heron and the mandarin duck first appeared, I could never think of them as great–or even middling–beauties. At the very least, before I can think of bestowing such praise on anyone in the future, my nose must make its own judgment.
(June 1924)
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