“Look at her eyebrows! Look at her teeth!” “Eh! Is it a little girl in a grown-up kimono?” “No, this is how barbarian women go about,” he said, shaking his head in horror. “And this is no woodblock artist’s fancy. The very Empress has started tricking herself out like this, and so now all Edo is full of these faces.” He groaned. “It’s a city of aging girls. And don’t they see?” He dotted his finger along the woodblock beauty’s smiling mouth, then along each white tooth of negative space formed by the curved train tracks and straight railroad ties. “Every time I looked at a court lady? Torakku,
...more
