described; and this, too, vanishes after marriage, when a still more
complicated fashion of wearing the hair is adopted.

2

Such absolutely straight dark hair as that of most Japanese women might
seem, to Occidental ideas at least, ill-suited to the highest
possibilities of the art of the coiffeuse. [2] But the skill of the
kamiyui has made it tractable to every aesthetic whim. Ringlets, indeed,
are unknown, and curling irons. But what wonderful and beautiful shapes
the hair of the girl is made to assume: volutes, jets, whirls, eddyings,
foliations, each passing into the other blandly as a linking of brush-
strokes in the writing of a Chinese master! Far beyond the skill of the
Parisian coiffeuse is the art of the kamiyui. From the mythical era [3]
of the race, Japanese ingenuity has exhausted itself in the invention
and the improvement of pretty devices for the dressing of woman's hair;
and probably there have never been so many beautiful fashions of wearing
it in any other country as there have been in Japan. These have changed
through the centuries; sometimes becoming wondrously intricate of
design, sometimes exquisitely simple--as in that gracious custom,
recorded for us in so many quaint drawings, of allowing the long black
tresses to flow unconfined below the waist. [4] But every mode of which
we have any pictorial record had its own striking charm. Indian,
Chinese, Malayan, Korean ideas of beauty found their way to the Land of
the Gods, and were appropriated and transfigured by the finer native
conceptions of comeliness. Buddhism, too, which so profoundly influenced
all Japanese art and thought, may possibly have influenced fashions of
wearing the hair; for its female divinities appear with the most
beautiful coiffures. Notice the hair of a Kwannon or a Benten, and the
tresses of the Tennin--those angel-maidens who float in azure upon the