Dancer with a Sword

The dancer in fantastic costume creates a visual conundrum to anyone familiar with the history of Japanese dress. At first glance we would imagine this must be a male courtier wearing an eboshi (palace headgear) tied with elaborate red silk cords and donning ceremonial swords. Attached to the backside of the sash are ceremonial paper wand traditionally associated with Shinto rituals. Yet viewed in the history of performance, another interpretation unfolds. On one hand, the costume closely resembles that of female shirabyōshi performers of the early medieval times who cross-dressed in courtier robes for entertaining nobility with elegant dances and songs, and also sometimes serving as amorous companions. Yet this painting dates to the late seventeenth century, and captures the appearance of a female performer who performed otokomai, literally “manly dances.”

Further visual confusion is caused because the hairstyle since, the upright topknot below the hat is a tonsorial style associated with male teenage performers generically referred to as wakashu, or “youths.” Thus the painting captures a fashionable type of performance of the second half of the seventeenth century of young women wearing anachronistic aristocratic fashion. The frisson of transvestite entertainment, poking fun at authority, and fabulous over-the-top fashion sensibility enjoyed widespread popularity both in private and public stages. An entire subgenre of genre painting, being produced parallel and simultaneously with paintings called Kanbun bijin, “beauties of the Kanbun period.” of the 1670s and 80s, which showed young women donning similarly gorgeous raiment.

Such images of individual entertainers, male and female, against a blank background anticipated the genre of ukiyo-e paintings and prints that would emerge along with new forms of popular literature at the end of the seventeenth century.