Wearing Kimono

I have never wanted to wear a kimono, although I have been living in Japan 12 years.

A friend invited me on a recent day. At a discount rental kimono price we could sightsee autumn colors in the ancient city of Kyoto in style. I was game, but relieved when cold rain changed our attire to jeans and sweaters and umbrellas. Later that day, the rain lifted and we saw a kimono’d young woman with white face makeup walking slowly.

“That could have been us!” I said.

“No,” my companion middle-aged friend corrected with a smile, “we would have been dressed differently.”

On the other hand, the patterns of the fabric intrigue me to stare in awe at kimono wearers.

In summer, informal lightweight kimono beckon brightly as if a color had been added to the rainbow. An insect motif displayed in a department store was too small for my medium adult size, never mind that it was for boys.

A late summer model in a small shop showed a red kimono with spider web. The autumn kimono depicted scorpion. Consultation with Japanese friends revealed that insect kimono for women are modern but not avant-garde.

It is not that I couldn’t wear a kimono. But I have never pictured myself in one, and the image does not click. The silhouette is different than my Western culture. And yet the body underneath is not substantially different in curves.

I had been hiking and bathed in onsen with a Japanese family and was delighted to be invited to the kimono practice session when my friends’ elder daughter turned 20. More precisely, it was the year she would turn 20. In January, Japan has a coming of age day national holiday. To-be 20 year-olds youth dress up, hear speeches, come of age.

Mother, paternal grandmother, and the 19-year-old go upstairs. The futon where parents sleep has been put away in the closet. The box containing the mother’s coming-of-age kimono is opened. The sleeves are like the blouses we used to call Angel Wing. Only an unmarried woman’s kimono has long hanging sleeves.

The lithe young woman stands on a paper rug and is wrapped by her elders. “Like a pig,” she laments, pulling her stomach in. “It is the same phrase in Japanese.”

Magazines of the year’s kimono fashions strew the room. Rentals are popular and stores abound. The new angle to make the heirloom kimono stylish is the tying of the obi, the long wide belt. It is crossed and pleated and pinned to form sculpted designs in the back. Mother and grandmother follow the directions in the magazine. They compare the result with the picture in the magazine. Unsatisfied, they unwind the obi, and start again. Hours pass.

There is no rush. The father loudly plays a recording of an opera downstairs. The younger sister returns from a shopping trip. She enters the room, seeing her elder sister standing arms out, the mother mouthing pins. She participates by ornamenting her pinioned sister, trying on earrings and hair pins. The siblings communicate intensely in their youthful pair. Women of accordian’d ages play out roles.

The next morning, getting into a car is the most difficult manoevre for the celebrant. Young men and women approach the municipal hall.

“How will I get carry a pass for the train and bus?” the 19-year-old asks.

“You will return by taxi,” her father says.

She gets out of the car and is gone.

“Do you have this in America?”

“No, we don’t,” I reply, recalling car-hopping for other 16-year-olds at Bob’s Big Boy in Los Angeles.