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Updated: August 22, 2024
The lady Masa and her brother remained as powerful as ever and as careless of the Court's dignity. Two events now occurred which materially hastened a rupture. One was connected with an estate, in the province of Settsu, conferred by Go-Toba on a favourite a shirabyoshi, "white measure-marker," as a danseuse of those days was called.
You had been a shirabyoshi, and I have not forgotten your name. He uttered it. She, astonished and confused, could not at first reply to him, for she was old and had suffered much, and her memory had begun to fail.
Under the magic of the Master's brush, the vanished grace returned, the faded beauty bloomed again. When the kakemono had been finished, and stamped with his seal, he mounted it richly upon silken cloth, and fixed to it rollers of cedar with ivory weights, and a silken cord by which to hang it; and he placed it in a little box of white wood, and so gave it to the shirabyoshi.
When she had unwrapped it, the painter perceived curious rich quaint garments of silk broidered with designs in gold, yet much frayed and discoloured by wear and time the wreck of a wonderful costume of other days, the attire of a shirabyoshi.
Some of them were called shirabyoshi; and their hearts were not extremely hard. They were beautiful; they wore queerly shaped caps bedecked with gold; they were clad in splendid attire, and danced with swords in the dwellings of princes. And there is an old story about one of them which I think it worth while to tell.
With his name is associated the origin of the shirabyoshi, or "white measure-markers" girls clad in white, who, by posture and gesture, beat time to music, and, in after ages, became the celebrated geisha of Japan.
Hastily girding up his robes, he slipped noiselessly from under the paper curtain, crept to the edge of the screen, and peeped. What he saw astonished him extremely. Before her illuminated butsudan the young woman, magnificently attired, was dancing all alone. Her costume he recognised as that of a shirabyoshi, though much richer than any he had ever seen worn by a professional dancer.
He will see the Master's work: he will forgive me that I can no longer dance. Once more the Master bade her have no anxiety, and said: 'Come tomorrow, and I will paint you. I will make a picture of you just as you were when I saw you, a young and beautiful shirabyoshi, and I will paint it as carefully and as skilfully as if I were painting the picture of the richest person in the land.
And it is this that I can offer in return for so great a favour nothing except these dancer's clothes; and they are of no value in themselves, though they were costly once. Still, I hoped the Master might be willing to take them, seeing they have become curious; for there are no more shirabyoshi, and the maiko of these times wear no such robes.
'Nevertheless, the painter replied, 'to-morrow you will take me to that forsaken and filthy place. What time I live she shall not suffer for food or clothing or comfort. And as all wondered, he told them the story of the shirabyoshi, after which it did not seem to them that his words were strange.
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