In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (Original Harvest Book; Hb333) by Anaïs Nin Read Free Book Online

hotels, and inns—and yet achieve a self-effacement which is striking to foreign women. In the hotels and inns they are solicitous, thoughtful, helpful to a degree never dreamed of except by men, but this care and tenderness are lavished equally on women visitors. It is as if one’s dream of an ever-attentive, ever-protective mother were fulfilled on a collective scale, only the mother is forever young and daintily dressed. They are laborious and yet quiet, efficient, ever-present and yet not intrusive or cumbersome.
    I was invited to Japan by my publisher, Tomohisa Kawade, and being a writer, was allowed at the geisha restaurant where the patrons are usually only men. A geisha kneeled or stood behind each guest, and no sooner was my saki cup empty than my geisha leaned forward in the swiftest and lightest gesture and filled it again. She also noticed I did not know how to handle my fish with chopsticks, so she operated on it with amazing skill. She softened the fish first with pressure from the chopsticks, and then suddenly pulled the entire bone clean and free. All this in an exquisite dress with floating sleeves, which would paralyze a Western woman. Another geisha brought me her scarf to sign: “I have read Hemingway,” she said, “he signed my scarf when I was fifteen years old.”
    They stoop before you not a moment longer than necessary; not one of them seemed to be saying: Look at me; I am here. How they carried trays and served food and listened seemed like a miraculous triumph over clumsiness, perspiration, heaviness. They had conquered gravitation.
    Dressed as they were, in fresh and embroidered kimonos, with their hair in the classical coiffure, lacquered and neat, with their white tabi and new sandals, it hurt me to see them follow us out into the street, in the rain, and bow low in the rain until we were away.
    Outside of Tokyo, I saw them in their geisha quarter, rushing to their assignments, exquisitely dressed, elaborately coiffed, in snow white tabi and wooden sandals. The texture of their kimonos always slightly starched, the sleeves floating, like the wings of butterflies.
    I saw women at work in factories. They wore blue denim kimonos, shabby from use but clean. They kneeled with their legs under them, at work with the same precision of gesture as their more glamorous counterparts. The hair was not lacquered or worked into rounded chignons, but neatly braided.
    The modern emancipated Japanese women remained in Tokyo. During the rest of the trip the women I saw seemed to please the eye, to answer miraculously a need for a drink.
    Their costumes bound them but their gestures remained light and airy, transcending the tightness of the obi. Their feet in the wooden sandals were as light as ballet dancers’.
    In the fields, the peasant women at work presented the same harmonious dress of coarse dark blue denim, uniform and soigné even when worn. The straw hat, the basket, were also uniform, and the women worked with such order in their alignment that they seemed like a beautifully designed group dance. I watched them pick weeds, in a row, on their knees, with baskets beside them, and they picked in rhythm, without deviations or fumblings. The women weeded gardens while the men took care of the trees or cleaned the ponds of surplus water lilies.
    The softness, the all-enveloping attentiveness of the women—I thought of the Japanese films, in which this delicacy can turn into fierceness if challenged, in which they startle you with a dagger or even a sword at times. What kind of modern woman would emerge from the deep, masked, long-hidden Japanese woman of old? The whole mystery of the Japanese women lies behind their smooth faces, which rarely show age, except perhaps on peasant women battered by nature. But the smoothness remains from childhood far into maturity.
    The thoughtfulness cannot be a mask, I concluded; it seems so natural, it seems like a genuine sensitiveness to others. It seems to come from