Mirror pieces

[wombat1138]

(wrt Tomoe's mirror in RK, again) I thought I'd remembered seeing this somewhere, but wasn't entirely sure until I looked it back up again-- as with their family crests, women of the samurai class passed on their mirrors through matrilineal inheritance, from mother to daughter and thus generally from one patrilineal family to another. A woman could also use a husband's or father's crest, but was not required to do so.

None of which explains the simple crest on Kenshin's haori during the wedding scene in Seisouhen, but then the entire Shinto ceremony was anachronistic anyway. AFAIK no crest is ever shown associated with Kaoru or the Yukishiro family (or, for that matter, Kiyosato).

...which is giving me a faint twitch of plotbunny about Tomoe's mirror, but I don't think it really has anywhere to go, aside from possible linkage with a folktale that resembles a mutant form of Snow White: a man brings the gift of a mirror to his wife, who has never seen one before; when she's mystified by the face "inside" it, he explains to her that it's her own face, and repeats to her the saying that the mirror is the soul of a woman. As one would do with an item that suddenly contains your own soul, she carefully wrapped it up and put it away in a box. Some years later, as she lay dying, she gave the box to her young daughter and told her that in moments of loneliness, the girl should look into the mirror and be comforted, because her mother's soul was inside it. When the man remarries, the requisite jealous stepmother enters the family, and then more stuff happens.

Given that Enishi can be a bit... imaginative at times, he might have some interesting thoughts about nee-san's mirror, which had reflected her face so many times and then was left to burn with her body. OTOH Tomoe must've left her own mother's mirror behind in Edo, along with every other link to her former life except her lingering quest for revenge. And then there's that hairpin, which bugs me for some reason I can't articulate... was that Kiyosato's (betrothal?) gift to her before he left Edo, or was that the bequest which his family gave her after his death? If the former, then the only thing I can think of for the latter was the tanto which she carries around thereafter-- which fits the pattern in various ways, but I can't figure out if there's a definite answer. I have a feeling that there should be one, but it keeps squishing out from under my brain cell.

Addendum: OMG. Enishi's glasses aren't just a random artistic fillip by Watsuki; they're actually accurate to the place and period. (I don't think that eBay item is going to sell real soon, but I've saved the pic to my own archives for later relinkage.) From the description:

Chinese, mid 19th century, unsigned. The lenses are made of 2 1/16" diameter x 3/32" thick colorless optical quartz, mounted in a decorative cast brass rimless frame with folding ear pieces. [...] The lenses have no correction and were designed to be worn as a fashion accessory. See Chapter 7 in J.W. Rosenthal's "Spectacles and Other Vision Aids" on the Development of Chinese Spectacles.

The cited text is partially available on Google Books here, with more pix.

Comments

[redswordheart.livejournal.com]

In the manga, Kiyosato gives Tomoe the hair pin when he proposes to her. In the OVA, she receives the dagger from his family as a remembrance of him.

OK, I'll buy that they might have had wired glasses in 19th century China, but no way in Hell did they have tinted lenses.

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

In the manga, Kiyosato gives Tomoe the hair pin when he proposes to her. In the OVA, she receives the dagger from his family as a remembrance of him.

Hm. My brain cell keeps trying to tell me that while those are fairly straightforward and reasonable inferences, they're not unambiguously presented in terms of, say, actually showing someone from his family handing the dagger over to her, or having Kiyosato explicitly say, "Will you marry me? Say yes and I'll give you this hairpin." OTOH sometimes my brain cell has to be told to just shut up and sit down.

I'm not sure if there's enough of that book in Google to tell if tinted lenses were commonly used in 19th-century China per se, but page 273 has what looks like the endpart of the history of tinted lenses in Europe, picking up from the mid-19th century onward: UV-blocking uranium glass (which probably means pale green/yellow in color) in 1871, something called a "pink arundel lens" in 1872, "chloris green" UV-blockers in 1880 (possibly the same as the ones from 1871?), purple in 1886... theoretically, these could've been introduced to Shanghai via Western influence.

--oh wait, different search terms bring up page 270, which Google has misfiled *after* page 273:

Chinese spectacles, as noted by Marco Polo on his first voyage in 1271, were furnished with plano lenses (no power) and came in (almost) clear, tea shade, and dark colors (Figure 493). All lenses were made of mined crystal, mostly from Mongolia. The Chinese names were ai-tai, or tcha-chi, and Caucasians call it "tea stone."

Otto Rasmussen's remarks (1908) clarify the Chinese use and beliefs of these spectacles:

...any middle-aged Wang, feeling that his eyes were bothering him, bought over the counter a pair of, say, "tortoiseshell-monkey-fish-scale-ink" for distance, and "brass-40-years-water" for reading. The ink shade would be a light smoke tint, suitable for the hot, brilliant summers of China, coupled with the light yellow loess soil of the coastal areas.[...]

The superstitious ancients, lacking scientific knowledge, held that rock crystal contained a sort of solidified "medicine." Light passing through was supposed to pick up particles and deposit them on the eye surface. The Tea-Crystal was best of all.

So it sounded like shaded lenses were cut from smoky quartz and were prestigious and expensive, which would fit Enishi's role as Triad boss. However, I suspect there is no explanation for his dubious fashion sense about dominating his wardrobe with lurid traffic-cone orange.