The nape of her neck
After having dwelt somewhat in the last two posts on the peculiarities of the female kimono, I would now like to give away why this dress fascinates me so irresistibly.
The secret is in the collar.
At the back, the kimono shows a graceful dip with a perpendicular, raised collar. Since the rest of the female figure remains hidden from view, the dip, collar, and always ingeniously pinned up hair, draw all our attention to the nape of the neck. And so this becomes a charming, erotic spot of touching feminine beauty.
In his novel Spring Snow, Yukio Mishima describes a few times how the admirer of a beautiful woman in kimono is carried away by the view of the nape of her neck:
“Her body was turned sideways, so that the nape of her neck shone white like a small lake that one sometimes comes upon in the mountains.”
“The snowy peaks before his eyes today were the very image of the white that had dazzled him that day – the pure color of the nape of her neck under the lustrous black of her hair. That had been the moment in his life when a divine female beauty had first moved him into adoration.”
The nape of the neck of the girl posing for her friend in the photo above, would honour Mishima’s lyrical expressions of tenderness.
Photo of the week: Higashiyama, Kyoto, Japan 2008
καιρός remembered 
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