乬Would
you like to have this made for your dress, Michiyo?乭said my deceased aunt, showing me a kimono material that immediately attracted
me by the color, the pattern
as well as the texture woven with exquisite bamboo and pine designs.
乬This
might be too old even to bother. The dress made out of this may be torn easily.
It乫s a shame, I suppose. I loved to wear this kimono when I was young. It
was originally a mourning kimono of your great-grandmother,乭 said Aunt Chiyoko about ten years
ago. She was 84 years old or so then.
Oh? If it was a mourning dress, it must have been black, must n乫t it?I asked in wonder. She answered that mourning had been white back
in the past and she had gotten the mourning kimono from her mother, and
had it dyed into what she had liked. If it was wore by my great-grandmother, it must have
been woven in the Edo period or the early Meiji era. It must probably be
more than 100 years old. Aunt Chiyoko casually put it on my shoulder and
said, 乬It becomes you very much.乭
It was the first time for me to realize that kimono could be original Japanese
dress material..
Igot the material made into a two-piece dress. I had special feelings toward
the dress. The kimono was originally my great- grandmother乫s, then handed to her daughter-in-low, and loved by my aunt .And it finally reached me in a different form to decorate me. There乫s something entirely different about it compared with other dresses I had.
As almost all the housewives who have their own jobs at the same time are,
I was a little tired at that time.Is it a little too overstating if I said
that the dress softly rapped, encouraged and comforted me?While I was
gently touching the surface of the old material which outlived several
women, it seemed slowly to animate me with the life latent in Japanese
traditional clothes that bundled up,protected and adorned thousands of
Japanese women,apart from the fact that the material was my blood relatives乫.
