Well, this is a breath of fresh air! I really like stories that employ intertextuality and metatextuality to discuss the ways in which peripheral and marginal figures navigate sociocultural fields that frame them in negativity, as phantoms ominous or abject, an alienation felt with especial keenness by Hanayo, positioned as she is in collocation with an implicit death that is at once scripted insofar as her own family deploys subtle narratives of burdening and senility toward her, and yet also inducive of an erosion of structure and convention, a place into which the forces that have dominated and maneuvered her life cannot fully reach, leading her to enter a space of liminality that is not so much a waiting as a beginning, a slim freedom for which the price of decades has been paid, but is nevertheless all the more enjoyable for what she has left- not remnants, but cultivation, vigor and wisdom all at once, the sagacity to be giddy and hopeful and carefree again, for such things were never the monopoly of youth. In this space, constructed as it is from the false binary of seniority and youth, she feels with especial keenness the pressure of 'both' worlds, manifested in the voice of the ghost that dogs her with the terror that this joyless repression shall be her beginning and her end, and the charge for liberation that drives the action of this tale must begin from her very body, that first and foremost space onto which these narratives are inscribed and enacted, a space that she fears losing control of due to a host of maladies and pressures, but also her final bastion and first step, the key to senses, thoughts and agency.
It is right and beautiful, then, to express this convalescent independence through a reclamation of the cosmetic, a sphere in relation to which older women are once again ambivalently positioned. Popular narratives under an ageist patriarchy often frame makeup as both deception and dependency, an act of masquerading that implicitly creates the horror of an unflattering unmasking or abject 'real' behind the veil, and at the same time valorizes those who may so skillfully 'veil' themselves as to take on the equivalence of an impenetrable 'naturalness', so synthesizing a race toward spontaneity and exhausting standards if one feels the need to conform to social conceptions of beauty. Conversely, if makeup is framed as an often-dangerous agency in 'younger' women, it must be denied to 'older' women in order to construct them contrastingly as victims of nature, neither deceptive and nor active, but 'real' insofar as they make no appeals to change the minds of others, and are indeed seen as losing control over their own. This pressure to conform to a degrading and fatalistic 'reality' is (dis)embodied in the voice of the husband that lingers after his death, functioning as the injunction of an dominant and oppressive system that sorts women into hierarchies of subordinated temporality, exerting a measure of control over Hanayo from the afterlife, a persistent and invasive thought process that demonstrates the degree to which these toxic schemata have shaped her life, and also disturbingly reflecting her fears of losing control of her own thoughts, the result here of not senescence, but subjection to a system wherein women are only ever maidens, mothers or crones.
Hanayo's embrace of cosmetics, however, serves to interrupt this subordinating thrust of misogynistic ageism, achieving as Yoshiko points out not a 'hiding', but rather a texturing and emphasis, perhaps even a revelation of her hungry, vibrant, ardent desire to live and shine. The authoring one's own life as a metaphor for cosmetics is especially charming, as it frames the self as a work-in-progress, a grand venture, but not one that must be conducted for success under any particular market or gaze, for the dream of good reception in the auction of lifetimes that so many women are tossed into to fetch a good price- no, the only goal in Yoshiko's vision of the cosmetic is expression, creativity, honesty-as-personhood, and a blooming that shall never wilt, but draws on time indeed as its star and shower, fueled by countless moments into a present eternity. This story understands that people are at every point and every age cosmetic and authored, their notions and presentations of beauty shaped and responded to by an everpresent social gaze, which is written in and of itself by a multitude of texts ranging from product descriptions to lifestyle TV to folklore to literature, all of which Hanayo encounters over the course of this chapter. However, it is precisely because of the multiplicity of these sources that absolute consistency and control cannot exist, and so people discover a capacity for navigation, negotiation, invention and expression among uncemented derivatives and doodled margins, creating faces as flexible as paper and relations as complex as calligraphy, painting across the pages of themselves, be they bunched or sticky or yellowing or rumpled, the stories of a life. I eagerly anticipate the next chapter of Hanayo's.
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