Blackened Teeth Made a Woman Grown — A Tale of the Iron Dye, from the Days When White Teeth Were a Shame

In the world today, the whiter the teeth the better.

Whitening pastes line the shelves in rows, and some people go so far as to have their teeth bleached with medicine. A flash of white when you laugh looks clean, they say, and youthful. Whiter is more beautiful — no one doubts it anymore.

But long ago it was the very reverse. There truly was a time when teeth were held most beautiful the blacker they were.

As the mark of having grown up, women — and sometimes men — would all of them blacken their teeth. Iron was steeped in vinegar or tea to draw off a black liquor, which was painted on again and again until the white was wholly covered over. It took time; it took trouble; and the smell was harsh. Even so, people prized that blackness for a very long time, as the sign of a grown person, as beauty at its very height. This custom of dyeing the teeth black — ohaguro, the tooth-blackening — outlasted whole ages of the world.

There was a time when white teeth were thought childish, unseemly, a thing to be ashamed of — though say so to people now, and they will hardly believe it. But I was there, on one such morning of the blackening, without a doubt.

It was the spring of 1014 — Chōwa 3 — at a certain mansion in Heian-kyō.

At that mansion I had taken on one of the tasks nobody wanted: to keep in steady supply the kane, as we called the black dye — a stinking black liquor. Old nails and the snapped heads of hoes I would toss by the fistful into a chipped jar, then pour in sake and vinegar, boiled-down tea, and the clear top of rice gruel. After that, a stir now and then, and a full month left to sleep. The iron seemed to melt away into the liquid, and there came a blackish, clinging water.

That jar reeked, above all else. The smell of rusted iron and the smell of soured vinegar mingled together and stabbed at the back of the nose. Every time I lifted the lid I turned my face away in spite of myself. And yet the gentlewomen awaited this foul liquor like a treasure.

When first I was set this task, honestly I could not see, for the life of me, why anyone should nurse so foul a thing with such care. Was it not just water with old nails rotted in it? But as I kept watch a day, and then two, the way the color deepened by the day grew oddly interesting to me. What had been a reddish rust-water at the start took on more black the longer it slept, and turned thick and heavy. A liquor that surely was not alive seemed to be conceiving something within. For every measure of care I gave, the black grew deeper. That much, at least, was work with a true answer to it.

That morning, the inner rooms were unusually gay. The young lady of the house, they said, would blacken her teeth for the first time.

The house had just finished a celebration called mogi, the coming-of-age rite. To shed a child's dress and remake herself as a grown woman — the finishing touch of it, it seemed, was to dye the teeth black. Only once her teeth were blackened was a girl counted a woman grown, the gentlewomen said to one another.

Bidden to it, I moved the aged kane into a small vessel, and then heaped, in a separate dish, a mound of fushi powder — gallnut, ground from the dried galls that form on sumac leaves and the like, a bitter, astringent powder. Layered onto the teeth together with the kane, this bitter powder, strangely, makes the black richer, deeper, and longer to last, or so it is said. Why it should be so, I do not know. Only that the women who did the dyeing had always done it thus, mother to daughter.

When I bore the vessels within, an older gentlewoman — one called Ukon — beckoned me. She had a name as the finest hand at tooth-dyeing in the house, sent for even by other mansions.

The young lady, a face still soft with childhood, sat leaning on an armrest. Unsettled, perhaps, she kept peering into the mirror in her hand, opening her mouth a little to look at her own white teeth.

"Peer as you may, your white teeth are yours only for today," Ukon said, laughing, and the young lady flushed and laid the mirror down. But soon, softly, softly, she lifted it again to look. Whether she was grieving the parting, or longing for the face she was about to become, or the both of them at once — her young eyes went back and forth in the glass.

Ukon set the vessel I had brought at her side and took up a small brush made of feathers. She dipped it in the kane and shook off the drops, then edged close before the young lady and said, gently:

"Open your mouth, just a little. It will not sting the teeth. Only the smell — bear with it a while."

The young lady opened her mouth timidly. Ukon's brush stroked one white front tooth, smooth and slow. Where the iron liquor lay, it dyed at first to a dull, ashen color. Then Ukon took the astringent fushi on a fingertip and worked it carefully over the top. Kane, fushi, kane again. Layer upon layer, the ashen teeth deepened by degrees into a lustrous black.

At first the young lady knit her brows. The smell told on her, no doubt. She wrinkled the bridge of her nose, and yet kept her mouth bravely open. Ukon did not hurry. One tooth at a time, as though laying down lacquerwork, she built up the black slowly. Paint, and let it dry, and paint again.

Waiting at her side, I found myself drawn into the movement of those hands. Here was a thing that keeping watch on a stinking jar had never once let me see. The black water I had spent days rotting, scooped up on Ukon's brush and meeting the astringent fushi, turned into something else entirely. Freshly painted, it was still a dull, unreliable grey. But with each layer of astringency, black welled up from somewhere deep within. Rust-water and the powder of galls — either one, on its own, is a thing far from beauty. And yet let the two come together, with a human hand passing back and forth across them again and again, and there is born a sheen to put you in mind of lacquer.

"Ukon, why should those two, put together, turn so black as that?"

I asked in spite of myself, under my breath, and Ukon, without stopping her hand, glanced up with a small smile.

"Who can say. I do not know it either. My mother, and her mother, only ever did it so. The reason we may not know — but the hands remember it."

The reason unknown, and the hands remembering. I, who nursed the foul liquor, and Ukon, who carried it to the teeth — neither of us knowing the why of it, we had kept this black alive by nothing but a handed-down handiwork. By the time the sun reached deep into the room, the young lady's teeth, upper and lower both, were dyed a deep black, as if drawn over with lacquer.

"There now — look."

Ukon held out the mirror. The young lady peered in fearfully. And then, softly, she opened her mouth to try. In the glass, the glossy black teeth showed themselves.

I watched with my heart in my throat — a child, I thought, might still be frightened of her own altered face. But after gazing a while into the mirror, the young lady slowly, like a bud coming open, smiled.

"...I look like a grown woman."

There was a true pride in the voice. The childishness of the white-toothed days was gone, and in the glass stood a girl a shade more grown. The blackened teeth, hidden when her lips closed, gave off their modest sheen only when she laughed. So this is what they mean by beautiful, I found myself oddly convinced. That from a stinking jar and a bitter powder something so lustrous should come.

In the days of my own childhood I had thought white teeth looked the cleaner, the more unspoiled. But living on in this mansion, my eye had grown wholly used to it. The gentlewomen's black teeth were every one of them glossy, and their mouths seemed to draw firm and fine each time they laughed. A young thing still white of tooth looked, by contrast, washed-out, like linen scrubbed thin — uncertain, somehow. What is beautiful and what looks childish — it is not, it seems, settled at one's birth; it is dyed into you, before ever you notice, by the eyes all around. Even my own eye, keeping its watch on a stinking jar, had come somewhere along the way to feel that black teeth were beautiful. That, to me, was the strangest thing of all.

Ukon nodded, well satisfied, and as she put the brush away she said: the black of the teeth, left to itself, soon fades; so from here on the young lady must dye it over herself, every few days. To keep one's beauty is, in short, never to let the labour of it lapse. The young lady nodded gravely, and once more, softly, smiled at the black teeth in the glass.

I carried off the emptied vessel and went back to my watch over the stinking jar. That nose-stabbing reek, from this day on, seemed to me a little worth being grateful for. To think that the very wellspring of that blackness was the thing I kept from failing — keeping the stinking jar was not so bad a lot after all.

The custom of blackening the teeth lingered in the world of men for a very long while after that.

At first it was the coming-of-age mark of the highborn. In time, I hear, it spread to the warrior houses and to the towns, and became the plainest of grooming, the sign of a woman who had married. Iron steeped in vinegar to make the black liquor, the astringent powder layered over the top — that pairing of the stinking jar and the bitter powder was handed down, I hear, astonishingly unchanged, through all the turning of the world.

Black teeth, beautiful. To people today it must seem a sense of beauty turned clean upside down. Seen from a world that spends good medicine to polish teeth white, the trouble of painting them deliberately black may make no sense at all.

But whenever I recall that morning in spring, this is what I think. What is held to be beautiful may turn inside out, as often as the world pleases. There are ages when black is the beauty, and ages when white is; and neither one is the right of it. Only — that the people alive in a given age believe this to be beauty, and pour their labour into it, busily: that pouring out of trouble alone, black age or white, seems, strangely, never to change.

The face of that young girl, smiling shyly at the black teeth in her mirror — I remember it still. And the voice that murmured, I look like a grown woman.

Whether one blackens the teeth or whitens them — the adornment may turn inside out, but that ticklish sort of pride, felt on the morning one first wears a grown person's face, is surely lit, just the same, in the breast of someone somewhere in the world today.

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