Longing for Orihime
The Komachi Odori of Nishijin and the Living Memory of a Weaving Town
The act of people gathering to dance in a crowd has, in every age, been inseparable from the land and from the memory of the communities that live upon it. What runs beneath Japan’s folk performing arts is above all an impulse: to move the body together within a single ring in order to ward off calamity, to pray for abundance, to send off the dead, and to let the living confirm one another’s presence. The most resplendent crystallization of that impulse was the furyū dance. In Kyoto’s Nishijin, that spirit lives on in a single delicate blossom — the Komachi odori, danced by girls in Genroku costume around the great Tanabata bamboo.
