Whenever I read Uno Chiyo's story "Happiness" I think of the pictured Ukiyo-e tarot card -- and if you like tarot decks, the Ukiyo-e is a really beautiful one that connects with Japanese legend and symbolism as well as elements of nature. The opening of "Happiness" is:
Every time Kazue gets out of the bath, she stands in front of the mirror and examines her naked body for a moment...She thus notes her resemblance to Botticelli's Venus. There is the similarity in the way that she is standing although no sea shell supports her. She also has the same feet and slightly rounded stomach.
As you read on, though, you learn that Kazue is seventy and really not insistent that she resembles Venus at her age -- but she also doesn't seem to care. Kazue's detached, fairly oblivious optimism has served her well through many difficult years. She allows the possibility of still being Venus because of her failing eyesight and because the steam from the bath pleasantly blurs her mirrored view, and she otherwise "collects fragments of happiness one after another, and so lives, spreading them throughout her environment. Even what seems odd to other people, she considers happiness."
Uno Chiyo would have been 110 this week; she almost lived a full century, dying in 1996 at the age of 98. Married many times and fond of falling in love, she certainly did live fully and most likely thought of herself as resembling Venus after her bath even at the age of ninety.
