« Women, water, and sexual emotions are concepts that have tended to cluster throughout Japanese history. »

« La femme, l'eau et les émotions sexuelles sont des notions qui ont eu tendance à n'en faire qu'une à travers l'histoire du Japon. »

Note 1 :
« There are many examples of this particular concatenation of linguistic images. The word nureta (wet) often occurred in classical poetry describing sleeves wet with tears because of a lover’s absence or fickleness. This usage established a connection between “wet” and “emotional”. Even the Japanese loan words from English, uetto (wet) and dorai (dry), have the specific meanings of “emotional” versus “rational, calculating”. In the geisha world, it is no accident that the willow, or ryu of karyukai, is a tree associated with flowing streams; that the term for sexual initiation is mizu-age; and that a geisha who sleeps around is a mizuten. Mizu, “water”, has a homonym in mizu, “unseen” or “unseeing”, and the original version of mizuten probably meant “indiscriminately tumbling”. Given these associations, substituting the homonymous character “water” is not strange at all. A coquettish glance between members of the opposite sex is a nagashi-me, a “flowing eye” and a woman of a mizusho, a “water temperament” has a wanton nature. »