Mizu (re-design)

My re-design of Mizu, the protagonist of Blue Eye Samurai.

The original series design for Mizu gives her a couple of expensive accessories, specifically her traveling cloak and her eyeglasses. (And yes, I realize she is supposed to have made her own eyeglass frames, but Japanese manufacture of glass was still new at that time and the lenses themselves would likely have been expensive.)

I kept the travel cloak design, but as many surviving originals are made from striped fabric, I chose to go with that.

She’s wearing tattsuke bakama, rather than having separate, removable kyahan (gaiters). This was a really common style for traveling, and since Blue Eye Samurai takes place in the 1650s, I went with a contrasting, rather than matching, waist tie. That style of contrasting colors would have been a bit more of an old fashioned look at the time already.

She’s wearing straw waraji instead of the black sandals she has in the series, and warajigake tabi, tabi with reinforcements in the toe split and the front of the foot that made them more durable.

I switched the short, samue-like jacket she’s wearing in the series for an actual kimono, but used the water pattern of the fabric she is using as an obi in the series as the pattern for her kimono.

Since she’s trying to pass for a ronin on her travels, I switched her hat for a sandogasa, which was a common design for traveling, and gave her a short sword in addition to her meteoric iron sword. (The lack of samurai carrying two swords in the series drove me absolutely bonkers.) I kept the un-wrapped rayskin design of her tsuka, but I’m not sure how I feel about it. 😅

I also changed the design of her eyeglasses to one that was common during the Edo period, using string instead of folding temples. The eyeglass design I’m using here is from the oldest known pair in Japan, Tokugawa Ieyasu’s reading glasses, but that same style was worn right up until the introduction of modern western eyeglasses at the end of the Edo period.