Ranto — 蘭燈

Ranto — "蘭燈," the orchid lamp — combines in a single title two of the most charged symbols in Yumeji's aesthetic world: the orchid (associated with refinement, rarity, and feminine beauty) and the lamp (associated with warmth, with the private hour of evening, and with the act of illuminating the otherwise dark). The orchid lamp as image suggests a source of beauty that is also a source of light — fragile, fragrant, burning — which is as precise a description of the Yumeji bijin as any prose could manage.