He sees not himself in the mirror of the cup but a strange, almost onnagata like Japanese face is gibbing at him. (Onnagata is an actor who always appears as a woman in the kabuki plays, and usually he will act this role while he walking in the streets, out of the theater.) And the first kanji 'kai' or 'kwai' put the question mark on these situations. Just like in the Kwaidan. You can think that something is wrong, it is not real, it is just a vision, but so vivid and exact and you talk to him or her, and she replays... and you already spent the night in love with her. The 'kwai' refers to this doubtful and ambiguous situation on the border of the dream and reality.
Hoichi, the Earless is my favorite. When you see his face, it wears a lot of Chinese characters of Heart Sutra. It seems thirty years before Greenaway's Pillow Book. Hoichi's mouth shows the charachter 'shin' or 'kokoro' that means 'heart'.
On his face there are the most famous and well known lines of this Buddhist text: 'the form is empty, the emptiness is the form'. To write a sacred texts on some body is a common practice in South-East Asia. In Thailand they tattoo with a huge iron rod, made big wounds and exorcize the demons, in China or Japan they have very fine inks which have a shine on the skin when they are writing with a brush.
