THREE O'CLOCK ‘is the darkest part of the night – the hardest part’, says Haruki Murakami in After Dark, and it was then that I was making photographs on the narrow streets of Kabukicho’s red light district. No one talks to foreigners in Tokyo, but that hour is a time for strange encounters everywhere in the world.

     Still, Noe Tawara astonishes me, walking up without the least hesitation, and asking, ‘Are you a photographer?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I am a jiuta-mai dancer.’ Serendipity is the only word I can find to explain the moment.

Noe Tawara is from Fukuoka, in southern Japan, and began her training at the age of ten at Hanayagi School. At the age of nineteen, during her acting studies at Hihon University, she took the advice of her classical dance teacher and specialised in jiuta-mai. Noe was fascinated by its obscure origins – it is today a secretive ancient style of dance – and the fierce rivalry between the Shirabyōshi who sought through their art to become the Shogun’s favourite concubine.

     Jiuta-mai is intensely intimate – it is only ever performed for an audience of one, a man – and its elegance is an underlying pillar of Japanese choreographic sophistication.

     ‘When I first saw jiuta-mai, I thought “this is it”. I had found the sole tool that could express something that filled me,’ she says.

     Noe says that beyond the sophisticated style of dance she found an extraordinary art of rare depth and poignant introspection.

     Jiuta-mai requires skills substantially different from other traditional dance, such as kabuki, which exaggerates movement and emphasises form for the sake of large theatre crowds. Jiuta-mai is its opposite, confined in space to small tatami room and a single viewer, and requiring slow, delicate and hugely symbolic motions based on the natural movement of the human body and demanding the subtlest of muscle and breath control.

Noe turns slowly on the tatami to the plucked notes of the jiuta, warm candlelight casting trembling shadows on the translucent shoji. Her body curls in an harmonious loop of movement and, the three strings muted, succumbs to unbearable sadness and she kneels, inconsolable amid the pain of lost love, bending back, extended arms flowing from her sides in a slow and graceful motion, evoking solitude, her hands grasping at imagined snowflakes.

     Jiuta-mai is rarely seen by foreigners, yet here, in Daio-ji, a small Buddhist temple in Yanaka, my camera is seeing a style of dance little changed since the twelfth-century Heian period.

Jiuta-mai is one of very few Japanese traditional arts belonging to the woman’s realm of expression. Its major themes are passion and distress expressed with a sensual and symbolic story-telling dance form. It was developed as a chamber art and enjoyed aesthetically sensitive patronage.

     Its choreographies involve a series of simple movements that yield complex internal emotions. The purity of the technique transforms jealousy or desolation into movement, the expression of which is subjugated to the sympathy and comprehension of its essence. That process of sympathy starts when the master choreographs the dancer to match the story told by the song.

     ‘Let’s say the choreography requires you to raise your arm,’ Noe explains. ‘Through practice and deep understanding of the song’s story, that simple movement becomes deeply meaningful.’

     She says her master, Hanai, once told her, ‘You cannot dance without your soul.’

     This often painful path to self-awareness requires a high degree of sensitivity, delicacy and strength.