Furoshiki: Ukiyo-e, South Wind, Clear Sky (Red Fuji)
Furoshiki: Ukiyo-e, South Wind, Clear Sky (Red Fuji)
Musubi
Hokusai called it Gaifū Kaisei - South Wind, Clear Sky - but everyone else calls it Red Fuji. Sometime in early autumn, in the minutes after sunrise, the mountain turns the colour of the sky behind it. Hokusai caught that minutes-long event and made it permanent: one print among his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, the same series that gave the world The Great Wave.
Musubi prints the composition on cotton furoshiki, here in navy blue rather than the red that gave the print its nickname, at three sizes: 48cm for a lunch box or a book, 70cm for a bottle, 104cm for a proper gift or something oddly shaped.
Made in Japan by Musubi.
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About the maker
Furoshiki is older than any explanation for why it still exists. The Shosoin Treasure House in Nara has kept furoshiki in storage since it opened in 756 - cloth used to wrap and carry, unchanged in purpose for nearly thirteen centuries. In 1937, when Kyoto's Yamada Kanshichi Store first opened, furoshiki was still ordinary. Students carried their textbooks in it. People carried whatever else wouldn't fit in a bag.
The store became Yamada Sen-i, and the Yamada family has run it since: Koichi Yamada from 1966, his son Yoshio from 2003. In between, furoshiki stopped being ordinary - zippers and suitcases made it optional in a way it had never been. Musubi's response was not to freeze the cloth as heritage but to keep asking what else it could do: reversible dyeing that gives one square two patterns, water-repellent weaves, collaborations with the textile house minä perhonen, the artist Masaru Suzuki, the illustrator Adeline Klam. The techniques changed. The cloth did not.
Recent work is in organic cotton and recycled polyester as well as the old weaves. Furoshiki from the Kyoto workshop has been shown at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and installed in front of Paris City Hall - a piece of cloth for wrapping things, still travelling.
