Furoshiki: Ukiyo-e, Under the Wave off Kanagawa
Furoshiki: Ukiyo-e, Under the Wave off Kanagawa
Musubi
In 1831, Katsushika Hokusai printed a wave taller than Mount Fuji, cresting over three fishing boats, about to break. Under the Wave off Kanagawa was one print in his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji - and became, in time, one of the most reproduced images in the history of art. Debussy kept it near his desk while writing La Mer. Van Gogh wrote home about it.
Musubi prints the composition on cotton furoshiki, in beige, at three sizes: 48cm for a lunch box or a book, 70cm for a bottle, 104cm for a proper gift or something oddly shaped. The wave is the same at every size. Only the cloth around it changes.
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.
