Square vase decorated with an illustration of a “suppon” turtle

✦ A sculptor, a flame, and a small blue joy

Some objects enter a room and quietly change everything. This square vase is one of them. Crafted by Makimasa Imai — a ceramist from a three-generation lineage of artisans who spent a decade studying sculpture at the Tokyo University of the Arts — it carries a rare duality: the considered eye of an artist trained to think in form, and the lightness of a spirit who knows how to smile.

✦ The white clay and the blue turtle

In the hills surrounding Takehara, in Hiroshima Prefecture, the ancient noborigama climbing kilns are stoked with wood for days at a time. In that long, patient heat, clay becomes something else — something luminous. It was in one of these kilns that this vase was born: fired slowly by living flame, its surface emerging with a warm, milky whiteness that feels almost like skin.

Onto that ivory ground, Imai drew — freehand, unhurried — a suppon turtle. This soft-shelled creature has been revered in Japan for centuries as a symbol of longevity and good fortune. Yet what Imai gives us is no solemn emblem. It is a small, slightly wry being, sketched in blue with a brushstroke that carries just the right amount of hesitation. It moves. It breathes. It makes you want to smile back.

✦ Living with this piece

Slip in the stem of a flower gathered on a morning walk — a pale anemone, a sprig of wild grass, a cosmos — and watch the room shift around it. Or simply let the vase stand alone on a windowsill, a shelf, a corner of a table: its little blue turtle keeping quiet, unhurried watch. Either way, it brings to your daily life that quality the Japanese call yō no bi — beauty through use, beauty that truly inhabits the everyday.

One piece. One artist. One flame that made it.

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