Three tatami-beri bottle bags standing on brocade before the altar of the main hall

Made once.

Tatami-beri pieces, made by hand at Honmyoji in Fuji.

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New pieces

All 27

Ai — Moss, sky-blue and indigo bands beneath a hand-braided navy handle.

Ai藍

A$170

Tokiwa — Evergreen and cream in a close check, under a pale woven handle.

Tokiwa常磐

A$145

Kuchiba — Chestnut, plum, rust and mint — the colours of late autumn.

Kuchiba朽葉

A$145

Beni — Crimson and dove grey with gold flowers, under a red handle.

Beni紅

A$135

A floor of woven rush, edged in cloth.

Tatami are the mats that make the floor of a traditional Japanese room — laid edge to edge, so closely that the room is measured in them: a six-mat room, an eight-mat room. The dark lines you see running across the floor are their edges.

A large tatami room with shoji screens, the dark edging of each mat drawing lines across the floor

Low light across a tatami floor, where the woven rush meets its cloth edging

Tatami畳

A mat of woven igusa rush over a thick core, roughly 90 by 180 centimetres. Soft underfoot, it smells of cut grass when new and turns from green to gold as it ages.

Tatami-beri畳縁

The band of woven cloth sewn along the two long sides of each mat. It protects the rush and draws the lines of the room — often plain in a house, brocade with crests and gold thread in a temple hall.

The bags

Every time a room is laid, the tatami maker is left with offcuts of edging too short to use. Those remnants are what MIROKU is made from — woven onto paper band recycled in Fuji City.

The character 縁 is also read en: a meeting.

Read the material note

Holding the Hishi handbag in the temple hall

Made to be carried, and made to go with kimono.

Every photograph of the bags was taken at Honmyoji — the hall, the windows, the wooden floor they were made on. None was shot in a studio.

The collection

Laughing, a tall bottle bag of green and sky-blue tatami-beri held at the waist

A red tatami-beri bottle bag held in both hands against a cream kimono

At the window with the Kago basket bag in hand

Five kinds of work

Three bottle bags standing on brocade before the altar of the main hall

Set before the altar, then sent.

Every bag is made entirely by hand in Japan, one at a time. Just as each strip of tatami-beri reaches us through some chance connection, every finished bag comes out with a character of its own — the colour, the pattern, the shape all a little different, in ways no machine could repeat. Because it is handmade it keeps that warmth, and becomes a bag you will meet only once.

Every finished piece is set down in the main hall before it leaves. After that, it belongs to the person who found it.

The maker and the place

Notes

The blog