The ends are secured into a loop about the size of a nickel, useful for hanging on a hook. I think it resembles not a turtle but a woodland creature you’d best not touch, a hedgehog maybe, curled in sleep. With the right curator, the tawashi might have been featured in MoMA’s Good Design shows of the midcentury, the ones that canonized the balloon whisk, the Lexikon 80 typewriter, and the Slinky. “Yes, says Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, if it is designed both for usefulness and good looks.”) (“Is there art in a broomstick?” wrote Time in 1953. Since I bought my first Kamenoko Tawashi in 2016, I’ve owned only three or four. They may as well be the same, like the beloved dog that dies only to be replaced by an identical dog. One brush takes ages to become gunky or gross. After many months, it begins to emit a faint metallic, scrambled-egg-like funk, the bristles develop permanent bedhead, and I know it’s due for a swap. Here, I could go into how the Kamenoko Tawashi has been crafted, not manufactured, since 1907, how, according to the brand’s website, the husks are soaked for four to six weeks before being separated into fibers, which are then coiled in a “delicate process that can only be done by hand.” But I knew nothing of this when I bought my first at a well-curated, Japanese-expat-owned home-goods shop, aptly named Tortoise General Store, in Venice Beach four years ago. I only knew I recognized the brush from my childhood and needed it. My dad grew up in Hamamatsu, a city midway between Tokyo and Kyoto, in Shizuoka Prefecture-a wet, green land that sprawls out, a spreading of hands, from the inland mountains along the curling tail of the Tenryū-gawa toward the sea. I knew little of the place when I was young, nothing of its past, and little of its present, just the tourist-bureau intel my family was in the habit of repeating: Suzuki, Yamaha, citrus, unagi.īut I knew my family’s neighborhood of Ike-machi, navigating its streets of concrete midrises, past the cigarette-embalmed kissaten, the cult-like granite church, the Brazilian bank, the fryer smell of 7-Eleven. Down into the underpass below busy Ote-Dori toward city hall, drawn as if through osmosis into the rushing suction of cicada chatter that announced Hamamatsu Castle Park. Past the elementary school, up the stone steps, around the antiwar memorial, and through the gate to the tea garden.
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