Five Aiko Sakuragawa Cups, Ranked by Minutes Before the First Drip
Aiko Sakuragawa makes cups that leak when you ask them to. We poured tea into five at a low table in Kyoto and watched a brass timer.
8:10 a.m. The tea is whatever temperature the kettle gives. The table is cedar, 30 centimetres high. Sun comes through a paper screen and lands on the cups as if it had booked them.
Aiko Sakuragawa's customers write a number on a card. It means minutes. She fires to it. Her studio is behind a lumber yard in Fushimi. Five cups, five cards, one loud timer. Ranked from fastest leak to slowest.
5. Two minutes. A cobalt beaker, 6 cm tall, glaze thick as paint. The card said only "guest". The first bead reached the table at 2:05. I did not ask.
4. Six minutes. Pink slip over white clay, wide mouth, a thumb dent where a thumb goes. It leaks from the foot. Quietly. The table took it.
3. Eleven minutes. Grey and speckled, chipped at the rim on purpose. The chip is the one part that stays dry. Aiko checked it anyway.
2. Nineteen minutes. Black, glossy, heavy enough to hold a door. It sweated first. At 19:20 it dripped. By then the sun had left the table.
1. Forty-three minutes. A straight-sided cup, 8 cm tall, mustard glaze over a red-brown body. One line of crackle runs from rim to foot like a dropped thread. The glaze pooled fat at the base and left a pinhole the size of a poppy seed. The thumb dent is on the left. Nobody stays at a table for 43 minutes, so we went next door and ate a pickled plum.
At 8:53 the timer went off in the other room. The cup had already started. The card said 43. Aiko read it twice. "Ten seconds," she said, and apologised to the cup.
