A Single Cloth That Can Become Anything

If you were to ask me what the cleverest tool is that I have seen in all my walking, I would probably answer like this.

A plain square scrap of cloth, I would say.

A box will only take what is box-shaped. A basket is good for nothing but the shape of a basket. But a single cloth, with one tie of a knot, will gather up the round thing, the long thing, the crooked thing, and wrap them all. Holding no fixed shape of its own — that is its greatest strength.

That cloth, people came in time to call furoshiki, a cloth for wrapping and carrying. They say it began with the wrapping of clothes shed at the bathhouse, but the truth of it, even I do not really know. The story behind a name is, more often than not, got up plausibly after the fact. The cloth itself had been quietly wrapping up people's lives long before any name was fixed to it.

It was the spring of 1802 (Kyōwa 2), in Osaka.

I was walking the provinces in those days, trading in a small way. That morning I had laid the bolts of cloth I had bought onto one large square of cotton, tossed it up, and was off to deliver them to a secondhand-clothes dealer in Tenma. Lift corner to corner, give it a turn, tie. Tie the other pair. That alone made a firm bundle, and one you could shoulder on your back.

The dealer's shop was called the Izutsuya, and a mistress named Osono kept it running single-handed. Old clothes were heaped in mountains along the shopfront, and beside them a single errand boy was wrapping each customer's purchase in a furoshiki and handing it across. When I untied my bundle and spread the bolts out, Osono ran her fingers over the weave and nodded, humming to herself.

"Good cotton, this. I'll buy it off you at your price, no haggling."

While the business was settled and we sat over a cup of tea, the errand boy at the shopfront had stopped in the middle of his wrapping and was gazing hard at my furoshiki — the big one I had carried on my back.

"Excuse me. That way you tie it — would you teach it to me too?"

"Gladly," I laughed. "You bring the corners together on the slant, like so. Tie it too tight and you'll never get it undone. Just so, no more. This here is a mamusubi, a square knot. The harder you pull, the tighter it draws; but press the ends this way and it comes loose in an instant. For tying a load there's nothing to beat it."

The boy tried the knot on one of the shop's cloths, watching and copying. The first time it fell slack and undid itself; the second he drew it so tight he was in a fine fix over it. Osono laughed at his elbow.

"Clumsy thing, aren't you. Listen — tying isn't about strength. You let the cloth teach you."

This Osono handled a single cloth as though it were a conjuring trick. Measure out rice and wrap it, and it was a rice sack; give the neck a twist round a sake flask, and it was a carrier you could swing along by hand. Spread it flat on the earthen floor and it was a stand to show her wares to a customer. Let the rain begin to patter and she would throw it over her head for a hat. When the need was done, she folded it away into her breast. It took up no room, and if it got dirty you washed it. With this one thing, most matters could somehow be managed.

"A box is heavy, a basket is bulky," Osono said. "But a furoshiki turns into a shape only when you want one, and goes back to being plain cloth when you don't. A trader's load changes its bulk between the going and the coming, doesn't it. Once you've sold your goods, you come home with nothing but yourself. Carry a box on your back then, and it's a plain nuisance and no more. But a cloth folds into your breast. There's no cleverer way of making up a load."

Just so, I thought, admiring it. Because it never settles on a shape, it can become any shape at all. Each time I tied that cloth, I felt, deep down, what a fine thing this ordinary human knack for living really was.

Osono was teaching the boy that there was more than one way to wrap. A square box you set on the slant in the middle of the cloth, then fold the four corners over it in turn. A round melon you take by the opposite corners, wrap with a turn, and knot at the top, and the knot itself makes the handle. A long thing, a flask or a scroll, you lay flat and roll up from one end, twisting the two ends to fasten it. Books and ledgers you fold flat, so the corners stand square. You look at the shape of the thing inside, and it is the cloth that answers to it.

"Cloth doesn't complain," Osono said. "Square or round, long or short, it holds its tongue and takes the shape of whatever it's given. Trade, in truth, ought to be the same way."

Osaka was a town where everything turned on trade. From morning to night, people passed to and fro with loads on their shoulders. Clerks making the rounds of their customers, apprentice boys carrying gifts, head clerks with the collection ledgers tucked under one arm — every one of them had a furoshiki bundle swinging at his shoulder or his side. What was inside might be bolts of cloth, or a box of sweets, or, at the year's end, the coin gathered on the collecting rounds. That single cloth wrapped up the very lifeblood of this trading town, and quietly carried it along.

From the knot of a bundle, Osono said, you could tell the standing of the house and even the care of the one who carried it. And so in the merchant houses of Osaka, before they set a child to reading and writing, they first taught the tying of the furoshiki. A bundle tied well was, in itself, a kind of greeting.

Just then a wife came hurrying in. She had been asked to a wedding in the next quarter, she said, and in her arms she held the flask of celebratory sake. As ill luck would have it the spring rain had begun outside, and she fretted and fretted over the sleeves of her good clothes getting wet.

"Osono, dear. I want to carry this without letting it get wet."

Osono took a furoshiki from the shelf and set the flask in the middle of it. She ran the cloth round the pinch of its neck, drew it into a quick knot, made a handle of it, and with the length that was left draped it softly over the flask's shoulders.

"There. Now the rain's kept off, and you can swing it in one hand and hold your umbrella in the other. It wouldn't do to turn up at a wedding with both hands full."

The wife thanked her again and again and went out into the rain. The handle of the cloth that wrapped the flask swung to and fro, to and fro, in time with her steps.

"Wrapping, now," said Osono, sipping her tea, "isn't only a matter of guarding what's inside. It's bad manners to hold a bare, unsightly thing out to another person, isn't it. So you wrap it. You hide it in a clean cloth, you set the knot to rights, and you hold it out in both hands. Do that, and it's your own heart, wrapped there, that reaches the other before the thing inside ever does."

As I was leaving, the errand boy tugged softly at my sleeve. On his open palm lay a small furoshiki bundle, tied with the very square knot he had just learned.

"Here. For teaching me, before."

I undid it, and inside were a few sweets. The knot was still lopsided, but it had drawn up just so, and came loose just so. I laughed and tossed one into my mouth. To hand something to another with the knot he had just been taught — that alone seemed already to be more joy than this child could well contain.

Nowadays there are bags, and there are paper sacks, and the goods for the most part come wrapped from the start. Those who use a furoshiki have grown very few. Each time I see a thin sack used the once and thrown away, something in me is left uneasy. That one cloth could be washed over and over, and used for decades on end.

Even so, when it comes to a formal gift, or celebratory sake, people still wrap it in a single cloth. They set the knot neatly to rights and hold it out in both hands. That heart — of trusting everything to one cloth and carrying it along — has not yet died out.

Every time I see a furoshiki bundle tied neatly, I remember that spring in Osaka. The way Osono of the Izutsuya laid the cloth so softly over the shoulders of the flask. That a thing which holds no shape of its own can hold the most of all — that one cloth is teaching it still, somewhere even now, in someone's hands.

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