At midnight the night before I left for Japan to learn kintsugi, the ancient art of repairing broken pottery, my parents’ kitchen cabinet came crashing to the ground. My dog and I slept through the sound in my childhood bedroom, but when we came downstairs the next morning, we found my mom in her robe staring at all the pieces. For decades, the cabinet had held all of my family’s tableware, which had been deeply sentimental and was now obliterated: ceramic pasta bowls from trips to my grandfather’s hometown in Italy, little blue cereal bowls from my mother’s childhood, Christmas gifts, everything turned into jagged puzzle pieces. My mom had stayed up cleaning, throwing everything away in a daze. I told her to let me take some of the pieces with me to Kyoto, where I’d be learning kintsugi from POJ Studio. In addition to selling crafts from artisans across Japan, the brand offers an intensive two-month kintsugi apprenticeship teaching the golden art of tableware repair.
Kintsugi, which means “to join with gold” in Japanese, is an art form, but also a philosophy: one that teaches us how to celebrate and value the imperfect, broken parts of ourselves, rather than disguising them or tossing them away. For hundreds of years, highly skilled kintsugi artisans have mended the shattered pieces of tableware using golden lacquer, made from the resin of urushi trees, to transform fractures into art—while also restoring stability to the piece, allowing them to be functional again.
I decided to leave the plastic bag of bowl shards that I’d schlepped from the States in my suitcase as I headed out along the Kamo River for my first lesson in POJ’s intimate Kyoto studio. Before I touched a drop of lacquer, my instructor, Satoko, had me pick up my pen. In my other hand, I held a dainty practice teacup that was split into two jagged pieces, and I studied it. I’d never looked at something broken so intently. Satoko asked me to sketch a “patient chart” of the two pieces, before having me place thin, delicate tape along all the crooked breaks.
During the formative years of self-myth-making that carried me to adulthood, I solidified ideas about what I’m good at and what I’m bad at. I am bad at precise, beautiful things, I decided, because I am messy and a little careless with fine details. I am good at writing, I decided, because I can faithfully transcribe reality, almost like a robot, if robots were vulnerable to insecurity. In early 2023, I was diagnosed with an advanced blood cancer, which I spent the entire year fighting with high-dose chemotherapy and nearly a dozen surgeries. I lost so many pieces of myself: hair, a lymph node, friends, blood, money, eggs, energy, joy. In a support group for young adult cancer patients this year, the leader prompted us to creatively write about our experiences for five minutes and I sat silently, hands clammy. When it became my turn to share, I told my peers that it was too much pressure. I hadn’t wanted to start something I couldn’t make perfect, even in the supportive, low-stakes setting of a group of nearly dying strangers.
