About the Twenty Large-Scale Tapestries

Machiya Townhouse and Storehouse
72 (H) × 144 (W) cm
Production period: 3 months, 1998–1999
Chikuzen Museum of Dyeing and Weaving, Patchwork Quilt Exhibition — Ikuma Dan Award

In November 1998, I began stitching this work, inspired by buildings in my hometown of Fushimi.

With no models or reference materials to guide me, I completed it entirely through self-taught methods and experimentation. It became the first of my Machiya Quilts.

After completing the work, I began my creative career in 2000 and entered it in a juried quilt exhibition in Kitakyushu. To my great surprise, I received the Ikuma Dan Award, presented by the late composer Ikuma Dan.

At the award ceremony, Mr. Dan said to me, “It has a wonderful sense of rhythm. I like the composition, looking straight at the buildings from the front.” His words gave me the confidence to continue creating.

This work became the starting point of my life as a quilt artist, bringing me many wonderful encounters and connections in the years that followed. It remains deeply important to me as the work I consider the origin of my creative journey.

The Ancient Capital
221 (H) × 177 (W) cm
Production period: 6 months, 2000–2001

This is my second Machiya Quilt.

In 2001, I was invited to exhibit a work in a quilt exhibition organized by Nihon Vogue Co., Ltd. at Ginza Mitsukoshi in Tokyo. For the first time, I conceived a large-scale composition combining machiya townhouses with the surrounding landscape.

I had only about six months from receiving the invitation to submitting the finished work, but designs and ideas seemed to pour out of me. Even methods of construction and sewing that I had never considered before came to me one after another, and I became completely absorbed in creating the work.

Through the making of this piece, I developed my own method of drafting, which I call “frontal representation and flattening”: depicting the buildings and landscapes I had seen from a direct frontal viewpoint and translating them into a flattened composition. I also established the basic construction method I use for large-scale tapestries, assembling and stitching the work progressively from the bottom upward.

It was with this work that the distinctive working methods I would continue to develop in my later pieces first took shape.

883 roof tiles, 102 lattice elements, and approximately 900 cherry blossom petals.

Okuribi — The Farewell Fires
162 (H) × 178 (W) cm
Production period: 4 months, 2001

This is my third work.

I created this work to depict Kyoto on the night of August 16, shortly after 8:00 p.m., when the fires of the Gozan Okuribi have been lit on the surrounding mountains.

I carefully varied the colors of the roof tiles and pillars so that each of the machiya townhouses standing side by side would be individually distinguishable, giving each house its own character.

To make the seams between the pieces virtually disappear, the pattern pieces interlock like a complex puzzle, making the construction and sewing process extremely intricate. This work clearly demonstrates some of the defining characteristics of my Machiya Quilts.

I entered this work in two major juried exhibitions in the quilt world, but it was not selected for either. At the time, I was deeply disappointed, wondering how this work could fail even to be accepted for exhibition.

Yet that experience became a turning point. I decided not to belong to any handicraft organization, but instead to introduce my Machiya Quilts through my own solo exhibitions and remain true to my own artistic style.

This is an important work for me because it determined the direction my creative career would take.

Machiya Townhouse and Storehouse became the starting point of my Machiya Quilts. The Ancient Capital established the foundation of my distinctive working methods. And Okuribi — The Farewell Fires determined the path I would follow as an artist.

With these first three works as guideposts, I continued onward, creating the works that followed.

The Red-Brick Western-Style Building
114 (H) × 159 (W) cm
Production period: 5 months, 2001

This is my fourth work.

In my neighborhood stands a red-brick Western-style building dating from the Meiji period. Today it serves as the main building of Seibo Jogakuin, and I understand that until the end of World War II, it housed the headquarters of the Imperial Japanese Army’s 16th Division.

I gathered brick-colored kimono fabrics and scraps and began joining them together, carefully matching the colors as though I were laying the bricks one by one. As I stitched, the building gradually began to emerge. It gives me great joy to be able to transform a familiar scene from my own surroundings into a work of art.

Whether I am stitching a machiya townhouse or a Western-style building, I enjoy letting my imagination wander as I work: “What kind of history does this building hold? What stories might it have to tell?”

I find great meaning in creating quilts that portray landscapes and buildings carefully preserved and passed down through generations, hoping that my work might convey something of the presence of the people who have lived their lives in and around them.

Sake Breweries of Fushimi
90 (H) × 104 (W) cm
Production period: 2 months, 2002

This is my fifth work.

I love the scenery of the sake breweries here in Fushimi, Kyoto—the contrast between their white plaster walls and black wooden siding, and the changing shades of green of the willow trees from season to season.

In the early years of my creative career, I wanted to portray my hometown of Fushimi through quilt, and one after another, I stitched the familiar landscapes around me.

Around this time, I began to develop an increasingly subtle and distinctive approach to selecting fabrics: matching the texture and character of the fabric itself to the textures and atmosphere I perceived in the buildings and landscapes before me.

I also became determined to continue developing my method of expression based on piecing—joining one piece of fabric to another through stitching.

Thirteen years after creating this work, I would return to Fushimi’s sake brewery landscape on a much larger scale, depicting the Matsumoto Sake Brewery in one of my major works.

Autumn Splendor of the Ancient Capital
141 (H) × 102 (W) cm
Production period: 2½ months, 2002

This is my sixth work.

In autumn, the mountains of Kyoto turn beautiful shades of red and yellow. I wanted to add an autumn scene to my series of Machiya Quilt tapestries, and so I created this work.

It is impossible to reproduce in fabric the exact colors of a landscape as we see them. Instead, wanting to preserve the feeling of wonder I experienced when standing before those beautiful mountains, I gathered fabrics in the colors of autumn and stitched them together to create this work.

People are often surprised by how short the production period was, but I work entirely on my own, without any sewing assistants.

I believe that in a work of textile craft, every stitch is an expression of the artist. For that reason, I cannot imagine having another person’s stitches become part of my work.

Around 2002 and 2003, my creative energy was at its height, and I was producing works at a remarkable pace.

Nanzen-ji Temple — Suirokaku Aqueduct
166 (H) × 121 (W) cm
Production period: 2 months, 2003

This is my seventh work.

I used scraps of sarasa fabric given to me by a kimono shop to evoke the appearance of the old brickwork.

When I first received these scraps, I thought, “They’re beautiful fabrics, but these aren’t the colors of machiyatownhouses, so I probably won’t be able to use them in my work.”

Then one day, I came across a photograph of the Suirokaku Aqueduct in a newspaper and was astonished by how closely the colors of its bricks resembled those of the sarasa scraps.

It felt almost as though someone were telling me, “Use those scraps to create this scene.”

I immediately went to Nanzenji Temple, took numerous photographs of the aqueduct, and began working out the composition.

Using the photographs as reference, I carefully considered the subtle variations in color from brick to brick. Because only a limited amount of the fabric remained, I calculated how much I could use as I worked, making sure that not a single precious scrap went to waste.

Colors of Spring
205 (H) × 174 (W) cm
Production period: 9 months, 2004–2005
30th Anniversary Japan Handicraft Art Exhibition, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum
Mainichi Shimbun Award — Open Competition Division

This is my eighth work.

Approximately 1,900 pattern pieces were created for the roof tiles alone. I used around 260 different kimono fabric scraps in this work, carefully selecting different materials—including silk, cotton, and linen—to match the texture and character of each part of the landscape.

Following The Ancient Capital, Okuribi — The Farewell Fires, and Ancient Capital in Autumn Splendor, this work represents the culmination of my series of large-scale Machiya Quilt tapestries.

It incorporates all the sewing and construction techniques I had developed up to that point. Completing this work gave me the foundation to move beyond the machiya series and take on large-scale landscape quilts, including Kiyomizu-dera Temple and the Taj Mahal.

From The Restaurant of Many Orders
— The Wildcat House —
110 (H) × 114 (W) cm, 2007

This is my ninth work.

At the time, I was also involved in reading performances, and I created this work as a backdrop for those events.

I imagined the Wildcat House, the mysterious restaurant that appears in Kenji Miyazawa’s The Restaurant of Many Orders. Inspired by the story, I wanted to evoke both its slightly unsettling atmosphere and its sense of fairy-tale fantasy.

Unlike my Machiya Quilts, which are based on buildings and landscapes that actually exist, this work grew entirely out of a story. Through my reading performances, I discovered a new way of creating: imagining a world from words and bringing that imagined world to life through quilt.

Taking on the new challenge of reading performances opened up a whole new dimension in the creative world of Sayoko Hayashi’s quilts.

Kiyomizu-dera Temple
90 (H) × 222 (W) cm
Production period: 6 months, 2007–2008
Approximately 130 different fabrics used

This is my tenth work.

When I look at a landscape or a building, the design and drafting plan seem to form naturally in my mind. I instinctively judge whether what I am seeing can—or cannot—be translated into stitching. When I looked out over the entire Kiyomizu-dera Temple complex from the Koyasu Pagoda, I immediately felt, “This is a landscape I can stitch!”

By the time I begin drawing the plan, I am already thinking about the order in which the pieces will need to be sewn together. Using my method of “frontal representation and flattening,” I must create what I call a “stitchable plan”—a drawing that can actually be constructed in fabric.

The colors also appear in my mind as soon as I conceive the design. I do not color the drawing itself. Instead, I imagine the completed work in color and begin sewing, selecting and matching fabrics from those I already have at hand.

Because the pieces are joined together in such a complex sequence, I cannot go back and resew a section later. I work carefully, thinking through both which fabric should be used in each place and the precise order in which the pieces must be stitched together.

From Gongitsune(Gon, the Little Fox)
— Hyoju’s House —
78 (H) × 94 (W) cm, 2009

This is my eleventh work.

I created this work as a backdrop for a reading performance, inspired by Nankichi Niimi’s story Gongitsune (Gon, the Little Fox).

Landscapes like this often appear in traditional Japanese tales: a thatched-roof house, a small Jizo statue, a large tree, susuki grass, and red spider lilies. Perhaps such a scene represents a kind of archetypal Japanese landscape—one that evokes a shared sense of nostalgia even in people who grew up in cities and have never experienced life in the countryside.

Around this time, I became increasingly aware that what I truly wanted to create were works that would gently touch the heart and evoke a sense of nostalgia in those who viewed them.

The Taj Mahal
107 (H) × 165 (W) cm
Production period: 5 months, 2009–2010

This is my twelfth work and my first attempt to portray a landscape outside Japan.

When I stood before the Taj Mahal during a trip to India, I immediately thought, “I can stitch this!”

I bought some white sari fabric in India and brought it home with me. After returning to Japan, I created the design and drafting plan and began stitching. But I soon realized that neither the white kimono fabrics I had collected nor the white Indian sari fabric could capture the subtle variations of light and shade in the Taj Mahal’s white marble. My work came to a halt. Never before had I been forced to stop working simply because I did not have the fabric I needed.

Around that time, I had become acquainted with a textile dyer, so I asked for help. The dyer created a five-step gradation from white to gray especially for this work. I also described in detail the color I envisioned for the background and had that fabric dyed accordingly.

From approximately three meters of gradated fabric, with its subtle shifts in value, I cut out precisely the shades I needed. By carefully matching these tones to create the effect of shadows falling across the marble, I was able to give the Taj Mahal a sense of depth and three-dimensional form.

The Ghats of the Ganges
97 (H) × 160 (W) cm
Production period: 6 months, 2010

This is my thirteenth work.

When I visited the Ganges in India, I thought, “I want to stitch this landscape too!” I returned home with many photographs of the buildings and the people gathered along the river.

For this work, I struggled with the design of the buildings, the overall color composition, and especially the choice of fabrics.

By this point, the complex construction and sewing itself presented no particular difficulty; I was able to draw on the techniques I had developed through my previous works. The challenge was finding materials that would allow me to portray an Indian landscape naturally using Japanese kimono fabrics. I was also struck by how different the colors of Indian architecture were from those of buildings in Japan.

My work is fundamentally based on piecing—joining fabric to fabric through stitching. If I were to reproduce the landscape exactly as I saw it, the composition would become far too complex to construct in this way.

So I selected the buildings that had made the strongest impression on me and rearranged them into a composition that felt natural as a whole. Using my method of “frontal representation and flattening,” I transformed the scene into what I call a “stitchable composition.”

The people gathered on the ghats are the actual people who were there when I visited. I photographed them on location, and later asked a friend who is a textile dyer to transfer those photographs onto fabric so that I could incorporate them into the work.

I hope that through this work, you can feel something of the energy I experienced in the city of Benares.

The Forest Within
76 (H) × 56 (W) cm
Production period: 1 month, 2012

This is my fourteenth work and the first in which I stitched an inner landscape.

A wounded heart can heal with time, just as a hollow in a tree gradually heals around its wound. And that hollow may eventually become a shelter or a home for small creatures.

The strength and tenderness that can grow from being wounded; hope and sorrow. To take all that we experience in life as nourishment, and to keep growing straight and strong, like a tree reaching upward—these are the thoughts and feelings I wanted to express in this work.

Effort, hope, courage, and the unseen forces that sustain us—if you can feel something of these through this work, I would be very happy.

Cherry-Lined Path — Life
86 (H) × 173 (W) cm
Production period: 4 months, 2012

This is my fifteenth work.

My mother had been ill for a long time and was unable to go out to see the cherry blossoms. I began this work with the wish that she could always have cherry blossoms to look at from her hospital bed. I chose as my subject the rows of cherry trees along the Sewari Embankment in Yawata—a landscape I wished I could show her.

Around the time I began this work, I was told that the flame of my mother’s life would soon go out. I stitched as though I were praying.

With a solo exhibition approaching, I stayed by my mother’s side in the hospital and worked on the final embroidery beside her bed. As I continued stitching, I silently repeated in my heart, “Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu…”

When the work was nearly complete, I showed it to my mother and spread it over her blanket. She gently stroked the quilt and said sadly, “I’m sorry I won’t be able to come to your exhibition.”

This became the last work of mine that my mother ever saw.

On the day of her funeral, I draped this quilt over her coffin. To my surprise, it fit almost perfectly.

My mother had endured many hardships in her life, but she was always proud that I had become a textile craft artist, and would often tell the nurses about my work. I like to think that perhaps, in the end, I was able to do one last thing for her as her daughter.

I want to believe that, carried on the flurry of cherry blossoms in this work, my mother made her way to the Pure Land.

Fushimi Threadscape — Sake Brewery Landscape
142 (H) × 295 (W) cm
Production period: 2 years, 2013–2015
Approximately 2,000 pieces of fabric joined together
Approximately 440 leaves on the tree at left
Approximately 65 skeins of embroidery thread
Tens of thousands (?) of embroidered stitches for the rapeseed flowers

This is my sixteenth work.

After losing my mother in 2012, I lost the desire to create. I stopped working for a while, and then began to think that I might slowly stitch a familiar scene of the sake breweries of Fushimi, taking all the time I needed, without scheduling a solo exhibition or setting myself a deadline.

To overcome the grief of my mother’s death and the darkness I was carrying within me at the time, I decided to make time my ally. For that reason, I chose to create my largest work to date.

The design itself was not technically difficult. I thought that if I simply kept my hands moving, stitch by stitch, the work would eventually be completed—and that by the time I had finished stitching this landscape, I might have found my way back to myself.

I also made color my ally.
The achromatic roof tiles to quiet my heart.
The black wooden walls to look within myself.
The red brick to give me strength.
The green embankment for the vitality of life.
The blue sky to set me free.
And the yellow rapeseed blossoms for hope and courage.

The fabric for the clear blue sky was specially dyed for me by a friend who is a textile dyer.

Exactly two years after I began, the work was complete.

I felt as though everything I had been carrying within me had been transformed and released through the completion of this work.

When I presented this piece at my 15th-anniversary solo exhibition in 2015, a representative from the Miyama Kayabuki Museum, having seen a newspaper article about the exhibition, came to visit. That encounter led to an invitation to hold a solo exhibition at the museum in 2017—and from that connection came my next work, Miyama Kayabuki Story.

Through Fushimi Threadscape — Sake Brewery Landscape, I came to understand deeply how encounters and connections with other people can lead me to create works I might never otherwise have made.

Miyama Kayabuki Story
220 (H) × 175 (W) cm
Production period: 1 year, 2016–2017

This is my seventeenth work and was created as the centerpiece of my 2017 exhibition at the Miyama Kayabuki Museum.

I wanted to create a work depicting thatched-roof houses through all four seasons. As I joined the pieces together, I imagined myself actually living in the village among these houses.

The composition begins with March at the lower left. From there, the seasons unfold as the eye moves to the right and then zigzags upward, as though climbing a hillside, until it reaches February at the upper left. In this way, the cycle of the seasons—from spring through winter—is woven into the composition itself.

I construct the work from bottom to top, joining the pieces together in a complex process much like assembling a puzzle. Every pattern piece in my work is different in size, and because they must be joined together in such an intricate sequence, I cannot rearrange the fabrics or go back and resew them once they are in place.

Choosing and matching each fabric while considering the colors above, below, and on either side is difficult—but it is also one of the most rewarding parts of the process.

Night of the Full Moon
96 (H) × 99 (W) cm
Production period: 3 months, 2018

This is my eighteenth work.

I stitched the machiya townhouse where I was born and raised.

Late into the night, I am inside, working on my quilts. Above me is a full moon.

Unaware that it is a full-moon night, I quietly continue stitching alone.

The moonlight shines gently, as though wrapping the machiya in its soft glow.

This is the scene I imagined as I created this work.

The Blossoming of Machiya Quilts
208 (H) × 190 (W) cm
Production period: 1 year, 2019–2020
My 20th Anniversary Work
Approximately 3,000 pieces of fabric joined together
2,020 appliquéd leaves
Approximately 280 different fabrics used

This is my nineteenth work, created to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of my creative career.

There was once an old tree in the garden of the machiya where I was born and raised. For various reasons, we had to cut it down, and I had always felt sorry for what we had done to it. With that tree in my thoughts, I created this work, imagining nine of my works blossoming upon its branches like flowers.

The nine works blooming on the tree are representative designs from my Machiya Quilt series.

Over the years, I adapted these designs for teaching and developed them into a curriculum for my Machiya Quilt classes. My classes have always been small, but students have continued to come throughout the years. Being able to teach and pass on my own distinctive style has become a great source of confidence for me.

The works that have sustained my creative life have also brought me many wonderful encounters, allowing beautiful blossoms to unfold throughout my life as a textile craft artist.

In this piece, I brought together the three worlds of expression that I have developed through my work: Machiya Quilts, Landscape Quilts, and Tree Quilts.

This work represents my twenty years of creative activity, filled with gratitude for all that those years have given me—for the students who came to my classes, and for every person whose path has crossed mine along the way.

I was appliquéing the leaves during the period of COVID-19 restrictions in 2020, so I decided to stitch exactly 2,020 leaves onto the work. As I counted and stitched them one by one, I found myself wondering how the world would change from that point onward.

This work has become especially important to me, holding within it both the memories of my twenty years as an artist and my thoughts and feelings during the time of the pandemic.

Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine
252 (H) × 170 (W) cm
Production period: 2 years, 2023–2025

This is my twentieth work, created to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of my creative career.

For this milestone work, I chose Fushimi Inari Taisha, a place in my hometown that has been familiar to me since childhood. I actually made the pilgrimage around Mount Inari myself, photographing the torii gates I encountered along the way.

I composed the work with the viewer’s journey through the image in mind: the eye passes through the Romon Gate of Fushimi Inari Taisha and then travels upward, as though entering and making its way through Mount Inari. I stitched each torii gate with the intention of rendering it as faithfully as possible.

Integrating the Senbon Torii—the thousands of vermilion torii gates—naturally into the forested landscape of Mount Inari brought together all the skills and techniques I had developed over twenty-five years.

Many people also gave me fabrics and threads for this work. In that sense, all the connections and relationships that have supported me over the years have come together here, in Fushimi Inari Taisha.

Twenty-eight years ago, it all began when I stitched a single machiya townhouse. Since then, I have continued forward, one stitch at a time, until at last I arrived here, at Fushimi Inari Taisha.

I am filled with gratitude.