Nishijin: Kyoto brocade, on your table
Shop the Nishijin table runners
Fold a Japanese woman's kimono away and the last thing to go in the drawer is the obi, the wide sash that holds it closed. On an ordinary day it is cotton or plain silk. On a wedding day, at a tea ceremony, at New Year, it is Nishijin brocade: a stiff, heavy weave shot through with gold, so dense with pattern that a single obi can take months to make. It is the most expensive piece of cloth most Japanese families will ever own, and it is worn where it can be seen, across the back, at the center of the room.
That is the cloth on these table runners.
Nishijin table runners · woven in Kyoto · table scenes are visualizations
Nishijin, the weavers' quarter
Nishijin is not a company or a technique but a neighbourhood: a grid of narrow streets in the north-west of Kyoto where silk has been woven for roughly twelve hundred years. The name means "western camp." In the 1470s a civil war split the capital in two, and when the fighting stopped the weavers came home and settled where the western army had pitched its tents. The looms have been clattering there ever since. Walk the district today and you can still hear them through the lattice windows.
What the quarter is known for is mon-ori, figured weaving. The pattern is not printed onto finished cloth; it is built into the fabric thread by thread, with gold and silver leaf wound around a silk core so that the metal sits on the surface and catches the light. Hold a piece up to a window and tilt it: the design brightens and dims as you move. That is the effect no photograph quite captures, and the reason a runner made this way changes a table more than its thirty centimetres suggest.
Why a runner
Nishijin cloth was never made for tables. It was made for obi, and it is still woven in obi width, about thirty centimetres. That happens to be the width of a table runner, and it is why a runner, rather than a tablecloth or a placemat, is the honest way to bring this weave into a dining room: the fabric is used at the width the loom makes it, with its finished selvedges, backed and hemmed so it lies flat.
Ours are YUWEN originals. The patterns were drawn up with a long-established Nishijin house that weaves for us in short runs, which is why most designs exist in small numbers and some, this season, in ones. They come in two lengths: 200 cm, which runs the length of a six-seat table with a hand's width to spare at each end, and 235 cm for an eight-seat table or a long sideboard.
Reading the patterns
Every motif on a Nishijin cloth means something, and once you know the vocabulary the runners read like sentences. Here are the ones on the table this season.
Crane, pine, bamboo and plum. The crane is said to live a thousand years and mates for life, so it is the bird of weddings and long marriages. Pine stays green through winter, bamboo bends without breaking, and plum is the first tree to flower, often while snow is still on the branches. Together the three are called "the three friends of winter," and a cloth that carries all of them, with cranes in flight above, is the classic dressing of a Japanese New Year table. The vermilion version has red and purple blossoms; the pink is softer, for spring.
The twelve animals. Japan counts years in the Chinese zodiac cycle, and the animal of the coming year is everywhere in December: on greeting cards, on sweets, on the little clay figures sold at shrines. This black runner carries all twelve at once, rabbit and tiger and dragon and boar picked out in gold and silver among pine and plum, which makes it the one you can bring out every year. Guests find their own animal somewhere along the table. It is also the one design here that is not pale, and it does something serious for white porcelain.
The myriad treasures. Takarazukushi is a scatter of lucky objects: the magic mallet that grants wishes when struck, the wish-fulfilling jewel, a clove, a key to the storehouse, a hat that makes its wearer invisible. It has decorated wedding kimono for centuries because it is, in effect, a list of everything you could wish someone. On a runner it turns a dinner into a small act of hospitality.
Tortoiseshell and flower diamond. The hexagon is kikko, the tortoise's shell, and the tortoise, like the crane, stands for a long life. The flower set in a diamond is hanabishi, one of the patterns the Kyoto court wore a thousand years ago and still one of the commonest family crests. The ivory and gold version is formal without being loud; the pink hanabishi is the same idea in a single colour, and the one to choose if you want the weave without the story.
Waves, gold leaf and cherry blossom. The overlapping arcs of seigaiha, "blue ocean waves," are a wish for calm that goes on and on; here they run in gold and silver on white, at the longer 235 cm. Scattered gold leaf on white or platinum is the quietest of the set and the one that looks most at home under a Western dinner service. And sakura on gold branches needs no translation.
On a Western table
The mistake is to treat a runner like this as a Japanese object that needs Japanese things around it. It does not. In Kyoto the same cloth sits under black lacquer and gold; in a New York apartment it sits under white plates, clear glass and whatever silver you own, and it looks like it was always meant to. A few things that help:
Run it down the center and let it hang a little at each end; a runner that stops short of the table edge looks like a placemat that lost its way. Keep the tableware simple, white or a single colour, and let the cloth carry the pattern. If you want a second Japanese note, one is enough: a half-moon tray at each place, or a pair of lacquer chopsticks laid across a Western setting.
Off the table, a runner along a console or the top of a chest of drawers is how many Japanese homes use them for most of the year. Folded in thirds it becomes a mat for a vase or a single bowl.
Looking after it
Brocade with metal thread wants the same care as a good silk tie. Brush crumbs off rather than wiping; blot a spill with a dry cloth and stop there. The polyester-ground runners can be hand-washed and dried flat in the shade; the cotton-and-silk ones with gold thread should go to the dry cleaner. Roll rather than fold for storage, away from sun and damp, and it will outlast the table.
The whole set is here: Nishijin table runners. All are woven in Kyoto, and to the US they ship with import duties included, so the price you see is the price at the door.