In search of a comfortable discomfort

In dreams, multiple events that occurred in reality are sometimes blended together and projected as a single experience. The experience itself is real, but when you wake up and think back on it, it is somehow strange. On the surface, the events that make up the dream seem to have no basis for being chosen and have little relevance, but they have something in common, even if they cannot be verbalised.

There seem to be films and novels that take this approach. Barn Burning is a short story by the American writer William Faulkner, which has been included in various collections of short stories. Japanese author Haruki Murakami published a Japanese translation of the novel in the January 1983 issue of Shincho, entitled 'Barn Burning'.

Several commentators have pointed out that Murakami used this short story as a conforming frame for writing this work, as it describes "I" reading a short story by Faulkner and the title is very similar to Faulkner's "Barn Burning". Since the two works are completely different in content, only Murakami himself can say whether he took Faulkner's work as a reference point.

However, I believe that it is precisely this structure that expresses the theme of Haruki Murakami's work 'Burning Down the Barn'. The synopsis of Haruki Murakami's 'Barn Burning' is as follows

At an acquaintance's wedding party, 'I' met 'my girlfriend', an advertising model, and we soon started dating. She is a mime and has several boyfriends in addition to me. One of them and I happened to have dinner together one day. During a casual exchange over marijuana and drinks, 'her' new boyfriend unexpectedly says: 'Sometimes I burn down the barn.

'Sometimes I burn down the barn.'

He actually likes to pour petrol on the barn, set it on fire and burn it down. He also plans to burn down another barn in the area in the near future. I started to look around at some of the barns in the neighbourhood, but did not find any that had burnt down after a while. When I met "him" again, he said, "The barn? Of course I burnt it down. Of course I burnt it down, it was burnt down beautifully". The burnt barn has not been found to this day, but I have not seen 'her' since.

This is a work with a strange texture, in which reality and fantasy are juxtaposed. In our daily lives, we are exposed to and remember various events. In the process, we organise them as information and store them as knowledge, which helps us to act on something or provides a basis for supporting our spirit. However, events are never preserved in their original form, but are constantly influenced and transformed by external influences. The approach taken in the production of this collection was to represent a spiritual world that is a mixture of reality and illusion.

The leather jackets are made from vegetable-tanned leather from Tuscany, Italy, and sewn in Kyoto. The tannery that produces the leather, INCAS LEATHER, is LWG Gold rated. This guarantees traceability of raw materials, high environmental standards and efficient use of energy and water in the tanning process. Vegetable tanning is the use of only vegetable and natural tannins for tanning and leather preservation.

The knitwear is made from merino wool and fine Peruvian alpaca from the Arles region of southern France, which is free-range in the wilderness, and is produced in a knitwear factory with a history of over 60 years in Gosen, Niigata Prefecture. The knit with a black panther motif consists of a background layer expressed using only four different knitting techniques and a black panther motif expressed using a combination of intarsia and jacquard yarns in three different colours. The half-zip knitwear consists of a multi-layered single-bed ribbed knit using two-coloured yarns and a ribbed structure expressed in a random way.

The denim jacket and trousers are made of original selvedge denim, woven on an old loom from a black warp and brown cotton weft dyed with sulphide dyes. They use solid iron buttons and aluminium rivets. The trousers are also acid-faded and laser-shredded for a destructive finish, and are processed at a denim wash house in Kojima. This factory has achieved a process that significantly reduces the amount of water used in processing.

Leather boots are made from GUIDI&ROSELLINI baby calf and handmade by shoemakers in Asakusa. The sole is made of natural rubber and finished with a cork insole. The laces are made from hand-woven Sanada cords, woven in Kyoto by a lacesmith who has been in the business for 15 generations.

The coats, jumpsuits, trousers and dresses are made from densely woven Ventile® textiles. The textiles used in this collection are 100% natural cotton fabrics made from extra-long staple yarns, which are grown by only 0.04% of the world's cotton farmers. The material is grown without the use of pesticides or chemical fertilisers and is GOTS (Global Organic Textiles Standard) certified.

The fur stoles are made of Tuscan cotton and dyed in a natural dyeing workshop in Kyoto. The dyes used are indigo, ōbo and yōbai (iron-mordant dyes), and each item is hand-dyed by a dyer.

If you produce a collection without a clear theme and with a vague idea in mind, inconsistent pieces will be produced. That said, if you produce with a strong subject in mind, you will be guided, and nothing accidental will be produced. Therefore, for this season, the first collection, I expressed various memories that were recalled in my mind while painting, as they came from my heart.

The motifs are based on an unspecified number of people and their clothes recorded as photographs and illustrations, such as British workers at the end of the 19th century and European clothing advertisements of the same period, and rather than faithfully reproducing them, I dared to intertwine multiple unrelated elements. For example, on the biker jacket, the livery and exhaust details of the first Mustang driven by Steve McQueen in the 1968 Hollywood film Bullitt were added.