Back to Japan: The Life and Art of Master Kimono Painter Kunihiko Moriguchi [Hardcover]

Bustle: Best Book of the Month 

From the critically acclaimed author of The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris, a fascinating, intimate portrait of one of Japan’s most influential and respected textile artists.

Writer, filmmaker, and photographer Marc Petitjean finds himself in Kyoto one fine morning with his camera, to film a man who will become his friend: Kunihiko Moriguchi, a master kimono painter and Living National Treasure—like his father before him.

As a young decorative arts student in the 1960s, Moriguchi rubbed shoulders with the cultural elite of Paris and befriended Balthus, who would profoundly influence his artistic career. Discouraged by Balthus from pursuing design in Europe, he returned to Japan to take up his father’s vocation. Once back in this world of tradition he had tried to escape, Moriguchi contemporized the craft of Yūzen (resist dyeing) through his innovative use of abstraction in patterns.

With a documentarian’s keen eye, Petitjean retraces Moriguchi’s remarkable life, from his childhood during the turbulent 1940s and 50s marked by war, to his prime as an artist with works exhibited in the most prestigious museums in the world.“In the limpid stillness of Marc Petitjean’s sentences, and the focus of his gaze, Back to Japan becomes something deeper than a conventional biography. It’s an act of profound contemplation.”  —Judith Thurman, author of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette

“A treasure of a book about a living treasure. Kunihiko Moriguchi’s story is the story of Japanese craftsmanship at its most elegant, and Marc Petitjean’s intimate biography is a window into a rarefied world most Japanesl³Ã