Ink-Blue Chawan

The edge billowing in waves, the deep indigo of this matcha bowl suggests night, deep waters, and the profoundest of pen inks, tempered by a spongy pattern like seafoam—the surface remains, however, liquidly smooth. Its fine production reveals itself in formal details: the lip curling inward funnels tea just to other lips, the kodai, or foot, is a charmingly rounded hexagon, and the spiraled traces of its hand-throwing evoke ripples. Yet these dark swirling eddies become a shore against which the tea drinker’s bright green matcha will lap in ecstatic contrast.