A room, a vase, a single stem

Hiro Yamazaki on the discipline of subtraction, and arranging air.

Hiro Yamazaki has been arranging flowers for forty-two years. His studio in Kyoto, on the second floor of a wooden house near the Kamo river, contains, on the morning I visit, exactly three objects: a low table, a ceramic vase the colour of wet slate, and a single white camellia.

The air is the arrangement

He laughs, gently, when I ask about the absence. ‘There is no absence,’ he says. ‘There is air. The air is the arrangement.’

What he means, he explains, is that flowers are not the subject of ikebana. The subject is the relationship between what is shown and what is not — the held breath, the long silence between two notes.

An hour without speaking

We sit for an hour without speaking, watching the camellia. By the end I am no longer sure whether I am looking at a flower, or at the room around it, or at the slow attention the flower has demanded of the room.