Kintsugi and the art of repair

In and out of the kitchen

There are 44 seconds of a song by a Korean artist called Yves that sound like watching someone you love fade away slowly. The first two minutes and six seconds of DIM play like a lilting electro-pop song, unremarkable in many ways. Then at 2.06, a lick arrives that signals a universally familiar bittersweetness. The beat drops 15 seconds later and remains melodic for just another half a minute. In those 44 seconds, I imagine listeners recalling their most bittersweet memories and those strange and vaguely hopeful heartbreaks – not the ones still fresh with searing pain, but those resolved ruptures that have simply left a scar.

It reminds me of a line in a movie, “You’ve been blessed with a broken heart. Once it’s gone, that’s when you know it’s over. Live in that for as long as you can.” It’s saccharine but true. When I listen to this song, I’m anticipating the longing and I’m disappointed when it ends too suddenly.

To me, these melting moments are a sonic equivalent to the liquid gold of kintsugi.

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I was making Vietnamese rolls at the time. Rice paper is famously fragile. It could snap at any moment and once soaked in water, you must handle the thin sheets carefully so they don’t tear. Keeping the surface you lay them upon a little moist helps; they are an ingredient so sensitive to a change in atmosphere that you can’t leave them alone for too long. Placing a shiso leaf in the middle protects the inside from the outside – a soft, mossy bed for everything to lie on.

You have to soak each sheet, which I usually do by pouring a thin layer of water on a large dinner plate. Out of pure laziness – or simply because I’ve done it countless times before – I pulled a plate from the stack on the open shelving above me, not bothering to remove the smaller plates sat on top. Suddenly I heard the clean break of clay. Two of my favourite mugs in that distinctly Cornish green, like the colour of the Helford in the mist, lay on the counter, one of them broken into three clean pieces. As it happens I take a sharp inhale and say my name like I’m being told off, only no one else is there to tell me how careless I had been.

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Things will break. Sometimes it will be your fault, but more often than not it is simply the fate of fragile things: ceramics, glass, hearts.

You have to be careful. This should be translated as full of care, although your body can be fizzing with care and you will still make mistakes that cause fractures and ruptures and tiny little breaks like knocking a brand new bowl against a lamp post and hearing the inevitable crack.

I tend to break things; a habit from childhood when I cared enough, often too much, but had an impulsive streak which caused accidents. Everything you touch you destroy is a refrain that rings in my head most days, and it’s strange how your brain can latch onto things flippantly thrown around in the heat of an argument and embed these memories into your psyche – like burning gospel, searing truth right onto your being.

If I am the one who breaks things, does that mean I’m exempt from being broken by another force? Unfortunately not, although in my experience no one can break you harder than you and the ancient, crushing weight of expectation.

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Kintsugi (金継ぎ) is a Japanese art form and philosophy whereby broken pottery is filled with glue mixed with powered gold, silver or platinum. I ordered a kintsugi kit online a few days later, after realising there were more things than I thought that needed repairing. I eagerly awaited the package, intrigued by the art of golden repair.

It arrived a few days later and I read the instructions carefully. The kit comes with two small ceramic bowls – one used for practice. You are supposed to break the bowl by wrapping it in cloth and hitting it against a hard surface, to achieve a clean break. This is then your testing site to make sure you understand how to use everything – the brush, the glue, the gold.

The idea of kintsugi is to create beauty out of something broken. To reveal the imperfections rather conceal them. To heal without forgetting the rupture. And to recognise that these are the scars and marks that make something unique and beautiful.

I put everything back in the box and the kit still sits untouched in the corner of my kitchen. I don’t need a practice run – the clean breaks are plenty, the unclean ones even more so. I imagine it means something that I am putting off this act of repair, waiting for someone like Alex to come and help me do it. The mug in need of repair sits in the middle of the shelf, the first thing I see when I walk into the kitchen.

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In 2015, Death Cab For Cutie released an album named Kintsugi. It’s not named after one of the songs, instead the record sums up the idea of embracing change in the wake of something breaking apart. Track 4 is my favourite on the album, a song about trying to hold something together despite the cracks of distance, change and uncertainty.

It’s a band and a song that remind me of someone specific; far from a clean heartbreak. When my first big relationship ended a few years ago, that was a clean break. In so much that it felt like I had been split down the middle. It hurt more than anything had done before, but months later, all the golden moments had repaired the crack. It was straightforward, something I could understand.

The him before him was more complicated. And perhaps the hardest part was realising that when you orbit someone else, they cannot reciprocate. They are immovable and you are always trying to find your way around them. It feels like the kind of heartbreak that should be suffered in silence. Not big or clean enough to explain to someone else; the pieces so small and scattered that they barely make up a relationship. I always thought of it as a one way conversation. Or an unanswered question. Or a fantasy. Perhaps even a lie. Something that feels like it shouldn’t matter, but splinters in some irreparable anyway.

Upon further listening, the track that follows is the other half of the conversation. It’s an answer to a question. Another sonic version of kintsugi: bittersweet, necessary and illuminating.