Parallel Diaries

( ELEIN FLEISS & NAKAKO HAYASHI )

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We are on Instagram : @nakakobooks @nakakohayashi @eleinfleiss @eleinlookingback

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Monday, March 25th — OLD FRIEND

Last March, I traveled to Stockholm and Copenhagen with my family. When I checked into the hotel room in Stockholm, I remembered I got an email from Anders Edström six months ago. He said he lived in Stockholm. I sent an email to him. A few hours later we were at his gallery where his latest works had been shown—very beautiful. On the way home, he drove me to my hotel. We went to a café and talked with each other about how we were doing these days. We have many friends in common. During this trip, I also exchanged messages with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. The last time I met Dominique was 15 years ago. It was like I was traveling overseas and also through time.

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Thursday, April 18th — FOUND PHOTOS

I had very strong back pain in April. Most of the time I could not move. My son was reading Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I felt like I myself became a Gregor Samsa who couldn’t will his body to move. When I got better, I spent time cleaning up my old documents in my workroom since going out still seemed dangerous. I found a photo album that contained photos documenting a party at the Purple Institute during Paris Fashion Week. The photos were probably taken at the end of the 1990s. I do not remember who I asked to take the images. In those days, I was reporting on fashion week for Hanatsubaki magazine and they must have been used for that purpose. Those images are linked with my memories. I really liked being there, whenever I visited Paris for fashion weeks.

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Sunday, March 10th — TALK, TALK, TALK

When I first saw the movie We Margiela, I felt like talking with friends from different generations about their own Margiela experiences. I planned a discussion at a theater before a screening in Tokyo, inviting PUGMENT, a label founded by designers who were born in 1990, artist Yuichiro Tamura, who was born in 1977. After the discussion, we talked at café Les Deux Magots in Shibuya and, later, through Messenger. We just could not stop talking. I also received many messages from people I invited to the talk—they also could not stop talking. In the film, many people who used to work for Margiela spoke a lot, but we also needed to talk after watching.

(Photographs by Yuichiro Tamura)

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Friday, January 4th — OUR EDITORIAL PROJECTS

On a sunny afternoon in early January, just after the three sacred days of Japanese New Year, I opened the first book I edited: Baby Generation. It was published in 1996, the year I turned 30, and a year that also marked eight years of working in the editorial room of Shiseido’s Hanatsubaki magazine. At that time, I was very much into the girlie movement, which started as “riot grrrl” culture in America and then turned into a less political movement when it was introduced to Japan. It spread here as daily life practices based on optimism and spontaneity, which led Japanese women to actively choose their profession and how they wanted to live

The idea of editing an unusual catalogue for an exhibition called Baby Generation came to me all of a sudden. I was very excited and believed it must be created by the best artists who could visualize this movement in the best way possible. In those days, I was working often with Takashi Homma. We talked and decided to ask Mike Mills to curate and design the exhibition and book. We had a meeting in Japan at the end of January, and visited Mike in Los Angeles in early March. After looking at my concept sheet in his office, Mike and Takashi started work immediately. They visited Sofia Coppola’s home and also shot photographs in the homes of two other women artists. I needed to leave for Paris because I was on a business trip for collection week but the exhibition had been scheduled to start at the end of April. We only had six weeks to make the catalogue. Since it was meant to be sold in the exhibition space, it couldn’t be a documentation of the exhibition. Instead, it was meant to document the artists’ houses, the spaces where their artworks normally lived. In the last week of March, Takashi flew to New York to continue shooting other artists’ houses. He visited Kim Gordon and Karen Kilimnik and stayed a few more days in New York before coming back to Tokyo with the design data Mike had prepared. Though it was 1996, the printer we were using—one of the biggest printing companies in Japan—had never produced a publication using data made on computer. It was quite an unusual book at the time because of its thinness, cheapness and the way it had been made.

I also remember how I wrote my text in the book. It was the first time I had written personally about what I was really interested in. I was quite nervous when I wrote it. How could I imagine that 22 years later a younger editor, Maki Takenaka, who is around same age now as I was then, would tell me she had been encouraged a lot by what I wrote and even launched her own media,  a web magazine She is, with a female colleague. It is such a gift.

(Photographs by Mayumi Hosokura)

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Tuesday, October 30th — FAREWELL ODEN PARTY

Last October, Elein traveled through Japan with her daughter Clarissa. They now live in Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val, a village in southwest France.

In the ’90s I used to see Elein twice each year in Paris when I traveled there for collection seasons. In 2001, I became a freelancer and I had my son in 2003, so my visits to Paris happened less often. Elein moved from Paris to Lisbon, where Clarissa was born, and then to Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val.

Ten years ago, when my son was 5, I visited Elein in Lisbon during a family trip. Four years ago she visited Japan with 4-year-old Clarissa. These days, we meet less often but keep in touch. I heard she had begun collecting used clothes, but I didn’t really understand why she started collecting until her recent visit.

While on her trip to Tokyo, Elein organized the beautiful Disappearing exhibition with Yukinori Maeda and Cosmic Wonder. This nine-day exhibition consisted of an installation of her photos and Autre Temps, secondhand clothes collected by Elein and dyed with Sumi by Cosmic Wonder. On the opening day, five models appeared and did a performance at the Center for Cosmic Wonder. I interviewed Elein for i-D Japan magazine and wrote essay for web magazine She is. While she and Clarissa stayed in Tokyo, I spent as much time as possible with them. Before they left from Haneda Airport I held an oden party. I invited people who would see Elein for the first time and also new friends she met during this trip.

At the party, Yuichiro Tamura—who used to read Purple magazine around 1998, during his college days—told Elein that, for him, Purple was a magazine of liberation. We had a very good time. Through conversation I realized that she had been finding beauty in clothes as well as in people who would wear them. When matches occur, a miracle can happen. In this era where so many things exist, beautiful things could only rarely be found—but they do exist. That is what Elein and Cosmic Wonder showed us in the Autre Temps project, but it also appears in the original spirit of early Purple magazines.

We were excitedly speaking about possible projects that we would work on together in the near future.

(Photos by Yuichiro Tamura)

https://sheishere.jp/hottopic/201812-nakakohayashi/

http://fashionpost.jp/portraits/150398

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Saturday, November 17th — KOUMIKO HAS GONE

My friend, poet Koumiko Muraoka, died a few days ago. Since several years she had a disease that made her lose her memory. It was her, about fifteen years ago, who told me I must have a child. She also taught me how to cook spinach and other green leaf vegetables, the Japanese way. I went regularly to her apartment overlooking Montmartre cemetery. Her place was messy, to eat together we had to install a table in a small corridor by the kitchen; then we couldn’t move anymore. Among other dishes, there was always a beef steak that she had cooked in a steel pan. A good meal had to have meat — she lived through the war in Harbin (China) and post-war in poor Japan. At that time, I didn’t know anything about pans, cooking, having kids. I remember the beautiful black and white photos of her twin daughters, Anna and Sophie, pinned on the wall, among many other documents, postcards. She was telling me, bit by bit, about her life, childhood in Harbin, return to Japan, arrival in France in 1966, May 68, living in Berlin, raising kids, having to work. The men figured like a pale detail in the story of her life but her two daughters were more important than anything. Last September she turned 82 years old.

(Photo: in Koumiko’s apartment, about fifteen years ago)

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Friday, August 12th — REMEMBERING THE PAST

I had a talk event at Beams Japan in Shinjuku. Maki Takenaka, an editor of the web magazine "She is," was an interviewer for the talk. While I was preparing for it, I looked at back issues of Here and There.

When I was Maki’s age, I was working on Hanatsubaki magazine. Through that job I got to know Elein Fleiss, Susan Cianciolo, Mike Mills, the people from BLESS, and several others. With the gratitude that I was born in the same era as them, and inspired by their work, I slowly had the idea of making my own magazine that would report on their activities.

After Here and There magazine started, I got to meet several other inspiring people inside and outside of Japan. The new issue includes 46 people, which is the largest number of contributors I've included in a single issue. I didn't plan to include so many people, but I am happy that was the natural path the issue took.

By speaking with Maki for print and web magazines, I remembered a feeling I had when the internet started: a sense of being liberated from the confines of traditional journalism. In a way, I learned a lot from traditional journalism, especially how to communicate with a larger group of people, but I also felt an urge to be free from it.

(Photograph by Yuri Manabe)

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Thursday, September 13th — A GLASS PEN

On the day I bought this glass pen, Shimu wrote to me that this was the best luck day in 2018. But I had been suffering a lot. I wished the situation would get better and bought this pen for myself in Omotesando.

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Sunday, July 15th — A FRIEND SITTING NEXT TO ME

On Sunday I was supposed to see Kiku at a coffee shop in Jimbocho. She was planning to look for a specific book about the cosmos. Jimbocho is a town of used book shops.

I was looking for information on Jimbocho and found an advertisement for a Korean-style sauna in the neighborhood. It seemed good. I asked if Kiku would join. She got interested, too, so we booked the sauna.

I realized that taking a sauna is a folk remedy connected to self-care methods for womens’ bodies. We sat next to each other in the steam, sweated a lot and talked a lot. It was a good experience. My body was light when I walked out of the sauna.

I was feeling sorry for her since I could not attend the opening day on July 13 of the Here and There poster installation at the Center for Cosmic Wonder where she works. During the sauna I told her what happened to me on that day, the fact that I got a call from my son’s school as I was trying to leave the house to visit the exhibition. After we said goodbye at the sauna, Kiku sent me a message saying that what I experienced on 13th must be connected to the star sign of this period: cancer solar eclipse. I was convinced.

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Tuesday, July 10th — HERE AND THERE HYACINTH REVOLUTION ISSUE

The printer called me on July 4, saying he could deliver some copies of Here and There vol. 13, which is titled “Hyacinth Revolution.” I was told it would arrive on July 6, so it was a good surprise.

Today is the day for bookshops to start selling the new issue. There was also a launch event at Utrecht Now Idea. I visited to see how the omikuji house had been installed for the accompanying exhibition. An omikuji is a fortune telling card one can usually find at temples.

I need to explain a little about the new issue: I asked almost 50 people to raise hyacinth bulbs at the beginning of the winter. I said I wanted them to present any works that came from this experience — photos or drawings or diaries or whatever — at the end of March. Some people said they could not participate because of personal reasons. In the end, 42 people joined in this story. I also prepared a story about Elein’s house and Pascale Gatzen’s new teaching method. Past issues normally included around 15 people, so this was an unusually large group of people for me to work with — something I’ve never experienced. I truly enjoyed the process of creating this issue.

Today “here and there library” starts at Utrecht Now Idea, an event that coincides with the launch of the issue for which we planned a new style of omikuji with Ryoko Aoki. Recently, Ryoko has been interested in messages coming from fortune telling, like tarot cards, which she has been integrating into her artworks. I included her interview and exhibition document in Here and There, so this event was connected to the new issue.

Ryoko lives in Kyoto. While she was concentrating on omikuji it started rain hard, and I was very worried. Some areas of Kyoto were becoming flooded. First she sent me a draft for her omikuji messages while it was raining quite hard outside. I thought they were so great and asked her to go on. In the meantime she completed them and then we started thinking of how to represent them. She said that a doll house her daughter created could fit for this project. On July 7, I received a photo of the house. It has a green wall and red roof. Inside, I could see white curtains and a clock. Ryoko said this is a little shrine house for omikuji cards. On the next day, the rain stopped. Ryoko sent the house from Kyoto to Tokyo.

At Utrecht Now Idea, a little temple was installed among books I had created in the past. It was great to see everything that I made during the past 20 years, with this tiny house delivering messages from faraway.

(Photographs by Futoshi Miyagi)

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Saturday, July 7th — LETTERS FROM FRIENDS

Yukinori Maeda sent me a message saying he received the new issue of Here and There. He said this issue is free spirited, which amazed him. “Thank you for showing something beautiful to the world,” he said.

On the same day, I received a message from Elein, who worried if Yukinori was safe in Miyama. She must have heard the news of heavy rain that attacked the western part of Japan. He said he was all right, and that the rain had gotten weaker, thanks to the gods. It is July 7, the day of the Tanabata festival.

(Here and There cover photograph by Elein)

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Tuesday, July 10th — MORNING

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Saturday, June 30th — SPIRITUAL SPACE

Last Saturday, I attended a lecture about meditation and Buddhism. The lecturer explained that the most important thing about Buddhism is that it is not monotheist like Christianity or Islam. Then he spoke about the importance of training: how to concentrate with your mind. Looking back at what humankind has made, culture has often been created by a concentrated state of mind. Concentration means looking inside your mind. We look inside to analyze our thoughts and to reconstruct them.

One day after the lecture, I was attending a talk event run by Kenji Sato, a jewelry designer. He had been on a spiritual journey for the past six months, traveling through several countries in Asia. After that, he launched a collection of jewelry under his Nohara label and held an exhibition of new works. There, I saw nice pendants made with stones wrapped by silk yarn and fabric.

Kenji talked about the experiences he had on his trip, and about spending time at a meditation center in India. There he saw people were very happy and, because of that, the winds were also happy and weeds were also happy. Sensing the happiness of the people, animals gathered naturally, one by one. Such a peaceful landscape was there.

Today I went to the opening of an exhibition by Yukinori Maeda. The space inside Taka Ishii gallery looked like a Japanese Zen garden, a place where gods appear. The elements included in the exhibition, such as water or stone or ashes or washi paper, came from where Yukinori now lives: Miyama, which is a village with wooden houses and thatched roofs in northern Kyoto. Several years ago, Yukinori found this village and, because of its beauty, decided to move in with whole his family and company, Cosmic Wonder.

The environment and the state of one’s mind reflect each other. It was necessary for Yukinori to put himself in a beautiful environment, a peaceful and spiritual landscape, to go beyond where he was.

(Photographs by Nobuhiro Shimura — http://nshimu.com)

Yukinori Maeda exhibition at Taka Ishii Gallery: http://www.takaishiigallery.com/en/archives/23871/

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Sunday, May 27th — DAYDREAM

Roppongi Art Night is a two-day event. As part of theater (TOWER) there were six different programs, which meant that Teppei and the performers had things to do all through the night of the 26th. I wonder if they have slept or not. I attended several events, but not all. On Sunday afternoon Teppei held a workshop to build a sculpture in his own style, connecting everyday objects and building them up high. My friend Aiko was attending this workshop as an instructor. She is a graphic designer who designed Teppei’s book tower (THEATER). Teppei's tower looked calmer now than it did last night, but many activities were happening: the workshop attendants’ towers were being built and things were getting in and out of the holes of Teppei's tower. I went to the back side and saw how this tower system was working. The tower seemed very practical. It supports people’s movement, allowing things to go through the many holes. Among those sitting in the audience, I saw the faces of performers I watched last night. They sat in a line: some of them were watching the workshop enthusiastically, and others were just sleeping. I found this situation quite moving.

Contact Gonzo  http://contactgonzo.blogspot.com Shinji Wada  http://wadashinji.com Teppei Kaneuji  http://teppeikaneuji.com Satoko Shibata  http://shibatasatoko.com Roppongi Art Night  http://www.roppongiartnight.com/2018

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Saturday, May 26th — WHEN DIFFERENT THINGS MEET, OUR IMAGES EXPAND

We saw a huge unstable wooden tower which is six meters high and full of holes built among the tall buildings in Roppongi. The singer Satoko Shibata popped up from a hole with her guitar and sang. The drummer Shinji Wada appeared on the stage with his drum set on his shoulder. Performers from the group Contact Gonzo were climbing the tower, fighting each other. We could not anticipate what would happen. On the night of the tower (THEATER) performance at Roppongi Art Night, my friends contacted me one by one. We met in a vast square among the crowds to see this theater work by Teppei Kaneuji. Four days ago, Teppei told me this work came from a postcard-size drawing that he made 20 years ago when he was completing his master's degree. The idea gradually grew from drawing to animation and has now become a theater work involving almost 30 talented actors, performers, and musicians who come in and out of a structure he designed in collaboration with an architect. It was amazing, and to experience it brought us a strong, fresh sensation.

(Photographs by Masahiro Otani)

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Tuesday, May 22nd — TOWER

Six months ago, I was at a bar in Omotesando with Teppei Kaneuji, Takashi Ogami and a few other people. They had just finished Tower, a new theatrical work in Osaka conceived by Teppei.

Tower involved many performers, musicians, and actors. Teppei is a sculptor who deals with collage, and Tower had been a challenge for him to create a theatrical work. As he connects images from unexpected contexts in his sculptures, he connects many performers in an unexpected and exciting manner in Tower.

In Osaka, on a theatre stage, he built a huge tower that has holes where many things get in and out — including people. Different activities happens at the same time.

That night in Omotesando, the people involved in Tower — the stylist, person working on hair and make up, and photographer — joined one after another at the bar. Together, they had a mood that something had been achieved. Teppei said he would like to hold the performance in Tokyo. They talked about where it could happen. Later, I heard from Takashi that it would be realized at Roppongi Art Night, an outdoor art event in the middle of Tokyo. Takashi is the editor-in-chief of an independent soccer magazine but he sometimes produces independent theatrical works.

I made an appointment with Teppei while he was preparing for the event. I saw that Tower had been built in a huge outdoor square, among many tall buildings. At that time, a few days before the event, I could not imagine what would happen there.

After my conversation with Teppei, I came back home and saw the photograph I had taken of his work. This six-meter-tall wooden tower looked so mysterious and unexpected. It’s beautiful, like a poem.