Harikuyō: Let My Needles Rest in Peace
Rakuko Rubin
My dearest Misakichan,
I am writing to you in case my upcoming surgery does not go well and this becomes my last request. I have carried something in my heart for many years, and I want to set it down now while I still can.
When I look back, it is no exaggeration to say that my life has been lived in the company of needles—hand needles, machine needles, every kind of needle that exists. After my father died in the war, my mother’s hardships were beyond words. She supported the two of us by sewing and mending kimono, and the moment I was old enough to hold scissors properly, she put me to work beside her. I began by pulling out basting threads, and little by little I learned to sew kimono myself. As the times changed, so did our work, and I spent the better part of my adulthood making Western clothes.
I sewed your dresses, of course, but also turned every scrap of old kimono and wornout clothing into something useful—cushions, patchwork quilts, padded jackets, kotatsu covers, the beanbags you loved to play with, even cleaning rags. Nothing was wasted. It was a life in which we had “nothing, nothing, nothing,” a world unimaginable today.
Through it all, my mother never once complained. I can still see her clearly: silent, steady, bent over her work. In her later years, when her eyesight failed and she could no longer thread a needle, she could still tell silk from cotton, linen from hemp, even the type and region of a tsumugi weave, simply by touch. As her health declined, she entrusted me with a box filled with broken and bent needles and said, “Please give these needles their last rites.” I, too, had been saving my wornout needles, and so I placed mine with hers. But life was busy, and the years slipped by, and here we are.
What I am asking you to do, Misakichan, is this: please take my box of needles and offer them properly in harikuyō when the day for it comes on February 8. You are so involved in your office job, I’m sure you will never use needles in your work. Of course, there is still a chance I will recover. But by writing this down, I can rest easier. And if there is an afterlife, I will be able to tell my mother that her needles were finally given the honor they deserved.
As for the place to perform the ceremony, any shrine or temple will be fine, but since it is so close, you might as well go to Saga Shrine. The purpose of harikuyō is simple: to give thanks to the needles that have supported our lives. In the years after the war, especially in my mother’s time, we made clothing out of any material we could find—homespun cloth, even the rough hemp sacks used for farm goods. Needles broke often in those days.
And so, to ease their long labor through stubborn cloth, the custom is to press each needle, at the end, into something soft—a block of tofu or konnyaku—before offering a prayer for it. This is a final kindness, a gesture of gratitude. Please contact the shrine and be sure that the ceremony is carried out. I am counting on you.
Thank you for all you have done for me over these many years.
Having you as my daughter has been the greatest happiness of my life.
January 31
Mother
--translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin