a quiet auction of pressed things
茉莉花 — jasmine, gathered and set down to dry; bids close by the moon, not by the clock.
Eleven blooms, gathered before dawn while the dew still weighed on them, laid between blotting sheets and forgotten for the better part of a season. The petals have gone the colour of old letters — that warm, almost edible ivory — and they keep, faintly, the smell of the garden they left. Mounted on rag paper with a single line of pencil beneath: for the one who waits. Provenance: a kitchen window in Kobe, 1971.
Current bid ¥ 18,400
Cut at the height of its blue and hung head-down in a cool stairwell until the colour deepened to dust. The stems still snap cleanly; the smell, when you crush a head between two fingers, comes back whole — that grandmother smell, that linen-cupboard smell. The string is the original, a coarse garden twine, knotted twice as if the gardener was not sure once would hold. A scrap of paper, folded small, reads only: from the long bed by the wall. Pressed and kept since the summer the river ran low.
Current bid ¥ 22,000
A single great frond, lifted entire from the edge of a wood and pressed flat over the space of three months under a stack of seed catalogues. It has dried to the brown of a moth's wing, and the smallest pinnae are intact, each one a tiny green ghost. There is something almost architectural in it — a fan, a feather, a map of a river system seen from very high up. The collector's note, in a hand grown shaky: found the morning after the storm, the only thing not flattened. Provenance: a beech wood above Hakone, kept since.
Current bid ¥ 9,750
Nothing rare here — a lawn daisy, the kind a child picks by the fistful — but pressed so carefully, so flat and so clean, that it has become a kind of small monument. The white rays have yellowed only at their tips; the eye is still gold. It came taped into the back of a diary, with one line above it: he gave me this on the walk to the station, and then he was gone. We sell it because the diary's owner asked us to, before she too went. Provenance: a coat pocket, then a drawer, then a long quiet.
Current bid ¥ 3,000