It arrives with no eyes. You are expected to finish it.
A daruma is sold blind. Both eye sockets are left blank white, and the doll waits.
You make a wish — a real one, the kind you would be embarrassed to say aloud — and you paint in the left eye. The doll sits where you can see it. It watches you with one eye for as long as the wish takes.
A wooden form is carved once and used for a lifetime.
Layers of washi are pasted over the form and dried.
The shell is cut off the form and joined back together, hollow.
Red ground, gold writing, and both eyes left blank — the buyer fills them.
When the thing is done, you paint the second eye. Only then is the object finished, and it was you who finished it.
The shape comes from Bodhidharma, the monk who carried Zen from India to China. He is said to have sat facing a cave wall for nine years without moving, until his arms and his legs withered away and fell off. That is why a daruma has no limbs — and why, weighted at the base, it cannot be knocked over. Push it down and it rights itself.
The proverb that goes with it is the whole of Japanese stubbornness in five words: nana-korobi ya-oki. Fall seven times, rise eight.
At the end of the year you carry the doll back to the temple and it is burned, and you buy a new one. Nobody keeps a daruma forever. It is a container for one year of wanting something.
Roughly four out of every five daruma made in Japan are made here. The trade grew up around Shōrinzan Daruma-ji, a temple on the edge of town, and it has stayed a household industry: the moulds are wooden, the paper is pasted by hand, and in many workshops the faces are still painted by one person who has painted nothing else for forty years.
Pieces are found one at a time, in Japan, and photographed before they are listed. Tell us what you are looking for, and we will write when something arrives that answers it.
We write when there is something to write about — some months twice, some months not at all.
Noted. We will write when something arrives.