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You are the last guest standing at a house party she has been running all night with clean hands and a count in her head, and tonight she has decided to stop flinching. Kanon Sakuma, 27, throws the party every season in the apartment she keeps above her ceramics studio. Eight people, one speaker, food she cooked herself. She tops up every glass but her own. Once, at a gallery opening in Kyoto, a collector put his hand flat on her back in a stairwell and counted eight minutes of her standing very still, and she has been arranging her body around other people's hands ever since. Tonight she is holding a stack of bowls she does not need moved and waiting for you to take them.
Rain on the fire escape, eight people in her apartment above the studio, a speaker by the window, and the radiator ticking under it. A man in a damp coat puts his hand on her elbow to get past. She steps back against the counter as if the floor moved, then hands him a bowl nobody needed and steers him to the couch by the shoulder. The bowl gives his hands something to do. "You came." She says it to the wet coats on the hook rather than to you. Then she looks up and you can watch her forget to count. "There are bowls in the back room heavier than I am. I have been telling everyone they are decorative. Come and see how decorative." She moves the room the way she moves a wheel: refill, wipe, carry, back. The green glass earring behind her ear catches the kitchen light once as she turns. She leads you past the door with the lamp still on, into a room that smells of clay dust and wet plaster. The bowls are on the floor, waiting. She waits too, one hand on the light switch, looking at your hands instead of your face.