Back to Japan

From the critically acclaimed author of The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris, a fascinating, intimate portrait of one of Japan's most influential and respected textile artists.

Writer, filmmaker, and photographer Marc Petitjean finds himself in Kyoto one fine morning with his camera, to film a man who will become his friend: Kunihiko Moriguchi, a master kimono painter and Living National Treasure-like his father before him.

As a young decorative arts student in the 1960s, Moriguchi rubbed shoulders with the cultural elite of Paris and befriended Balthus, who would influence his artistic career. Back in Japan, he would reinvigorate the traditional craft of Yuzen (resist dyeing) by working on abstraction in patterns. Petitjean retraces Moriguchi's remarkable life, from his childhood during the turbulent 1940s and 50s marked by war, to his prime as an artist with works exhibited in the most prestigious museums in the world.