Cursive · sōsho 草書 · VC4B
Cursive or sōsho (草書) styles are the most simplified styles and Master Takase's favorite. While very beautiful, these styles are often difficult to read even by specialists.
生甲斐 ikigai Reason For Being
A reason for being: what makes a life worth the living, and the thing you live for.
by Master Eri Takase
Born and raised in Osaka, Japan, Eri Takase received the rank of Shihan, master, from two calligraphy societies, the Bokuteki-kai and Bunka-shodō, and won best-of-category awards in all-Japan national competitions. She has created calligraphy for people around the world for more than thirty years, and with your order she will be creating calligraphy for you.
In a ritual as old as calligraphy itself, Master Takase prepares the ink, meditatively rubbing the ink stick against the stone until it reaches the perfect consistency for the paper. Then, properly loading the brush with ink, she brushes your scroll. And only when the scroll is just right and meets her approval, she signs it and affixes her seal, completing your original scroll.
12 1/4" × 43" (31 × 109 cm) Japanese Scrolls
The scrolls have woven damask borders and special layered Japanese paper (washi), designed to last generations by a scroll maker in Gifu, Japan, with whom we have worked for over two decades.
Gift-Ready
Your scroll arrives boxed, with a printed insert describing the words in detail.
Sending it as a gift? Add your message at checkout and we will include it with the insert.
Ships in 1-3 days from Washington State
Your scroll is brushed when you order it and completed within 1 to 3 business days.
Your scroll ships from Master Takase's studio in Washington State. Shipping is calculated at checkout. We ship worldwide.
30-day money-back guarantee
Every order is covered by our 30-day money-back guarantee. If your scroll arrives damaged, or we made an error, we replace it or refund you in full, including shipping.
Explanation
What makes your life worth the living, and the thing that makes it so: a child, your work, an aim. It is an everyday Japanese word, built on 甲斐 (kai), an old native noun for the worth an act turns out to have had. In the classical books Japan's national library has indexed, it is mostly said in the negative, of a life not worth the living; the positive is in print by 1838, and from the 1890s Japanese translators of foreign books used it to call a life worth living. In the surveys one anthropologist reports, men over thirty found it in their work or in family and children, most women over thirty in family and children, and people in their twenties in leisure or in dreams of work or marriage. The psychiatrist Kamiya Mieko wrote a whole book about it in 1966. The four-circle diagram that travels with the word in English, what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for, is not the word: it was drawn in 2011 for the Spanish word for purpose and given the Japanese name in 2014. The Japanese asks only whether living is worth it, and names what makes it so; which thing that is, for you, is yours.
A native Japanese word: its earliest example in the 日本国語大辞典 is the fourteenth-century war chronicle 太平記, where it is said in the negative, of a life not worth the living.
Learn More About These Words
We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 生甲斐.
