Posted on Wednesday, 12/11/24.

On Monday evening, not wanting to go home right away, I stopped in 渋谷. I pinned this to a weak desire to find a blanket at MUJI. The nights have been getting colder, and I don’t like running the heat, so while my duvet has proven warm enough, when it dips into the high thirties outside any small gaps allow cold air to brush at my limbs, and the action of sleep has become careful and confined. The MUJI shares a space with Loft—an arrangement I’ve seen in other stores around Tokyo—and the bedding takes up half of the basement level, along with tables, chairs, shelves, curtains, and in a far corner all of the kitchen items.

As far as I could tell MUJI carried only two variants of one basic blanket type, sized according to the main bed sizes here, from S to K. A contraption of stacked baskets also held some ‘half-blankets’ with color-contrasting over-locked stitches around their edges, but these were basically unsubstantial. The mainstream blankets were divided into thick and thin, with each of these divided in turn by color (and the aforementioned sizes): cream, a dusky beige, brown, and blue. All were the sort of static-prone, hyper-soft, over-lustrous polyester blankets that seem to be created only to accumulate anomalous small rips and stains and linty morsels.

The day had already been sort of abortive, and so standing, tired and underfed, vaguely overheating in the basement of a well-traveled store in 渋谷 was depressing—i.e., instigating me basically wondering why I haven’t felt like I’ve been able to do much of anything at all recently, and why hadn’t I noticed how pathetic such actions as this were before (when so many other people have, and continue to, etc.), and basically that at this point I didn’t even deserve a blanket, especially one bought not out of genuine need but just as diversion from returning home to the same comparatively empty apartment, etc. Ultimately I have to remind myself that the sources of my poor moods are pretty much more basic and physical than I admit: food, warmth, sleep, human contact, sunlight. But still, I can’t completely discount the more insidious possibility that, at least sometimes, probably in these more banal settings, various mental defenses are basically bleached and weakened and I revert to seeing things effectively as they are: namely that I’m in the way of a lot of the things I want, and that no single purchase or outing or action or abstention is going to resolve this, though the idea that some constellation of them might is impossible to disprove.

I didn’t buy the blanket; along with the above, the thought of essentially sweating into fiberized plastic for perhaps the next year and a half during fitful sleep was again just kind of tenderly sad. Loft had even fewer options, and my brief exploration of higher levels basically reinforced the idea that focused consumption is soulless. In the end I bought a small tube of Weleda ‘Light Skin Food’ on the first floor, because once my sister recommended it, and I remember recoiling slightly, even at that, at the endlessness of skincare.

Again not wanting to go home, this time the feeling made keener by having failed to complete even the initial, false diverting task, I went into the Ikea across the street, which I figured might at least have more options for blankets. I’ve mentioned before that this is the only store I’ve been to here whose escalators are arranged to force anyone visiting to traverse all floors on their way up or down, taking them through the staged rooms demonstrating how one might use the objects in life. This also required that small piles or collections of the same item might appear on different floors, so as to lower the barrier to picking up an example of what one has just seen in situ, thus immediately forming a connection with it on the long ride back down to the self check-out.

The item of the season, distributed in large white wire-frame baskets throughout the store, were medium-sized sheepskins, something like 80cm long and 60cm wide, either white or off-white tending to richer cream-like yellows. I learned later that Ikea has released, over the years, differently named sheepskins of varying sizes, as well as smaller and much cheaper faux-skins in many colors which I know less about and am repulsed by. The skins are manufactured in China, and there were small signs about sustainability and reuse, though beyond this their origin was mysterious, and it was strange to see the large baskets on each floor, perhaps holding twenty or more of the skins each, and to imagine the shape that the sheep they belonged to must once have taken up. A few were placed in model rooms on beds, and others under fake Christmas trees of varying size, as if to mimic fallen snow, or to serve as tree skirts.

I remained on the fence, but while idly digging through skins on the bedding floor I found one a few layers down in a bin that must have been twice as thick as most of the others and perhaps twenty to thirty percent larger. I was surprised by the variation, checking others on that floor and others to confirm that essentially I had found a nice example. While carrying my rolled fleece up the escalator two (presumably American) men a ways back said loud enough for me to hear that maybe they ought to pick up a ‘pelt’ as everyone seemed to be getting ‘pelts’. This interest I basically also observed elsewhere; while prodding some early examples on the first floor (part of their prominent Christmas display) my interest seemed to draw two women who, once I walked away, quickly started picking up and prodding and discussing the lambskins themselves. Large amounts of organic objects are, against the effectively hyper-mainstream and otherwise Scandinavianly austere store setting, I imagine pretty engaging—desperate to be touched. This, paired with the obvious variations between skins, suggested some small friction against the normal mechanisms of Ikea; though only to an extent. I think about the scale and noise of the factories, somewhere, producing such an enormity of these skins such that this one particular Ikea could, in real estate, hold hundreds of them. By itself, in my room, in the low lamplight I use at night, it’s easy to imagine anything else.

In daylight the one I bought is pretty deeply off-white in places, almost yellow toward the center, which I imagine would be seen as a flaw for certain uses, though the visual warmth is pleasant. The shape of the original animal is obvious, with the size suggesting that it was maybe trimmed less aggressively than others. Protrusions for the legs. Toward the edges the hair starts to wave or ripple, and the texture is rich and variegated. It obviously doesn’t serve the same purpose as a blanket, which I may still need to find, but against my linen sheets it quiets the drafts and is immediately warm against wherever it is pressed.

I consider if I were to become someone who tried to acquire high-quality animal skins, and what financially, morally, and practically that would mean, though the desire is weak. I poke around メルカリ and see someone selling their 120cm long Australian lambskin for a high price, but can find no real reason to purchase it, just some curiosity at the novelty of the size. Their listing even says that they bought it in Australia on vacation seven years ago, wrapped it up carefully, and left it in their closet in silent wait. Everyone is biding their time.