The grey wool coat hangs on a hook by my front door. From a step away it looks intact. Up close, on the right elbow, you can see a small oval of slightly darker grey thread where I darned a thinning patch in November, working in lamplight at the kitchen table, badly at first and then more carefully. The repair is not invisible. I prefer it that way. The patch is a small tally mark, a record that the coat continued.
This essay is an inventory of five such tally marks from the past year. None of the items would have been remarkable to keep. Each, by the soft logic of contemporary consumption, would have been more rational to replace. I kept them anyway, and I want to write about why — not as a moral position but as a description of what the keeping was actually like.
One. The wool coat with the re-darned elbow
The coat is twelve years old. I bought it when I had just moved out of my parents' house and was working an editorial job that paid in postage stamps. It was, at the time, the most expensive single garment I had ever owned, and I remember the small ceremony of carrying it home in its long black bag.
By last autumn the right elbow had thinned to the point where light came through the weave when I held it to the window. A new coat of comparable quality, in 2026 Tokyo, would cost roughly ¥48,000. I priced a tailor's reweave at ¥6,500 and a self-darn at the cost of one skein of matching wool, ¥320.
I chose the self-darn, badly, on the first attempt. I undid it and tried again, more slowly, watching a video by a woman in Osaka who specialises in invisible mending and explains, in the soft voice of someone explaining something they have done ten thousand times, that the trick is to imitate the original weave one strand at a time. My second attempt was acceptable. My third, finished a week later in the same lamplight, was good.
The coat is back on the hook. It is no longer the most expensive thing I own, but it is the oldest, and the elbow is the part of it I am most fond of.
Two. The electric kettle, descaled
The kettle is six years old, white plastic, brand of no consequence. In January it began taking nearly four minutes to boil a litre of water. The mineral scale at the bottom had built up to a layer about three millimetres thick, hard and pale, like the inside of an oyster shell.
The temptation to replace was real. A new kettle would cost ¥3,800 at the electronics shop near my station. The old one had no sentimental weight; it was a kettle. But the descaling required only half a lemon, a kettleful of water, and twenty minutes of indifferent attention while I read at the table.
I boiled the lemon water, let it stand for fifteen minutes, poured it out, rinsed twice. The scale dissolved entirely. The kettle now boils a litre in a hundred and ten seconds, which is what it did when it was new. The repair cost ¥40 of lemon and a half-cup of attention.
I mention this because it is the most embarrassing of the five. I had spent six years assuming a slow kettle was an old kettle. It was simply a dirty kettle. Many household objects, I have come to think, are not broken; they are unattended.
Three. The leather shoes, resoled
The brown leather shoes were my grandfather's. He died eight years ago and left them to my father, who has different feet, and so they migrated to me — by accident, really, when I was clearing my mother's hallway closet last winter. The leather upper was in extraordinary condition: he had polished his shoes every Sunday of his adult life, and the leather, fed weekly with wax and mink oil, had grown almost soft. The soles, by contrast, were finished. Worn through to the welt at the ball of the foot, with a small stone permanently lodged in the right heel.
I took them to a small repair shop in Yanaka, the kind with a brass bell over the door and the smell of leather and shellac, where an older man named Endō-san examined the welt with a magnifying glass and said, after a pause, that they were worth resoling. The repair cost ¥9,800, which is more than I would have spent on a new pair of comparable but lesser shoes. I paid it.
I now wear my grandfather's shoes once a week, on Sundays usually, when I walk somewhere I want the walk to feel deliberate. The leather has begun, slowly, to take the shape of my feet rather than his. I think he would have found this funny.
Four. The chipped tea bowl, with kintsugi
The bowl is small, hand-thrown, a soft uneven brown with a band of cream around the rim. It came from a potter in Mashiko, three hours north of Tokyo, whose work I bought on a weekend trip the spring before the pandemic. I dropped it last March, washing up after dinner, and watched a triangular chip the size of a thumbnail break off the rim and skitter across the steel sink.
I kept the chip. This is, in retrospect, the moment that decided everything that followed. If I had let it go down the drain the bowl would have gone to the bin. Because the chip was sitting on the windowsill in a small saucer, the question was no longer throw it away; the question was what to do with the chip.
I bought a beginner's kintsugi kit from a shop in Asakusa for ¥4,200 — urushi lacquer, brass powder, two thin brushes, an instruction sheet. The traditional repair takes weeks, in stages, with curing times measured in days. I did one stage per weekend, for five weekends. The seam is now a thin gold-coloured line that runs from the rim down into the body of the bowl, slightly raised, slightly imperfect.
I drink hōjicha from this bowl most evenings. The seam is the thing my eye returns to. The bowl, I think, is now more itself than it was before the chip.
Five. The jeans, patched at the knee
The jeans were nothing. Mid-priced, four years old, indigo. The right knee had thinned in the way the right knee of jeans always thins, then split into a horizontal mouth about two inches wide.
I had assumed I would replace them. I went into a shop near my office, tried on three pairs, and walked out with none. The cuts had changed. The denim was thinner than I remembered. The new jeans cost ¥7,800 and felt, on the body, like a costume.
So I went home and looked, again, at the old jeans on the chair. The split could be patched. I bought a small piece of indigo cotton from a fabric shop in Nippori — the textile district, an hour I had not budgeted for, but the walk through the bolts was its own pleasure — and pinned it underneath the split, then ran a sashiko-style running stitch across it in a slightly lighter indigo thread. The stitching took an evening. The patch is visible. It looks intentional.
I have worn the patched jeans most weekends since. People have asked me twice where I bought them. I tell them the truth, which is that I patched the knee of an old pair, and watch the small recalibration in their face as they realise this is an option.
What the five have in common
I do not want to draw a moral. The point of the five repairs was not to demonstrate that I am thrifty, or virtuous, or aligned with any movement. I am none of these things in any consistent way. I bought a single-use convenience-store coffee on the way to write this paragraph.
What I will say is that the five repairs share a small structural feature. In each case, the moment of decision was earlier than I thought. The coat was decided when I noticed the thin elbow rather than when I went to buy a new coat. The kettle was decided when I assumed slowness was age. The shoes were decided when I picked them up from my mother's closet rather than leaving them. The bowl was decided when I kept the chip rather than letting it go down the drain. The jeans were decided in the changing room of the shop, when the new ones felt like a costume.
Repair, in my limited experience of it, is not really about skill. It is about catching the decision earlier in the chain. Once you have committed to the bin, almost no skill will rescue the object. While the object is still in your hand, almost any small attention will.
The five repairs cost, in total, around ¥21,000 in materials and labour. The five replacements would have cost, conservatively, ¥75,000. The savings are not the point. The point is that I now own five objects whose continued existence I am responsible for, in a way that I was not responsible for them before they were repaired. The relationship has shifted.
I do not know what next year's five will be. The kettle is now eight years old and may eventually require something I cannot do at the kitchen table. The coat is fourteen. The bowl will outlive me, kintsugi seam and all, and pass to someone who will not know who dropped it. This is part of why the seam is gold.