京都の静かな工房で、土に向き合いながら作品を生み出す陶芸家夫婦の多賀洋輝さんと楓夏さん。大学の陶芸部で出会ったおふたりは、時間をかけて言葉と手仕事を重ね、作陶を中心に回る心地よい暮らしを築いてきました。自然の理や旅の風景、幼い頃に親しんだ物語の色彩が美しく織り込まれた器の背景には、飾らない日々の情景と、手仕事への誠実な想いが息づいています。

A warm remark she heard in high school — you have a talent for this — was what pushed Nishi into the world of ceramics. What she arrived at was a softness like cloth living inside hard-fired pottery, along with pastel colours that brighten a table at a glance. We went to find the feel of the vessels made in her quiet studio, and the gentle story behind them.

Twelve solid years of craft technique, built up at kilns in Kyoto and Shiga. On that foundation, the potter Sei Ishido makes vessels entirely his own — pieces that hold both a clarity that stops you for a moment and a warmth that settles easily into daily life. We visited his studio to ask about his restless curiosity as a maker, and about the water that runs through his work.

Shimizu's vessels add a quiet touch of colour to the most ordinary table. Simple, yet with beautiful colours that catch the eye at once, and a feel in the hand that is startlingly easy to live with — how do they come about? She kept searching for what it was that she could do, and behind the vessel-making she arrived at lies a thoroughgoing kindness that comes from someone who pays attention to her own daily life.

Katsuyoshi Tashiro works from his studio, Chachu Kobo Yogetsu, in Kagoshima. Pick up one of his teapots and it tends to leave you without much to say: the weight is startling, and the lid closes with a precision that seems to draw itself shut. But you can't talk about these teapots without the slightly unusual twenty years behind them.

Among all the vessels we introduce at muny, Matsuo's carry a particular composed stillness. He once worked at a child guidance centre, staying close to the inner lives of children. Why did he throw himself into the world of clay, and what is he trying to express? We follow the tracks of a deep thinker whose mind reaches all the way to the person using his work a hundred years from now.

A quiet studio in Kyoto: soft, still air and a comedy radio show murmuring in the background. The story of the woman kneading clay here begins with something that has nothing to do with efficiency or calculation — a pure impulse. From an office job to ceramics, and then to an apprenticeship under one of Kyoto's best-known potters. She treats her late start as room to grow, and deliberately keeps choosing the harder technique. We asked Natsumi Ishii about the feeling she pours into her softly white kohiki ware.

Driving a mountain road on a trip, he'll find his eyes pulled toward the ripples of an exposed rock face; spotting a construction site, he'll stop the car and go over to put his hands directly into the soil. He can feel through his skin that a clay is high in iron, and he has been known to contact a landowner himself just to get hold of a particular earth. All of it comes down to one thing: he is helplessly drawn to the uncertain character of clay, which never reveals its true face until it has been fired.