Vintage Japanese Studio Ikebana Vase, Faceted Mentori Body, Aubergine to Black Glaze, Sculptural Gourd Silhouette

Unusual among traditional Japanese ceramics, this vase reads more as sculpture than as a conventional vessel type. Its lower body is thrown round, then cut with flat vertical facets — a technique called mentori (面取り), where a potter slices angled planes into the still-soft clay with a wire or blade, trading the smoothness of a thrown surface for a faceted one that catches and breaks light differently from every angle. Above the faceted cone, the form softens back into a smooth round shoulder and a slender neck, echoing the silhouette of a hyotan (gourd) or a tokkuri sake bottle — a shape long considered auspicious in Japanese decorative arts, its pinched waist read historically as a symbol of good fortune and protection.

The glaze reinforces the split personality of the form: a deep aubergine-plum tone covers much of the surface, but across several facets it shifts, unevenly and without a clean boundary, into a darker, near-black tone closer to tenmoku. This kind of variation usually comes from how flame, ash, or a second glaze layer interacted unevenly with the faceted surface during firing — the ridges of each facet catching or shedding glaze differently than the flat planes between them, so the same glaze recipe reads as two different colors depending on where light falls across the cuts.

The base carries a small round seal, stamped rather than carved, marking the piece as the work of an individual studio potter rather than a factory production run.

For a collector or interior stylist, this vase sits somewhere between traditional Japanese ceramics and contemporary studio sculpture — a piece equally at home in a tokonoma display or on a minimalist console table, its faceted geometry and shifting glaze giving it presence even without a flower in it.