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Weather: Sunny
Lunch: Lunch buffet @ Quilt show @ Akasaka Prince Hotel
Dinner @ friend’s home: cheese & olive paste, marinated fish (carp, tuna, etc) with vegetable, Tofu-egg quiche with eel, Inari roll, cheese cake, chocolate cake

Saw a friend from my Chicago days at Akasaka Prince Hotel for lunch. She is a professional quilt artist, and her work was featured at the exhibition. She and Mark worked in a Japanese Sushi restaurant in Chicago during the summer of 1980, Mark as a bartender, she as a waitress, and both were total misfits in the restaurant industry, and thus became good friends.

She was an interior designer before coming to Chicago to visit her friend, who used to be a missionary at Sofia University, and stayed in Hyde Park for about a year and a half, where the University of Chicago campus was located. She discovered quilting after that, and now her work is featured in a book tilted “Japanese quilt,” and the American Craft museum in N.Y. purchased her work.

Her work always utilizes old Japanese patterns and fabric. At this exhibition, which was themed as “Edo,” a lot of work was like a quilt version of cartoons or Ukiyoe, wood print. Her work, however, had a beautiful balance and the right level of abstraction. Mark and I are visiting her again at her home in a couple of days.

For dinner, we were invited by an American Korean specialist and his family in Saitama. We met them in Massachusetts while the husband was a fellow at Harvard. The wife is a wonderful cook and house-maker. I do not know how she maintains her home so neatly.

I borrowed quite a few books from her.