Recently I bought a toy for a friend of mine. I know you’re supposed to buy toys for children, and this friend is a grown-up, but I just felt she really needed this toy. It is called a Flower Cube, and in some ways it is, I think, a perfect object – a confluence of design, technology and spirit that hits the mark. It was made by the Japanese company Takara Co. Ltd, the same folks who brought you the toys known in the U.S. as Transformers.
The Flower Cube is quite simple really. A plastic flower toy that you put in a window sill, at which point sunlight hits a little solar cell and the flower responds by swaying. Which it will continue to do forever, as long as there is a Sun; no batteries required. Nothing fancy here – just a simple whimsical statement of joy and happiness. This is what it looks like:
Like all perfect things, the Flower Cube has a tragic side. After all, perfection without a tragic side would be intolerable – it would call into question so many things. In this case the tragedy is that the Takara Co., Ltd. was merged on March 1, 2006 with the Tomy Co., Ltd., a giant Japanese toy manufacturer. It was the beginning of the end. The Flower Cube has been discontinued, although you can still locate a few stragglers in select toy shops, if you look carefully and you’re lucky. That’s how I found the one for my friend.
There should be more perfect objects in our lives. Not fancy, overwhelming, commanding objects, which demand that we bow down before their magnificence. No, merely perfect objects that remind us that life is, at its best, a symphony composed of a million small pleasures and delights.
Does anybody else have a perfect object?
What a great gift idea. . . I found a bunch of them on ebay for around $20 each. Thanks for the idea.
Hehe, it’s really cool 🙂
As for a gadgets/tools, I’d go for the Rubik’s cube. I knew all the moves by heart some years ago..
As for flowers, my definite favorite is the Rose of Jericho. It’s so amazing that there is something like a resurrecting living thing 🙂
Hello,
my name is Cathy. I totally love solar’s. This is why i’m interested in
your flower cubes. Just love them.
So what do I need to do to purchase them.
Hope to hear from you soon.
At Simpsoncs@comcast.net
I’m not sure you can still get them. I just looked on-line, and it’s possible you can still order one from: http://www.gizmo-guru.com/e-toys/flower-cube.htm