My usual mode of making contact with a piece of pottery is to give it a hug. If I’m in an exhibit of a potter’s work, I’ll find a large vase, pick it up, cradle it against my body, and close my eyes and try to listen, the way the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke would listen to the things that were all around him. Pottery doesn’t speak in words — not to me, at any rate — but it imparts a feeling. Most vases are cuddly; it’s like hugging a golden retriever. The work of Ken Matsuzaki, which will go on view at the Pucker Gallery beginning this Saturday, is more like a cat: sometimes huggable, sometimes not, always independent, frequently inscrutable, never boring.

Matsuzaki was born in Tokyo in 1950, the son of a painter; in 1972 he began a pottery apprenticeship with Tatsuzo Shimaoka, whose work was shown at the Pucker in 1998. Matsuzaki’s work has been exhibited primarily in Japanese department stores (where it finds the kind of pottery-educated and -appreciative audience it wouldn’t at Filene’s or Macy’s); this is his first Pucker show. The exhibit title, " Tradition Today, " is no throwaway: Matsuzaki stretches techniques, shapes, textures, even concepts. He has tried to obtain the effects of the Oribe and Shino styles using a gas kiln where tradition calls for wood firing. He has designed his own wood-burning kiln. He has drawn on the traditions of China and Korea. He has used long firings to create subtle variations in the glaze.

The Pucker Gallery has been a faithful advocate of pottery, in recent years hosting shows of Shimaoka, Fance Franck, Noriyasu Tsuchiya, Brother Thomas, and Phil Rogers, as well as work from Southern Africa and Japan’s Onda community. The gallery’s regular customers, already spoilt for choice, have voted with their pocketbooks by buying a good number of the pieces that appear in the handsome catalogue. Matsuzaki has sent replacements, so there’ll still be a show, but you won’t see everything that’s in the catalogue.

In " The Naming of Cats, " T.S. Eliot points out that there are particular " Names that never belong to more than one cat. " That’s true of Matsuzaki’s work: every piece has its own logic. The tea bowls come in all shapes (saucer, bowl, cylinder, mug) and glazes (natural ash, black, Oribe, Tetsu Shino), and they have a homemade, one-of-a-kind look, just like your cat. The vases range from squat-square to rectangular to cylindrical to planter-shape to dress shape (MK35) to wishing well (MK18); some even bespeak a kind of triumphal arch, as if trying to depict the Great Gate of Kiev that Mussorgsky transformed into music. These last are massive forms, with a narrow opening at the top for a flower or two and a tiny passageway at the bottom. They’re more like pieces of sculpture; try imagining them as huge monoliths dotting the Japanese landscape.

Matsuzaki makes cups, plates, bowls, water containers, boxes, sake bottles, sake cups, teapots, incense burners. Each has its own texture, as if it had been hand-rubbed. Some of his pieces are so rough and stony, they feel like granite. Some look like Van Gogh canvases, with wave upon wave of paint. His colors range from the gray-and-white ice-cream swirls of Kohiki and Hakeme to the mottled red and white of Tetsu Shino to the rust and green of Oribe. An Oribe tea bowl (MK76) has a hunter-green glaze interrupted twice by an unglazed section that suggests a desert in the middle of an oasis; it’s decorated with calligraphic-like markings in a terra cotta red. Turning up also on a number of boxes (MK88-90), and on bowls whose shape looks to have emerged from an MIT think tank (MK91-93), this harmonious dialogue/dialectic opens from glazed versus unglazed and green versus red into forest versus beach and perhaps belief versus unbelief. Matsuzaki’s more conventionally shaped Oribe bowls continue the conversation: in MK85 the sandy terra cotta predominates over the green, whereas in MK72 the green drips like cake frosting, and in MK71, where the shape conjures pottery from the American Southwest, it swirls like a nebula. MK70 is entirely green but no less complex for that: Matsuzaki has fluted the bowl in five places, so that it resembles a giant water lily opening. Or closing.

I’m back to hugging, MK34, a Maine coon cat of a big-bellied vase with horizontal bands on its top half and ash glaze dripping over a granite-like ground. I implore it to disclose its secrets. It swishes its tail.