#1430. Japan Stories

I left the one thing I most wanted to do in Japan for the final day.

By the time I fulfilled that wish, I had already wandered through Shinjuku and Shibuya on two walks with Łukasz Palka; lost—and improbably recovered—my wallet and passport; traced the neighbourhoods where early manga artists once lived and worked; and even gone on a date with a hedgehog at Harry’s Pet Store in Harajuku. I had spent a memorable evening literally wading through the immersive exhibits at teamLab Planets, been saved by Tokyo’s disciplined traffic after a careless slip on a rain-slick crossing, and stumbled upon a shichi-go-san ceremony at Hie Shrine.

Along the way, I carefully traced the kanji character 心 and offered it to the deity at Saihō-ji before entering its moss gardens; visited the room at Yūsai-tei where Yasunari Kawabata wrote ‘The Sound of the Mountain’; tracked down at least half a dozen installations from the TOILET PROJECT designed by some of Japan’s leading architects; made an unsuccessful attempt to absorb D. T. Suzuki’s words at the museum in Kanazawa; and sat quietly on tatami mats in restored samurai houses in Hida Takayama.
Only then did I arrive at what I had saved for last.

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Sometime before my trip to Japan, I re-read Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s famous essay on Japanese aesthetics, particularly his meditation on how shadows deepen the beauty of traditional lacquerware. By the time I reached the final pages, a small but persistent seed of an idea had been planted in my mind. This is the result.

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