Ryokan Subiyoshya served us for breakfast a fat sardine fried fish style, pickles – obligatory, miso – with silken white tofu, rice – essential, bitter gourd – delicious, spinach – in sesame oil and soy, a cut green melon – with melon fork and a seasoned fried egg – we guessed rightly slid nicely onto the warm rice and was hearty yokey goodness. Mother served at this family ryokan, which has been the case for the last 300 years, although the building itself has enjoyed many face-lifts and not enjoyed some. Lost and only a cosmetic feature the twisted tree-trunk ceiling beams; grassy skunky new tatami and a matt red with yellow pale new cedar décor, a green border at floor level, clashing well with our blue and emerald green yukatas; ugly stairs; clean onsen-style public (for users of the ryokan) baths. No feature is truly unhappy here. Exterior surfaces generally seem to be left to weather naturally, even the unnatural materials, while interior surfaces – the textures of living – are papered, painted, plastered over. Black ceramic roofing tiles shining like new are the signature style on this side of the alps. Kanazawa escaped – being deemed non-vital by the enemy – signature World War II bombing: plenty of old buildings in the centre of the city. We didn’t venture very far in the half day before boarding Thunderbird for Kyoto. But the pace and ambience of the city suggests wealth, a city comfortable with its provincial status – however it is, like Toyama, looking forward to the shinkansen due to start later this year, they say – and therefore, with wealth and a comfortableness, comes access to shopping and culture: it is a little like Florence for the tradition of high-end patronage of the arts which continues today. It is a very likable city.
We cycled to the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, too early, too early now, and, having parked our bikes at the suggested bike park, were admitted to Kenroku-en gardens, one of the top three in all of Japan – an official site of peace and tranquility. (Everything has its place in this discriminating culture, officially, as part of the machine of modern life, even peace and tranquility: we are enjoying this fineness of discernment, this cultural refinement. The question is not so much one of how or where do kawai’i and otaku fit in with traditional values in terms of prohibition, permission, incitement or morality but how do they work functionally and where fit inside a tradition which remains ethologically committed to inclusion on a finely partitioned plane, a textural motif, with ever finer lines possible – up to the infinity of nothing – a flattened bento box, or layered horizon, without focal point.) The care for trees is remarkable; it makes our practice of staking look miserable and mean – like the crudity of carpet versus tatami or the waste of toilet-paper versus under-arse toilet-sprayer or the dirtiness of public bathing without washing beforehand while dressed with its conjoint fear of nudity and the body, that moral hangover. The structures surround trees can be more substantial than the trees themselves, dead trees holding living trees up, lashed with ropes, Dali-esque trusses and crutches on trees, supporting them on land or out over the water. Where we would let a tree fall, here every effort is made to let it fall while being supported: let it lean over, let it grow outward, make these allowances for it, it is getting old and must bear up under the conditions the climate imposes; this is the least we humans can do. Where I recently stapled a tawa tree at home onto a lateral support, I should have allowed the tree to fall as far as I could make the support or sling which, with the minimum possible invasion of its arboreal integrity, would honour its livingness, its lifehood. The craft of tree-trussing is highly evolved here and another example of one of the 6 virtues of the ideal garden Kenroku-en is named for, artificiality. There is also seclusion and… I forget the rest.
The gardens are beautiful as one would expect but unobtrusively beautiful, unnaturally naturally. The artifice with the beauty is deliberately made background to the garden’s gardening, not that of the human workers, but of itself; its continuing condition of innate and inhuman beauty and artifice is granted on the principle of beauty and artifice as human-given coordinates, or open-ended virtues.
Inside the gardens we happened onto Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Traditional Arts and Crafts. An interesting relationship to the history of local craft came out of visiting the several exhibitions dedicated to ceramics, paper manufacture, gold leaf (Kanazawa still contributes 98% of Japan’s total gold leaf production), paper umbrellas, wood-turning and laquerwork: an appreciation of the Meiji as a kind of break in continuity between traditional and modern which it is important now to bridge.
After Z.’s ice-cream, we returned to the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art. A circular glass pavilion, flat as a coin, rising maybe 3 metres, with white volumes pushing up and cutting down into it. These are the galleries: white boxes, square or rectangular, a white cylinder and, uncovered, atria, square or rectangular, surrounded by glass walls – one cut through by a glass corridor, and the most extraordinary room, a square version of the pantheon, cutting out a perfect piece of sky, with stone viewing benches worked into the walls, and the ‘cutter’ ceiling itself contrived to appear to be without relief, two-dimensional. The square sky-piece – the most perfect expression of the building’s artistry, where, for example, at Mori Tower the architect had included a room to contemplate the building. Here the sky contemplates the architecture. The building is literally amazing – we got lost many times and would see exhibits through glass to which we could not find a way. The finish on the building is exquisite. It also – because of the placement of solid-walled volumes within a see-through glass volume – proves larger on the inside than any circuit of the outside would suggest.
Leandro Erlich’s work featured in the special exhibition. A magical artist from Argentina, resident in Uruguay, his work messes with the senses through optical illusions, like 19th century toys do, using mirrors and careful mises-en-scène, and simply clever ideas. One work not recorded in the snaps invites audients – to a piano quartet – to take up bows and sit to play the instruments in front of a projection in which they are superimposed. Another comprised a sort of gutter running beside a darkened corridor in the gallery with, reflected in the running water, an entire city-scape upside down, complete with birds flying above it. The clouds pieces, the stairwell, the lifts and the swimming pool are his in the snaps. All his work made us laugh.
The highlight of the permanent exhibition was for me an Anish Kapoor commissioned for the museum – a black hole in a purpose-built room, an awesome thing, the room and the elliptical hole together.
We spent half an hour negotiating at the Post Office to send Z.’s special gift to special someone and returning the bikes to the ryokan we walked the local market where I recorded some calls but couldn’t find a cheap eat there so continued on to the underground of a department store, where, in the cool – the sun now out scorchingly – we ate really good sashimi and sushi sets. Time to retrieve the luggage from ryokan and walk to the station.
Our 16:01 train to Kyoto rolled in and we embarked to find our seats occupied. It took a while, but it transpired that we had booked for the day before. Railway guards came in from both directions, J.’s can of coffee spilt over the floor, consultations ran up and down the carriage, we became the sideshow we suspected ourselves of being and the problem, it was agreed, was no problem. We were ushered into the next carriage, where, apparently, no problem really is no problem, and slid along in comfort at speed to arrive in Kyoto at 18:08.
Another extremely serendipitous finding of booked accommodation ensued: taxi from station to where apartment ought to be – the driver’s birthdate on the dash read 1927 – and first number on a list of seemingly meaningless numbers J. keyed in was answered with the security doors clicking open. Then, at the lifts, we guess 406 must mean the fourth floor. The doors slide open and a head pokes out of a room smiling in welcome.
Great apartment in Kawaramachi, with every gadget including X-Box and white leather sofas and a view over the old quarter at back – which follows a canal: it could be Rome, apart from the architecture. We stroll out late to dine and the streets around the two-storied wooden terraced eateries along the canal are alive with people. 50 million visit Kyoto annually, it’s said, and there were a lot of gaijin, but it’s off-season. We found a yakitori bar with the best beef skewers we’ve ever had and sake and shochu. The upstairs room seated 16 on its tatami floor – and still smoking inside here: cigarettes in front of us; some herbal concoction beside us: two guys trying to impress two girls, who were either easily impressed or paid company for the evening. Kyoto scene so far has an edge we didn’t see in Tokyo, but perhaps will when we return and stay in Shinjuku.
