An artful way to show off green maple leaves at studio in Kyoto
Green maple leaves are reflected on a polished desktop in the 'Marumado no Heya' (room with round windows) of the Arashiyama Yusai-tei dyeing studio in Kyoto's Ukyo Ward on May 8. (Yoshiaki Arai)
KYOTO--A surreal scene awaits visitors to dyeing studio Arashiyama Yusai-tei in the city's Ukyo Ward at this time of year.
The leaves of the green maple trees outside are perfectly reflected on a polished desktop in one of the rooms.
Dyeing artist Yusai Okuda took over the building, which used to be a 'ryokan' inn, and opened it to the public as a gallery.
In one room, visitors can view the green maples through round windows. There is also a terrace where visitors can enjoy the reflected green maples swaying when ripples are created from drops of water from a brush onto a water mirror.
The building is where Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata is said to have written his novel 'Yama no Oto' (The Sound of Mountains). The room he used has goldfish bowls with artificial hydrangea flowers floating in them placed by the window to create a cool atmosphere.
The bowls received rave reviews on social networking sites when they were displayed for the first time last year.
Visitors must be at least 13 years old and can visit from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is 2,000 yen ($13.80). Reservations are preferred. Closed on Thursdays.
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Asahi Shimbun
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Asahi Shimbun
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The Mainichi
17-05-2025
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ISHIGURO: You can take two kind of approaches. You write a novel and that's the discrete, perfect thing. Other people can pay homage to it but basically that's it. Or you can take another view that stories are things that just get passed around, down generations. Even though you think you wrote an original story, you've put it together out of other stuff that's come before you. So it's part of that tradition. I said Homer but it could be folktales. The great stories are the ones that last and last and last. They turn up in different forms. It's because people can change and adapt them to their times and their culture that these stories are valuable. There was a time when people would sit around a fire and just tell each other these stories. You sit down with some anticipation: This guy is going to tell it in a slightly different way. What's he going to do? It's like if Keith Jarrett sits down and says he's going to play "Night and Day." 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AP: To me, much of what the book and movie capture is what can be a unbridgeable distance between generations. ISHIGURO: I think that's really insightful what you just said. There is a limit to how much understanding there can be between generations. What's needed is a certain amount of generosity on both sides, to respect each other's generations and the difference in values. I think an understanding that the world was a really complicated place, and that often individuals can't hope to have perspective on the forces that are playing on them at the time. To actually understand that needs a generosity. AP: You've always been meticulous at meting out information, of uncovering mysteries of the past and present. Your characters try to grasp the world they've been born into. Did that start with your own family investigation? ISHIGURO: I wasn't like a journalist trying to get stuff out of my mother. There's part of me that was quite reluctant to hear this stuff. On some level it was kind of embarrassing to think of my mother in such extreme circumstances. A lot of the things she told me weren't to do with the atomic bomb. Those weren't her most traumatic memories. My mother was a great oral storyteller. She would sometimes have a lunch date and do a whole version of a Shakespeare play by herself. That was my introduction to "Hamlet" or things like that. She was keen to tell me but also wary of telling me. It was always a fraught thing. Having something formal -- "Oh, I'm becoming a writer, I'm going to write up something so these memories can be preserved" -- that made it easier. AP: How has your relationship with the book changed with time? ISHIGURO: Someone said to me the other day, "We live in a time now where a lot of people would sympathize with the older, what you might call fascist views." It's not expressed overtly; the older teacher is saying it's tradition and patriotism. Now, maybe we live in a world where that's a good point, and that hadn't occurred to me. It's an example of: Yes, we write in a bubble and make movies in a kind of a bubble. But the power of stories is they have to go into different values. This question of how you pass stories on, this is one of the big challenges. You have to reexamine every scene. Some things that might have been a very safe assumption only a few years ago would not be because the value systems are changing around our books and films just as much as they're changing around us.
