We were surrounded by friendly neighbors. The two retired fishermen whose houses straddled our driveway entrance were something else. Our former landlady had always managed to ignore them, as did most of our other neighbors. We couldn’t. The driveway is extremely narrow—little more than 2 meters wide and requiring a turn off of a narrow walled street at 90 degrees. That means a tight three-point turn that sometimes, if one is not careful, might cross a centimeter or two onto one of their properties.

The old man on the near corner made it more difficult by planting a cast iron post box illegally in the setback space, and appearing as an alcohol-fueled typhoon whenever he believed I had trespassed. The only thing that saved this was his wife, who would come out and drag him and his storm clouds back inside by the ear. We became great friends with her and shared vegetables and other items on an almost daily basis thereafter.

Subscribe now

The old man on the other corner was ensconced in an old folks’ home after his wife passed away. As a condition, he had his two daughters swear that—even after his death—they would never sell the property. Before he left home, he fortified the setback space along the house with every heavy thing he could scrounge—concrete blocks, rock slabs, ladders, lumber, plants, even discarded appliances. All illegal, of course, but . . .

We needed to show access to get a building permit, and a real estate agent friend told us that since a road this size called for a setback, we could very likely get both of the irritants removed. He suggested we talk to prefecture authorities, which we did, and they told us to go to the city office to get the official surveys of the road. Which we did. And they told us, looking very embarrassed, that they couldn’t give us the survey results for the 80 meters of road in front of our house because it hadn’t been done.

After several whispered huddles, one of the officials furtively showed us a map that had those 80 meters cross-hatched in red. Unlike the roads in the rest of the city of Yokosuka, it seemed, our section of road didn’t officially exist. They said they had run into some “resistance” when trying to survey. (I imagined the two old fishermen joining forces to attack the surveyors with rakes, hoes, and garbage tossed from their second floor windows.)

“We’re not sure when we can get around to it,” one said.

“In the next couple of years?” I asked.

“We can’t really say,” he replied.

“Ten? Fifty?”

He shrugged.

“One hundred?”

He carefully folded the map. “I really don’t want to give you a date.”

Despite the ambiguity, we were able to get the permits, and we signed the builders contract and picked a date for taking the old house apart. We dated both agreements on taian, days that are auspicious according to the traditional calendar.

Not long after, on a visit to move more stuff, I ran into the man with the fortress built of scrap. He’d never been easy to understand, but for some reason that day he was more than intelligible and quite friendly. He said he had escaped from the facility and was planning a permanent return to his former home sometime soon. We had a long talk in which he claimed that our house had actually been located down the coast a few hundred meters before being disassembled and rebuilt where it was now around 1900. He also claimed that he had a photo of the place with its original thatched roof.

In the midst of our conversation, his daughter showed up and they had a long, extended battle about returning to the old folks’ home. He lost the argument and, in the process, lost all his swagger. When he turned and spoke to me as she pushed him not so gently into her passenger seat, I couldn’t understand a word he was saying.

Soon we would have to make our official calls at the houses nearby to announce our intent to become permanent members of the neighborhood.

If you’re interested in my translation of Junichiro Tanizaki’s essay, In Praise of Shadows, here’s a link to the book’s website.

By March, 2009, we had a plan, with final layouts and a final estimate. We committed to getting the house finished by the end of the year at the latest, so that little m could start in the local elementary school the next spring.

We sadly found the old tokobashira, the unfinished post forming one side of the tokonoma alcove, was cracked all the way through, at a very angled split. Since it stood at an important place structurally, we reluctantly gave up on it. What we wouldn’t miss was the electrical system. I had rewired the kitchen a few years earlier; when I climbed in the ceiling space, I found the ceramic insulators would actually crumble when I touched them. I redid them, but I was happy to see the last of my work would be replaced by professional electricians with something less, say, incendiary.

We also decided to repurpose the wood slab that we used as a dining table into a counter between the kitchen and the dining room. It meant cutting a section out of the wood, but we felt it was worth it to have this beloved piece of wood where it would remain a crucial part of life. We bought it a few years earlier from a man in Nagano who had a small woodworking shack in the deep forest at the foot of the Alps. It was a ramshackle place jammed inside and out with wood slabs in various stages of completion.

We had to slide in between, and crawl over huge slices of nara, hinoki, cryptomeria, and various pines. Scattered everywhere were figures—from Buddhist bodhisattvas to forest animals—that he had sculpted out of left-over pieces. He worked all alone and he was very old. There are many superb furniture makers in Japan, and the perfection in their work can make your eyes bulge, and your wallet shrink.

But you could tell the old man was looking for something different in his work; his skills were obviously self taught, and it was the imperfections and rough-hewn quality of his work that was so appealing. We visited him fairly often over the years, and never saw him working; most of the time we had to wake him from a nap in the back room. So you told him what you wanted and then waited months—or years, we heard—for the completed work.

We chose a slab of nara. When he finally delivered the table top, it came—unexpectedly, and for no extra fee—with massive curved legs from the trunk, their tops shaped to match the table bottom, so it would rest solidly on them,. They didn’t leave much room for human legs, but they were unique pieces, so what could we do but find some use for them.

*

Meanwhile, I was enjoying my work editing a book by Azby Brown—a good friend, a prolific writer, and a professor at Kanazawa Institute of Technology. It started at a bar on the way to a local Tokyo festival. We’d been batting ideas back and forth and I was waxing hops-fed poetic about the old Akiya house and the comfort zone of traditional architecture. Azby, of course, knew what I was talking about. He was the author of The Genius of Japanese Carpentry about a renowned temple carpenter, among other books. And he came back with the idea for the new book about how Edo-period people lived lives that had very little impact on the environment.

We titled the book Just Enough: Lessons in living green from traditional Japan, and while we were putting together the outline, I realized all the more how the Akiya house reflected similar values. The title, Just Enough, came from the period thought of finding value and method in minimalism; of treating things with care over many years of use—mainly because it was drummed into society, forcing people to survive on few resources.

The crux of it is that what started as imposed austerity became an aesthetic that permeated society. In many cases, it led to the melding of industry and art in the craft of making things of great usefulness. This is a greatly simplified description of a very complex time, and I am very aware that other societies also had this concept. It’s just that in Japan it had two centuries of isolation to develop.

The chance to experience living with some of those traditional values in a way that would be very hard to do in Tokyo—say, working with local carpenters, making a garden and compost, or looking for healthy compromises of traditional methods and contemporary conveniences—had me hooked. And I had pages and pages of Azby’s prose—as well as sketches of everything from toilets (and oddly smirking people squatting on them) to an entire breakdown of modulating sunlight to regulate temperature and shadow—to keep me happy for a while.

This was his favorite spot overlooking the beach. He had several other good locations--a crumbling wall, the tile rooftop of an old temple--where he’d go if there was a lucrative-looking picnic taking place nearby, but this old pine branch felt good under his feet and he appreciated the way the twisted branches kept him less exposed. Besides, it was right next to the Kisami-tei beach house, which rented out parasols and boogie boards, and served an extensive menu from ramen to barbecue. There were two garbage bins, and they could be gold mines.

He was in the middle of scratching the tough feathers around his lower beak with the top edge of his wing when he felt a shadow sweep across the sand, and he looked up at the hawk that had just started another circle high above. He stopped what he was doing, spread his wings to make himself look larger, and flapped them noisily. “Craaaahk!” He paused just long enough to know that he had the hawk’s attention. “Craaaaahk!” He hoped it was loud enough for the hawk to get the point: that squid belonged to Kikuo.

The girl in the lime-green bikini top was now listlessly chewing on the end of the stick. The squid was only half gone, and her progress was so slow Kikuo found himself hopping up and down. He had six caches spread up and down the beach, the farthest of them inland, the highest in a dead tree nearby. When he was younger he had more, but his memory wasn’t as reliable as it used to be, so he’d learned to be more clever about placement.

The squid was going to go right below him, in a hollow where a typhoon had ripped a branch off. It was the second best location he'd ever found. The finest was a shallow spot in a nearby cave, just above the high tide line. But when concrete tetrapods were hauled in a few years ago to form a breakwater, the wave action changed completely, and when Kikuo had returned to dine on his stash of day-old fried noodles, crispy pork and vegetables, he found the cave full of water, his meal plundered by crabs.

•••

BELOW HIM, THE girl in the lime-green bikini top was crumpling the napkin that had come with the squid, rolling it in her palm with her thumb as she stared at the beach house, where a good-looking young man in a jinbei was serving bowls of shaved ice to some little kids. With the other hand, she was mindlessly spinning the stick of squid down by her leg, not realizing it was throwing specks of sauce on her thighs. Kikuo was sure she'd have to make a move soon. Toss it, please. Or eat it. "Caaaaaaahw!" he cried in frustration, and she looked up for a moment and then went back to her spinning.

I'm going to fly down there and take it right out of her hands, Kikuo thought. He wished he were one of those dumb hawks. He'd seen them swoop down and pluck things out of people’s hands hundreds of times. “Caw. Ca-a-haaaw.” He hoped the girl would hear his hunger in his call, but she didn’t move.

He thought about giving up. There was a partially flattened shopping bag in the middle of the road just up from the convenience store, but he was hoping to get to that later, after the afternoon traffic had thinned. And he was sure that the minute he abandoned his spot, the squid would end up in the bin and soon after that in the clutches of that circling hawk.

Toss it. Toss it. Toss. It. Kikuo started a mantra, hoping the girl in the lime-green bikini top would get the message. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to concentrate on anything but his hunger. Toss it. Toss it.

The pain came like a spear in his side, and his eyes opened in shock. He was looking up at the sky, but he wasn’t flying. He was falling backwards. He didn’t remember letting go of the branch and there wasn’t time for another thought before he hit the gravel at the foot of the pine tree, raising a cloud of dust. He struggled to his feet; his right wing hurt like crazy and he wondered if it was broken. He knew he had to get away from whatever had hurt him, so he hopped as fast as he could down the gravel path towards the river.

•••

“FUCKIN’ FREAK,” SAID the young man in the jinbei, dropping the second of the large stones he’d picked up.

“Who is that?” said the girl in the lime-green bikini top.

“Nobody,” said the young man. “Some crazy dude who went to school with my dad, though they used to beat him up because he was too smart for his own good. Supposed to go off to Tokyo University they said, the first ever from this village.”

“But what’s with all the long, matted hair, the ratty clothes, the beard, and filth?”

“I don’t know,” the young man said. “I heard his family had a pet crow, but the day before he was to go off to college he strangled the bird and took off into the hills. He came back later, but he’s been like that ever since. Doesn’t really bother anybody, but he scares people.” He grinned, looking down. “Like you.”

“So creepy,” said the girl in the lime-green bikini top. “He just kept staring at me from up in the tree when he thought I wasn’t looking. Like he wanted to take a bite out of me or something.” She leaned in tight against the young man’s arm.

Hidden by the bank, where he crouched behind the boulders that bordered the river, Kikuo watched as the girl in the lime-green bikini let the stick, the squid tail still intact, fall to the sand and followed the young man in the jinbei back to where the kids were tilting their bowls of shaved ice up to their mouths to get the last drops of the sweet syrup.

•••

Note: There was, in fact, a real Kikuo in the Izu village where I did construction work in the very early seventies, with a story similar to the one related by the young man in the jinbei. A man of indeterminate age, he would sit in the pine trees overlooking the beach but never bothered anybody other than with an occasional caw. One night I stumbled down to the beach and sprawled out in the sand trying to sober up after hours of drinking with the crew at Ina-chan’s, the local hangout, when a group of bosozoku pulled up, got off their bikes and started hassling me—for the fun of it, I guess. It was starting to get out of hand when out of nowhere, Kikuo came down from the sea wall, flapping his arms, shaking his long hair, and screeching and cawing and prancing around us. The bikers stood around a while, looking confused, and I guess they didn’t find it much fun, for they sullenly got back on their bikes and roared off. Kikuo disappeared as well, leaving me looking up at the stars through the transparent sky, trying to reconstruct what just happened. He never even glanced my way from his tree perch when I attempted to thank him the next day.

The toilet.

You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned toilets despite their importance in any house restoration or build. Actually, by this stage of the planning we had made our decision on brand, maker, and location and were happy with it. The toilets we chose from were awe-inspiring Japanese creations, as everyone now knows. All washed our rear ends. Some talked to us, opened when we approached, used little water, and even less water. Given that I didn’t have particularly fond memories of those days squatting over traditional Japanese toilets, I had no problem with the toilet makers’ many innovations in recent years that have made our encounters with them so pleasant.

But I later struggled with translating Tanizaki’s opinions on traditional toilets in his essay In Praise of Shadows. Rather than paraphrase, I’m going to let him rave about them here:

The tatami room is fine as far as it goes, but it is the design of the toilet that truly soothes the mind and soul. . . . To squat in the faint glow of the light reflecting off the shoji and surrender to a meditative state or gaze out the window at the garden scenery is a sensation that is impossible to describe. . . . It is truly the most appropriate place to listen to the chirping of birds and insects, to appreciate moonlit nights, to contemplate the pathos of things as the seasons go through their changes; surely haiku poets from time immemorial have been blessed with countless ideas while occupying this space. It is, therefore, clear that of all the many aspects of Japanese architecture, the toilet is the apex of refinement.

“The apex of refinement.” Really? Not the gabled roofs of Japanese temple entrances? Coffered ceilings? Delicate ink paintings on fusuma sliding doors? Intricate joinery? Remember, he’s describing a time when you squatted over an open hole, hopefully keeping your rear cheeks from touching while your calves and thighs strained to keep you from putting your feet in it. But Tanizaki claimed the Japanese traditional toilet was so sophisticated that his one minor quibble was its distance from the other rooms which made visits during the night very cold (I can confirm that). Even then, he softened that observation by stating that “elegance is ice cold.”

He went on to compare them favorably to Western toilets, especially the harsh lighting of the latter, in one of my favorite, funniest sentences that I struggled to translate:

Just as it would be inexcusable for even the most beautiful, alabaster-complexioned woman to expose her buttocks and legs in public, it is very rude to illuminate this destination of our bodily products, since highlighting the parts we can see only provokes us into thinking about the parts we cannot.

There have been deep scholarly discussions about his state of mind when writing this, with opposing camps interpreting the toilet passages as naïve or ironic. But did you notice something? I did. There’s nothing about the odor. Nada. Not an omission on my part—in three pages of toilet-related rapture, he never once mentions the smell. That’s got to be a very conscious choice. I’ll give him this: it was a time when human waste was still being used as fertilizer, and not only the toilets themselves but the trucks that emptied and hauled their produce were a pretty regular sight and smell, which may have led to olfactory disinterest.

But in choosing the tone of this section for my translation, I went with my gut feeling: while a lot us have had moments of extreme clarity and genuine sparks of imagination while going about our evacuation business, would anyone seriously wax this ecstatic about their time spent there, particularly on a precarious, aromatic drop-zone? What finally convinced me that most of Tanizaki’s soaring prose in this section was written tongue-in-cheek, or perhaps fingers-squeezed-tightly-on-nose was a line that appears later, simply:

I had modern facilities installed when I built my own home.

So did we.

Subscribe now

The house of our former landlady, Mrs. A, a small, two-story prefab structure, would be the first in line for demolition. It sat in the far corner next to the rear of our old wooden house, and the space would eventually become part of our garden. It was built with a steel frame, so the contractor would have to get a small excavator in and just topple it over. You can see how small it was in the above photo—basically two, six-mat rooms stacked on top of each other with a small kitchen and bath downstairs.

She lived here until she was 95, while renting out the old house on the property to a long line of foreign weekenders, ending with us. She had moved out three years earlier when her family put her in an assisted living facility. When we bought the property we turned it around and rented her old home to a friend.

Sadly, though she was thrilled with my restoring the older house, there was nothing traditional about Mrs. A’s house but the tatami rooms. When we did pull up into the driveway on a Friday night to spend a weekend out of Tokyo, her whole house would glow from the fluorescent lights that she would leave on in each room—understandable for a single woman alone in a quiet village. But it reminded me of Tanizaki’s lament about Japan’s overly eager acceptance of electric lighting, indoors and out—a major impetus for his writing In Praise of Shadows. He wrote:

“The style of interior lighting these days has nothing to do with being able to write or sew, but is an expense paid solely to erase the shadows from every corner of the room.”

When he became perturbed by going to one of his beloved secluded resorts, only to find them lit so brightly that it made “everything from the rooms to the bottom of the stones of the garden seem shallow and superficial," he wrote:

“I’ve discovered that the best solution is to stay home, open the shutters on all four sides, and stretch out under a mosquito net where I can enjoy the cool breeze in total darkness.”

And erase the shadows she did. Mrs. A would tightly close all the shutters, turn on all the lights in all the rooms, and enjoy her air-conditioned communion with her favorite TV variety shows at full volume. And if that’s what kept her vivacious and charming whenever she emerged from that little cocoon of a house, I had no problem with it.

But now it was time to prepare the house to be ripped up, cutting off all the utilities, removing any semblance of life. When I entered the empty room downstairs for what would be the last time, it was a punch to the heart. I remembered when I used to sit with Mrs. A at a little low table, going through old photo albums while she told me stories of her life. Now there was nothing but a musty smell, and even more musty memories.

I went upstairs, and glanced out the window at the lot next door. At purchase time, we had to get official registration for our property border, and we found that the large lot and old house next door had once belonged to the wealthy American owner of the Tuttle publishing firm in Tokyo. We learned from neighborhood gossip that it had later been sold to a Swedish family who—when they left for home—basically passed the property over to their maid and their gardener/driver. Sadly, those two didn’t get along, and instead of somehow finding a use for the old house, built their own tiny prefab places in the most distant corners of the lot, and let the sprawling old house slowly deteriorate.

From the sidings, tiled roof, and carpentry, the house looked very much like it was built around the same time as our place, but much larger. From the stove pipe coming out of the roof in the photo you can tell that this section jutting out was once the bath house, likely fired by a wood stove when it was first built.

When I went through the last closet upstairs at Mrs. A’s, I found a yellowed newspaper from January, 1989, a banner headline announcing the death of the Showa emperor. I picked it up, remembering the odd stillness that gripped Japan that winter, and how the whole country seemed to hold its breath as his health slipped away. But my memories had faded as had the paper, despite its being carefully preserved in plastic. Now, both the wrapping and the newspaper were as fragile as moth wings, and reading its somber pronouncement—“the turbulent Showa era comes to an end” one line put it—felt very right standing under the harsh light from the room’s very Showa-style ceiling fixture, which surely was designed by someone deeply into SF anime.

*

When our friend Ben heard that we were going to rebuild, he asked if he could have a day to take photos of the house. He had restored a similar house nearby for his home and studio. Of course we said yes. A few weeks later he handed us a small photo album of his work, something that we treasure to this day. It sits on the counter next to the kitchen, and it’s often picked up to help us describe the heart of what we tried to duplicate—and compare it to the second generation.

So here’s a gallery of his photos of the old house. Thank you, Ben. (All photos © Ben Simmons)

Little m was hit by a van right in front of me, and I was unable to do anything. Her little 5-year-old body was tossed a great distance, and she landed on her side in the middle of the road.

It was all my fault. We were in Warabi, M’s family home, taking some futons from the beach house to store there while we were rebuilding. Across the road was a vegetable store run by Chinese immigrants spilling over with cheap produce. When traffic was light, our family group jaywalked across the street to buy some zucchini, arugula, and tomatoes. I was the first to cross the road back with a full shopping bag, and turned to see little m on her own. She’d slipped her aunt’s grip, and was standing on the yellow line in the middle of traffic.

I screamed at her to stop and wait, but she took two steps—and disappeared from my sight. A van lifted her up in the air—thunk, it went—in slow motion and a house blocked the rest. By the time I turned the corner and got to her side, she was gasping for air, and writhing on the ground. I wondered about moving her, but couldn’t handle the sight of her laying on the asphalt road. I moved her to a grassy patch on the roadside and laid her down. M was calling for an ambulance.

I looked back at the driver, who had stopped. He made eye contact, paused, and sped off. A group of people, including M’s sister, and two young Chinese men from the vegetable store took off after the van. Little m was in shock, moving her legs and trying to get up, moaning about pain in her chest and hip and M and I held her down and stroked her head, trying to feel for any head injuries. One of the pursuers returned to say they’d chased down the driver and were holding him for the police, when the ambulance arrived. The paramedics went to work, put her in the ambulance with M. They told me to wait for the police, who were on their way.

I ran down the road and found some police already questioning the detained driver. I started screaming at him, asking him why he didn’t stop, but he wouldn’t even look at me until one of the cops demanded he apologize. Which he finally did, begrudgingly.

By the time I got to the hospital, they had finished with the blood test and x-rays, and M and m were waiting in the emergency ward. Little m was still in shock, staring silently at M and I as we hugged each other for a long time. “You never told me you could fly,” I said. “Were you trying to get out of the way?” She nodded and smiled and slowly started to return to us.

We learned later that she had been thrown eight meters. But, incredibly, the only visible damage was a bruise that was slowly changing color on her hip. There were no scrapes or scratches or cuts.

The other miracle was the people there who reacted to the accident. The young men at the vegetable store left their stations so fast they were able to stop the car at the next light, quite a way down the road. As M’s sister ran down the road after them, people along the way handed her memos where they’d written down the license plate number. And while I was waiting, people were coming up to ask if I was the father, handing me canned drinks, and saying comforting things. The paramedics, police, everyone was extremely professional and very, very kind.

M stayed with little m, sleeping on a cot next to her bed. I went home to feed the cats and spend hours on the phone—talking with the police about whether to press charges; if I didn’t, they would. They told me the driver was definitely speeding when he hit m. One said it was lucky it was a cab-over type with a flat front; a car, he said, would have likely knocked her down and run over her. But, when I finally lay down, the image of the van slamming into her little body and carrying her out of my sight kept playing on a loop whether my eyes were open or closed. For weeks I was to have dreams of similar frustration—seeing loved ones in horrible situations where I could do nothing for them.

M’s sister called and told me that after I left she and the cops finally got an explanation from the driver for his hit-and-run drive away. He was in a hurry because he borrowed the car from his brother and needed to get it back.

It was time to speed up the schedule to leave Tokyo for the seaside.

T, the architect, handed us finished architectural plans. We handed back a demolished second floor.

He had finally finished a layout that would meet our budget, and had come in with complete plans, beautifully rendered with everything from water and electricity to windows, beams, posts and earthquake reinforcement.

If you look closely at the plans for the second floor (above), you’ll see all the measurements are based on multiples of 91cm. That’s the result of using shakkanho, an old system of measurement still used by builders in Japan, rooted in ancient Chinese units dating back to the 13th century BC.

The metric system became the sole legal measurement system in Japan in 1959, and though using shakkanho is technically prohibited, tradition can’t be swept aside that easily here. It’s still the main unit of measurement in traditional trades like carpentry and kimono-making. Even my metric tape measure has little arrows at 91 centimeters, which is three shaku. One tatami mat, or jo, is three shaku by six shaku (or one ken, or 182cm), and every measurement in our house plan is based around this system.

The jo is a very human measurement, being just the amount of space an average-sized person at rest would need. Though I suppose to people like my brother-in-law Jim, who at 205cm has grown beyond a size anyone imagined three thousand years ago, it might seem a bit small. Even though only the zashiki living room in our plans would actually have a tatami floor, all the other rooms and hallways were also measured in jo. One jo made up the floor space of our toilets, the tokonoma, closets, the wood stove space. Two of them were the size of the bath, the stair footprint, and so on.

And, of course, just as our contractor friends sat back feeling pleased with their endeavors, we threw back at them what we had been working on: a completely rejigged second floor that would mean changing the wall locations, water systems, windows and flipping the stairwell direction, which had T, the architect, scribbling like mad until he came up with a drawing of our plan below:

Ahh, much better, we said, as T held his head in his hands. Okay, so the master bedroom had moved six feet away from the beach-side windows, and the study was directly overlooking the sea (which meant concentrating on work would be a strenuous undertaking). But little m had a closet accessible from her room, we ended up with a large (by Japanese standards) walk-in closet with a loft, and to top it off, I found out that T didn’t know that the term for the sliding wooden locks on traditional storm windows in Japanese is “monkey.”

But T was nothing if not forgiving, both with me for my arrogance at bandying about an obscure term that he has never had to know to keep his clients happy, and with us for wanting to get the best out of what we were putting into this house. So he grinned and promised to have the new plans for us in “two weeks—maybe three.”

We’d have to let go of the monkeys.

We spent weeks going over the old house, looking for things we could keep or refurbish or copy in the new one. Too many posts and beams were fractured; they would have to go. Nor would we be using the old wooden amado shutters that slide on rails over the outer glass doors of most traditional Japanese houses. From the time of its original construction, they shielded this house from both the winter winds and the summer typhoons that often make their way up this coast. We usually kept them open while we visited, and closed them when we shut the house down after the weekend. There were times when we closed them while still inside, huddled in relative darkness as horizontal rain pelted the wood slats and the pounding waves shook the foundations. During the worst of it, they leaked blowing sand and rattled until our heads ached. We wouldn’t need them as we were going to replace the wood and glass doors with double-glazed, insulated versions.

As permanent residents, we would no longer have to go through the long routine of shutting down the house when we were away—everything from turning off the breaker to cutting the water and pulling the amado (all twelve of them) out of their storage boxes and locking them down And while I wouldn’t miss tugging those recalcitrant shutters into place, I would miss our monkeys.

The monkeys were security. The bolt that locks an amado in place is called a saru, or monkey, supposedly because a monkey won’t let go once it has its paws on something. It’s an excellent name. I once came down for the weekend without the front door keys and spent a long couple of hours believing I could get past them. But those monkeys held their ground, and I returned to Tokyo, defeated.

We also made the big decision to keep all the shoji doors—both for the genkan entranceway and surrounding the zashiki tatami room. People have questioned that choice over the years—and some have suffered from it. The house was built when the average Japanese was shorter than today, and the height of the shoji doors was 173cm, about 5 feet, 8 inches. The architect prodded us several times on our choice to stick with the old doors, rather than building replacements in a larger size. I’m 177cm, and I have to admit I’ve got several scars on my scalp from misjudging door frames.

But we were determined to use as many of the tategu fittings as possible, and I liked the idea of having to duck to enter the room—like a humble bow to the heart of the home. So we stuck with the old shoji door frames. A few head bruises seemed a small price to pay.

*

In the breaks between cataloguing the house, we continued to explore our future village. One of the nice things about Akiya is that one minute you can be scuffling your way down the beach past sea shells and starfish, dodging shore fishermen while scanning the sand for the pottery shards that wash up . . . and the next moment you can make a hard left turn and head up the river like Captain Willard. Well, they call it a river, but it’s more like a stream that makes its way down from Mt. Ogusu . . . which they call a mountain, but at 240 meters is more like a large hill. The open area at the peak, though, is the highest point on the Miura Peninsula, and from it you can see Yokohama, Mt. Fuji, and the distant, larger peninsulas that put Miura to shame: Izu to the west and Chiba to the east. Miura and Chiba are like crab claws closing around Tokyo Bay: Chiba’s the big fat one with lots of meat; Miura is the little thumb-like appendage.

So, on a chilly early December day, we put down our lists of house fixtures and headed “upriver.” M and I used to climb the mountain often before little m was born. It’s only a four-kilometer-or-so hike, but it’s largely steep stretches of steps too high for little legs and a tough workout for large legs carrying little legs. But thanks to the former Empress Michiko, who often visited here, the local authorities did something very nice. For the first mile upstream from the sea, they laid a series of stepping stones in a very natural-looking progression that made the slightly uphill and very secluded walk through the forest something that even little m could handle.

On the way to the trail, we passed several unattended stalls that sold freshly harvested vegetables. We called out at the last one before the trail, and a woman came out to sell us yakiimo potatoes baked over hot stones. We passed through bamboo groves, over several waterfalls, through a fairly deep gorge, until we found a place to picnic. The potatoes were wrapped in foil and still warm. They’re a delicacy when the weather is cold, and the skins are crisp and crunchy while the insides are creamy soft and sweet. Next time, we agreed, we’d bring salt.

I have to make something clear. The seaside house was not a minka—one of the spacious traditional “folk dwellings” that dot Japan, and have become the objects of laudable movements to conserve this important heritage. Unlike those, there was no sunken hearth, rough-hewn log beams, or broad doma indoor work space, all ideal for showing off in an open interior. Ours was the bare minimum, built very simply, but obviously with great care, by an anonymous local carpenter: two eight-mat tatami rooms surrounded by a hallway, a tiny kitchen, a four-mat “dining area,” and the bath and toilet.

The house was too small for the family to live in, so our first thought was for additions. We began looking for a komuten general contractor that would understand our love for the house and come up with a plan that would retain the heart of our home while giving us more space. A special issue of the Chiruchinbito magazine with a list of compatible firms helped; we picked several for further discussion.

Unfortunately, all the contractors told us that the foundation was too weak to build on. We could raise the whole house and put in a new foundation, but the old wood columns were cracked in places and split through in others and the walls weren’t strong enough to hold a second floor. Reinforcing them would cost a small fortune. We were trying to stay small, under 1500 square feet, and without adding a second floor we would need to use all the garden space, negating one reason for moving in the first place. So, after much soul searching, we decided to build anew, with the one absolute being that the main zashiki tatami room would use all the old house’s fixtures—shoji doors, ranma lattices, wooden fusuma doors, even the tokonoma shelf—and the rest be used or copied so carefully that we’d feel as if nothing had changed. The rest of the house should feed off of that aesthetic; all the architectural plans began around that.

The selection was much easier than we thought: the two men from K komuten who came to our Tokyo home—one was the architect—began nodding immediately when I mentioned In Praise of Shadows, whereas the other firms’ representatives looked at me blankly. We immediately agreed, among other things, that ceiling lights would definitely not meet Tanizaki’s approval, and moved on.

By this time, little m, our daughter was four, and—unfortunately for the contractor—we decided we wanted to be able to move in time for her to start at the local elementary school. I say “unfortunately” because that gave us plenty of time to agonize over the layout while they made the two-hour trek to central Tokyo for meetings a few times a month from their shop on the coast.

By November of 2008, we were far enough along to make our own journey to their office, after visiting several of the houses they built to get a feel for the various materials: the wood (sugi or pine?) for the flooring, and plaster wall material (shikkui or keisodo). We went with the sugi for the softness and warmth underfoot, and the keisodo to cut down on the sea breeze humidity. Shikkui is made of permutations of lime, hemp, and seaweed. Keisodo is made of fossilized algae, a type of phytoplankton, and has up to 50,000 pores per single micron. These help absorb humidity in the summer, and expel it in the colder, drier months. Both are biodegradable, but the keisodo’s rougher texture seemed to be closer to the wattle of the old house and would more likely earn Tanizaki’s blessings. (Keisodo, or diatomaceous earth, is also the material used in the traditional portable cooking grills called shichirin.)

At the office, Ike-chan, the architectural intern, had just finished a detailed model of the house, which he presented with such care and deference that when he lifted the roof to show the inside, and the whole thing slid from his hands, fell to the floor and broke in half, we all stood and silently stared down at it, hands clasped as if before an open coffin.

As we bent to pick up the miniature model’s pieces, I noticed that he had crafted the ceiling of the tatami room and the beams in a wood-pattern, just barely visible through the tiny doors and windows.

Next episode: “Kiku’s Lament,” a short story—and a breather from this detailed narrative of our building a home on the Miura coast south of Tokyo.

The village’s prominent feature is Tateishi—”Standing Rock”—the name of a 10-meter tall rock formation rising out of the sea just a hundred meters or so north of the house site. It’s been there long enough for Hiroshige, the famous Edo-period woodblock artist to do a print of it. For years, I doubted such a print existed, because although every mention of the rock includes that fact, I wasn’t able to find a copy anywhere, not even on the internet.

The front windows of the house faced southwest. A little to the right, over the water loomed Mt. Fuji, which could be disconcerting, since all our senses told us we should be looking toward Hawaii when we were actually gazing westward in the direction of Shanghai. Across the bay was the long arm of the Izu Peninsula, where I first fell in love with beach life back in 1972, while working as a day laborer on a construction team digging deep holes in the jungle floor for resort hotel hot-spring tanks. (It paid ¥3000 per 10-hour day with all you could drink afterwards—and a bath. Not a hot spring bath either, but a cold hose and a barrel cut in half.) That summer ended with a horrendous bike accident and a brush with someone from the CIA, but that’s another story.

I briefly described how discovering the hidden beauty of the little house changed my weekends from days of comatose relaxation to days full of activity in the notes that appear in my translation of In Praise of Shadows

“I began fixing the wall and cleaning the windows. When the wall was repaired, I tore up the worn carpet and restored the tatami floors. After the new tatami was installed, I spent months removing the paint from the floors, posts and beams, returning the wood to its natural finish. I replaced the fluorescent tubes with soft lighting, bought an antique cupboard for the kitchen. I sanded, and sanded, and sanded. I smoothed the runners of the sliding shoji doors, ripped out a maze of jerry-rigged electric wiring, and then I sanded some more.”

Looking back, I’m not entirely sure what drove me to do this. Not only was it not my house, but my housemates couldn’t understand why I was putting in the effort, and one was actually quite put out when I put the horrendous carpet out with the trash. Perhaps, he thought I was trying to wrest control from him since he had the contract. The real reason was that I was having more fun with this physical labor than I’d had in years. Of course, I always told Mrs. A, the landlady, what I wanted to do, and luckily she seemed content to let me have my way.

By the mid-nineties, F and I were the only tenants. In 2000, he returned home, leaving me with the dilemma of taking on the monthly rent alone, or finding someone to share. M, my new girlfriend, enjoyed the house as much as I did, and we finally jumped at the chance to make it our weekend retreat.

In 2005, when Mrs. A informed us that her family had arranged a place for her in an assisted living facility, we were shocked. She was 95 that year, and we shouldn’t have been surprised—but she seemed ageless. Whenever we saw her, working in the garden or giving her a lift to the supermarket, she was always carefully made-up and immaculately dressed in either kimono or Western dress. She had let us hold our wedding in the house a few years earlier—my girlfriend M was now my wife—and arranged for the local liquor shop to deliver cases of beer. She had shared remarkable stories of her scandalous years as a single mother: escaping from an abusive husband on a bitter winter day in northern Japan in the dark days prior to World War II to post-war days of selling black-market candy to put her two boys through Japan’s best university. She was still a striking presence, slight but with an erect posture, and with such expressive eyebrows and flirty expressions that made it easy to picture her in the heyday of the moga—the “modern girls” of twenties and thirties Tokyo.

Mrs. A made it clear that she had valued my restoration work by arranging an easy purchase of the land and the houses—if I wanted. In one afternoon, we went from despair to panic to elation. Could we let it fall through our hands? Could we live without it? What would we do with it if we had it? By then, our ties with the old house were entangled with memories. Thinking about our one-year-old daughter—who learned to walk on the tatami and the sand—made it an easy decision in the end. We’d work out what to do with it later.

For some time, we just continued with our normal routine. A three-day weekend the following fall shifted our thinking. We drove up to M’s parent’s place in Azumino, a valley town at the foot of the Northern Alps, where they had retired to a home they had just finished building. The exterior was striking: white plaster and dark exposed beams, the style of that part of Nagano prefecture. The interior was equally eye-opening—the centerpiece a towering tree trunk at the center of a soaring atrium, a broad wooden stairway leading to the second floor, a massive wood stove that was their only source of heat. (Nagano winters are severe, and their stacks of firewood nearly circled the entire house.) Next to the stove stood a precarious stack of issues of Chiruchinbito, a magazine that focused on “homes, ways of living and world lifestyles.” Post-it markers sprouted from hundreds of pages, which opened to spreads of beautiful old houses and new—all done using traditional Japanese carpentry.

“There were technical treatises

on heating traditional-style homes

(including wood stoves),

insulation, and baths. “

It was like discovering a new community of similar souls. There were homes with extensive shoji panels, and floors where tatami shared equal space with wood flooring. Walls were plastered, not painted. Sliding doors were everywhere, and posts and beams were exposed and celebrated, not hidden. There were technical treatises on heating traditional-style homes (including with wood stoves), insulation, and baths. There wasn’t a fluorescent light to be seen. And simplicity and restraint seemed to be the rule.

M’s parents had overseen every detail of their build, and the influence of those pages was visible everywhere. We paid a short visit to their carpenter’s workshop, to look at the great slabs of wood under discussion for a large dining table. Standing among the lumber, intoxicated by the scent of hinoki and sugi, toki and nara, I found myself thinking. On the drive home, for the first time we talked seriously about the possibility of transforming our beach house into a permanent home. The aesthetic of In Praise of Shadows kept coming up.

Tanizaki was also on my mind at work. At the time, I was an editor at Japan’s largest publisher of quality English-language books. The existing translation—done by Edward Seidensticker and Thomas Harper—was published in 1977 by a firm in the U.S., and had been in print since then. But the edition had always irked me, one antithetical to everything Tanizaki wrote about: blurry type on low-quality paper—as if had come through a fax machine. I wrote the rights-holder for an estimate to the rights if we were to do a more intimate edition and received an exorbitant figure that amounted to a middle finger.

I noticed that the essay would be public domain in a few years, so I began some long-term planning. My first move before choosing a translator was to find Tanizaki’s voice—the one I heard when I read the original. I’m not a translator by training, but I sat with the text until I had worked through the first “chapter.” Then I set it aside, to wait for the moment when a new edition could become more than a dream.

Subscribe now

In 2017, my translation of In Praise of Shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki’s essay on Japanese aesthetics was published. I received many messages of appreciation—including from a noted translation award committee—but for reasons Amazon never adequately explained, online sales were limited to Japan and Canada. In June, 2026, the book was finally listed on their sites world-wide.

I first discovered Tanizaki’s book at a time in the mid 90s, not long after becoming a co-tenant of a late 19^th-century cottage perched on the coast southeast of Tokyo. A number of foreigners had rented it over the years from the landlady next door, and most had treated it just as I first did: a ramshackle place to crash while enjoying weekends of sand and sea. It came furnished with discarded office furniture and threadbare carpets, and the interior was sloppily lathered in various shades of what was once white paint.

But there was a hint of something more. The first sign was a large, traditional wooden bath, fillable via a length of fat bamboo cut in half—ideal for sitting up to your neck in after a day of swimming. Over the months, other features revealed themselves: beautifully aged wood interior framing under the bad paint jobs, a traditional sunken storage space under the kitchen floor, tatami mats under the raggedy carpet. No longer content with just beach time, just for the fun of it I started restoring the house to its original condition.

I happened to be reading a translation of In Praise of Shadows, a 1933 collection of essays by Junichiro Tanizaki. The book is both a meditation on traditional Japanese aesthetics and a reflection on the changes Japan was going through as it opened to the world. It has long been required reading for architects and artists trying to grasp the essentials of the Japanese aesthetic tradition.

The pleasure of reading Shadows is following Tanizaki’s mind as it ranges across differences between Japan and the West—construction, paper, soup, theater, makeup, lacquerware, dancing, interior decorating, skin color, ghosts, and toilets. His long sentences suggest a stream of consciousness, though on closer reading, one can feel his careful constructs. His descriptions of certain details—the feel of washi paper, or the sight of a gold lacquered bowl by candlelight—opened my eyes to aspects of Japan that had never registered. Lines like this one grabbed my attention:

We will forever find great pleasure watching the intimate scene of the end of the day’s natural light clinging stubbornly to the last moments of life on a dusky wall.

I suddenly saw the rough, earthen walls I was working on in a whole new light, so to speak. I became more aware of the house’s textured highlights: the fine ridges of tatami, the grain of the worn wood pillars, the soft light through the shoji transoms. The house was no manor—nothing like the carefully preserved farm houses and merchant residences that can be found scattered about the countryside. A modest seaside home: two tatami rooms, an engawa, a kitchen, bath and toilet. But the years had done nothing to erase what the local carpenters had left behind: their work was their signature.

Deeply intrigued, I forced myself to read Tanizaki’s original Japanese, which was not an easy task. I found a passing mention of how some traditional toilets had “a narrow window at floor level for sweeping out the dirt; through this, one can all the more intimately hear the sound of raindrops trickling from the leaves and the eaves . . .” It described exactly what I had found in the beach cottage toilet, something I had assumed was unusual but unnecessary. I scraped the crusted paint from the window frame so I could open and shut it—and hear rain, and waves.

As a writer and editor, I found myself hoping that one day I would see to a new translation—to bring Tanizaki’s voice closer to the way I imagined him speaking.

As life would have it, coincidences conspired to make that happen. My work on the house led to a deep and very warm friendship with my elegant landlady, daughter of a downtown Tokyo kimono-making family who had been “exiled” for some family indiscretion. She was an honored guest at my wedding, held in the restored tatami rooms. A few years later I found myself the owner when she moved into a facility for the aged, and offered me the property. I had never imagined living there permanently, but this changed everything. My wife and I committed to leaving Tokyo for the coast, and we started looking into what it would take to rebuild our home—and our lives—on the Miura coast.

“Living in Tanizaki’s Shadows” is a series of posts describing how Tanizaki’s prose shaped my appreciation for Japanese aesthetics—and a first-hand account of the long process of building a traditional style house by the sea.