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The Directory › Asia › Japan › Tokyo
Plate III · i · b · The City

Tokyo

Two entries, an hour of city between them, and only one of the two have I actually stood in.

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A quiet Tokyo backstreet at blue hour, low garden wall and clipped hedge under telephone wires
Plate III · i · b · Aoyama, at dusk

A city that keeps its best rooms behind a hedge and a gate, and never once tells you they are there.

A day, properly arranged
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The morning is remembered. The afternoon is only intended.

The entries

Two entries — one visited, one still standing open.
An empty gallery of dark timber and stone, a low vitrine of bronze and tea ceramics lit softly from above
Interior · the low cases, Nezu

Everything set at the height it was meant to be looked at from, which sounds like nothing until you have spent a year looking down into other people's cabinets.

EARLY APRIL, ON OPENING
Still on the list in Tokyo
Not yet an entry. Kept here so I cannot quietly forget it.
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Notes for Tokyo

The Nezu is the one I can speak for. Go at opening, in April if you can arrange it — the approach under the bamboo is a deliberate piece of choreography and it only works when there is nobody ahead of you on it. The crowd, when it arrives, is exemplary; it is the quietest full building I have been in.

Seikado Bunko I have read about far more than is respectable for somebody who has never walked through the door. It shows in winter, the bowl is not always out, and I have twice been in this city at the wrong time of year. That is the whole of my authority on it.

These two are not a pairing so much as two separate mornings that happen to share a city. Do not try to hinge them on one afternoon; Tokyo will spend the difference on transit and give you nothing back for it.

← Japan One morning I can vouch for, and one I am still owed. The Index →