A trip to a ryokan is really a trip into a different way of seeing the world, a different sense of space and time and self. Not just because you wash (as everywhere in Japan) before you get into the tub (seated on a wooden stool, and slopping water over different parts of your body from a pail); not only because you’re eating with chopsticks and sleeping on the floor on a rice-husk pillow. But mostly because a ryokan is an initiation into the classic principles of Japanese design, which tell us that a suggestion is always more persuasive than a statement, and opulence consists mostly of finding out how much you can do without. In the most elegant ryokan, like Tawaraya, there are no dining rooms, or parking lots, or public areas; the emphasis is on privacy. The view from your room is not grand and expansive; it is deliberately particular and small, a study in miniatures. And the kind of recreation a ryokan offers has little to do with swimming pools, or health clubs, or discos, and everything to do with a sense of simplicity and silence so luxurious that all you want to do is sit and sit for hours in your room, watching the light reflect off paper screens and listening to the rain beating on the roof. You become a part of the scene; the scene becomes a part of you.
King of Infinite Space
Pico Iyer Journeys
http://picoiyerjourneys.com/index.php/2000/03/king-of-infinite-space/
When you step into a classic ryokan, or traditional Japanese inn, you step into decades, perhaps centuries, of silence. I was reminded of this as soon as I returned, not long ago, to Tawaraya, a nineteen-room inn that sits on a tiny lane of lanterns near the heart of old Kyoto. Though the place is often referred to as “the world’s best hotel,” there was nothing to denote its presence save a tiny sign hanging above an entranceway that has been welcoming guests for nearly three hundred years. I stepped through the doorway, barely large enough for one person, and found myself in a polished-stone genkan, or reception area, roughly the size of a small kitchen (the term different world). There was no lobby to be seen, no front desk or elevator: just a man in a Japanese silk jacket taking away my shoes (to polish them), a kimonoed woman laying slippers before me, and another man, in shirt and tie, whisking away my bags.
I stepped up onto the tatami mat and entered a world of shadows and screens. A single candle reflected off the polished wood of a narrow, narrow corridor. A wooden ladle sat in front of a pebbled indoor garden. A maid in kimono, shuffling along the corridor in white socks, her very movement a whisper, led me around a corner and down a passageway to my room, named after an ancient word for “green”, midori. She opened a door and slid back a panel, and there were two bare rooms, filled with emptiness and silence.
Though I had been in the inn for scarcely thirty seconds, my bags already sat neatly in one corner, as if I had been there forever, the maid ushered me to a cushion overlooking a private garden— moss and a stone lantern—and then, on her knees, bowed to the floor and placed herself at my service; another maid, who would also be waiting on me full-time, asked what I would like for breakfast the next morning, and when I opened the “Guide to Services” booklet before me and found a hand-drawn map of a “Path to the Serene World.” The maids came in again with a mug of green tea, some traditional sweets, and a hot towel, scented with incense for me to refresh myself with.
A trip to a ryokan is really a trip into a different way of seeing the world, a different sense of space and time and self. Not just because you wash (as everywhere in Japan) before you get into the tub (seated on a wooden stool, and slopping water over different parts of your body from a pail); not only because you’re eating with chopsticks and sleeping on the floor on a rice-husk pillow. But mostly because a ryokan is an initiation into the classic principles of Japanese design, which tell us that a suggestion is always more persuasive than a statement, and opulence consists mostly of finding out how much you can do without. In the most elegant ryokan, like Tawaraya, there are no dining rooms, or parking lots, or public areas; the emphasis is on privacy. The view from your room is not grand and expansive; it is deliberately particular and small, a study in miniatures. And the kind of recreation a ryokan offers has little to do with swimming pools, or health clubs, or discos, and everything to do with a sense of simplicity and silence so luxurious that all you want to do is sit and sit for hours in your room, watching the light reflect off paper screens and listening to the rain beating on the roof. You become a part of the scene; the scene becomes a part of you.
Even the most everyday aspects of your routine become transfigured, somehow, in the ryokan’s pearly light. You sit, typically, on the floor, at a low table, and the same room becomes dining room (as the maids serve your meals in your chamber) and bedroom (as they lay out your futon after you have finished eating). You slide across the tatami mat on socks and step around the spare, green garden in geta, or wooden clogs. Most guests, on entering a ryokan, will don a yukata, or light cotton kimono—a way of signifying that they have left their daily selves behind—and glide around the inn, and even the nearby streets, in the loose, relaxed gown. In a place like Tawaraya, everything is made of natural materials—reed and bamboo and paper and thatch. There are no locks or curtains, and the doors are so low that even the diminutive maids have to bow every time they come in or out.
The other feature of a ryokan, which I have never experienced in a lifetime of staying in hotels, is that, like the most alluring kind of partner, it reveals its secrets only gradually, one at a time; the longer you look, the more you are beguiled. When I first arrived in my room, I could hardly believe that I was paying hundreds of dollars a night for two largely empty tatami spaces; soon, I was thinking that I’d found a bargain as I settled into what felt like an ancient box full of hidden compartments. I opened the black cabinet in my greeting area—a small spray of flowers in a slim vase on top of it—and found a minibar inside; I opened a cupboard to hang up my clothes and saw that the wallpaper was made of sheets of traditional songs a geisha might sing. On one shelf was a lacquered box, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which turned out to contain antique writing instruments; nearby, in the tokonoma—the traditional alcove that is virtually a shrine to the religion of the seasons—there was just one scroll, so delicately traced that I could hardly read it, and a small ikebana flower arrangement. In a room of rigid straight lines, the single curved flower sang.
Before long, in fact, I had discovered that my simple space actually contained seven separate chambers, and the paper screens and sliding doors which made up its divisions allowed me to create a seemingly infinite number of combinations—framed angles of the garden, rectangles of air, silhouettes of twigs on almost transparent screens. I felt as if I were afloat in a room that trembled like a mirage—now large, now small; now shadowed, now bright. A ryokan is in many ways a study in rectangles, and its air of geometric clarity is enforced by the black edges of the tatami mats, the darkened bamboo screens hanging from the roof (to filter sunlight). Not for the first time, I decided that I would forswear wandering out into the romantic city of two thousand temples, and simply spend the day exploring the many facets of my room, learning to read it (as one might, again, a partner) by a hundred different lights.
The Japanese excel, in many respects, at drawing lines and marking off firm boundaries (between work and play, or the private self and public self; between me and you); everything, from their lunches to their feelings, seems to come in boxes. But in the ryokan I could better appreciate how that sense of segmentation actually makes for a kind of flexibility—“infinite riches in a little room,” as Marlowe put it. My space changed shape and size and color as futons were put down or put away, screens were pulled up or back; and I, likewise, found myself slipping from socks to wooden clogs, to straw sandals (in the stone-paved area beside the garden), to slippers again. Identity, in Japan, is more porous and adaptable than it is in the West.
The result of all this is that the ryokan changes you as you begin to adjust to its nuances. In most hotel rooms I enter around the world, I rearrange the furniture to make myself at home; in Tawaraya, it seemed as if the room were rearranging me. I began to speak more softly and to move deliberately; I start to notice the tiny white plates and the miniature white flask of sake put out in my garden for the gods, the sewing kit, in its own box, inside a silk pouch. Before long, I found that I was almost instinctively straightening my sandals every time I took them off.
The heart of the Ryokan, which derives from all this attention to detail, is that there is nothing impersonal about it; you begin to feel as if you are a guest in a kind of ideal home, rich with formal intimacy. In fact, many of the qualities that foreigners find so frustrating at the conference table in Japan–the reticence, the self-effacement, the refusal to give hard-and-fast answers–achieve in the ryokan their sweetest sublimation, as one enters what feels like a private, woman’s domain of softness and ceremony (all ryokan are traditionally run and staffed by women). That may explain why all the design principles we bring with us from abroad are turned on their head here: In New York, the best hotel rooms are generally at the top of the building, commanding a view of the city below; in a ryokan they are usually on the ground floor, where you can more easily merge with the garden. In the palaces of Europe, one often feels overpowered, almost, by the weight of history and the grandeur of tapestry and the chandelier and silverware; in Kyoto, even the imperial villas boast an almost shocking emptiness, as if to release one from the world of hours (no clock was visible in my room in Tawaraya). The Japanese room is a training in inwardness.
In much the same way, the maids in even the fanciest ryokan tend not to speak English (though Western-style hotels in Japan are generally bilingual); the implication is that intuition will suffice and words are hardly necessary. (When the maids in Tawaraya do speak, it is in an exquisitely polite version of the dainty Kyoto dialect that is, in Japanese, the equivalent of hearing characters from Jane Austen speak.) Certainly, one hardly misses the words. One day, I walked down the corridor to explore the small library in Tawaraya, and before I had even entered the room one of my maids appeared, as if she had been waiting for me (as, perhaps, she had), with a mug of hot tea. “Welcome home,” she said in soft Japanese, placing the drink beside me and slipping out of the room backward so as not to confront me with her back.
Behind this, of course, lie all kinds of principles, not just aesthetic but social and emotional, which date back to the very first inns in Japan, opened perhaps thirteen hundred years ago to accommodate itinerant priests. The Japanese speak of wabi and sabi, notoriously hard-to-translate terms that connote something having to do with loneliness, simplicity, and rustic purity; we may grasp the idea by thinking of a haiku (in which the spaces between the words convey as much as the words themselves), or a tea-ceremony room, so empty that it looks calm and elegant and large. The overall effect is to screen you from clutter and dirt and noise, and leave you free to meditate. “It’s the ultimate nostalgia,” a Kyoto-born friend of mine said to Tawaraya. “True heaven. Like returning to my childhood–the small green garden, the smell of tatami, the feeling that you have nothing in the world to worry about. Time stops.”
I noticed again how meticulousness is brought to relaxation–and that perfection and humanity are not regarded as incompatible–when I began to explore my bathroom. The cedar tub sat in a room of its own, a thermometer beside it, and next to a window that looked out on greenery and bamboo and rose no higher than my knees (the principle, again, being that a view eight inches high can be more revealing than one eighty inches high). In the separate room that housed the sink, even the scale was earth toned, and there were so many shades of beige that I thought of the temple, a few minutes away by cab, where there are 130 different kinds of moss, each of which reflects a different tint of green during the rainy season. The toilet, too had its own little room, and on top of the heated, high-tech contraption sat a small silk pouch filled with incense. Under the sliding paper windows was a tiny cedar sink in which to wash your hands.
For the Japanese guest, this sense of particularity, and of being pampered, comes to a climax with the traditional kaiseki dinner, which is the highlight of a stay in a ryokan (and may account for half the total price). As I sat at my table, my maids shuffling in and out amid a flurry of bows and smiles and apologies, bringing in one course after another, I realized that many of the culinary niceties and seasonal details of the ten-course feast were doubtless lost on me; still, I could see, on this October day, that the lacquered bowls in which the food was served were decorated with autumn leaves, or with pictures of the moon as seen through autumn grasses. Every one of the tiny dishes fit the moment – seeds from the garden soaked in sake, tiny pieces of seasonal fish wreathed in flowers, ginko berries next to spiced tofu – and many actually sat on autumn leaves. The sensuality was aimed as much at sight and touch and smell as at taste.
Even for Japanese guests, such grace notes have become increasingly exotic. Nowadays, the typical Japanese resident lives in a modern Western apartment appointed with windows and wood floors, showers and chairs and beds; and the average young Japanese woman cannot put on a kimono without the help of a beauty salon. The central challenge facing every ryokan today is how wired customer ( the likes of Jack Nicholson and Gerald Ford are often to be found in Tawaraya) while preserving an atmosphere redolent of the age of Dante. In Sumiya, a historic ryokan just down the road from Tawaraya, there are new blond-wood tatami rooms overlooking a classic Kyoto vista of gray roofs; in Hiiragiya, across the street from Tawaraya, there are specially invented remote control boxes, made of lacquered wood and in the shape of gourds, for controlling the lights and screens. Tawaraya, which has been in the same family for eleven generations – its entire history – has, in my view, the most elevated sense of how to incorporate foreign and modern elements in a world that remains deeply Japanese. There are Western-style chairs beside the veranda for looking at the garden, but they are wicker, to go with the bamboo and straw all around; there is a telephone in every room, but it is covered by a handmade cloth. Once, opening an antique-looking cabinet, I came upon a television set, but one that was wafer thin, as light and elegant as a laptop screen – the miniaturism of Japanese high-tech rhyming with the incense bowls nearby.
Coming upon such marvels, I could better understand why the small library I had visited was so richly stocked with books about Isamu Noguchi and Arata Isozaki, two Japanese-Americans who have worked hard to update the principles of Japanese design so that the old will be forever new. What is striking about the ryokan, after all, is that the classic Japanese aesthetic, with its fondness for black-and-white, its love of empty space, its belief that one rock can fill a garden better than fifty, seems to be more and more vogue everywhere, especially in the most contemporary and high-tech of environments. Just as the sushi bar has taught us a different way of thinking about food (and of looking at it), so the traditional Japanese room seems to be teaching us a different way of using space. I see its influence in the white-on-white patterns of Ian Schrager hotels and the uncluttered geometry of Armani showrooms; in the airy design of JFK Airport’s new Terminal One and the open spaces and natural light of Hong Kong’s stunning new Chek Lap Kok Airport (with its Cathay Pacific lounge designed by the brilliant English minimalist John Pawson). While staying at Tawaraya, I happened to flip through a glossy magazine from New York and came upon an ad describing a “little room overlooking the moss garden” and a “cinnamon-colored kimono with a design of autumn grasses” (capitalizing on the geisha chic quickened by the success of Arthur Golden’s novel, Memoirs of a Geisha). Twelve pages later there was another ad, depicting a Kyoto-style rock garden, with the words “security, simplicity, economy” (for a computer company, no less!).
As the world becomes saturated with “stuff” and with data – more than twenty thousand sites on the World Wide Web deal with information overload – simplicity and silence seem more precious than ever. And as more and more of us accelerate into a multitasking blur, the slowness and space of a ryokan can feel more than ever like heaven. If there are a hundred things in a room, Tawaraya taught me, the mind gets dizzy and overwhelmed; if there is just one, it grows so calm and spacious – so attentive – that in that one it can find a universe.