Takamatsu, Shikoku

This week I took a road trip to Shikoku. Nine hours there, nine hours back, with only about 40 hours on the island. We'd planned to stay longer but cut our stay short to beat a typhoon home. Our Shikoku hosts were Cathy Hirano, the amazingly adept translator of the Moribito books, and SCBWI friend and author Suzanne Kamata, so the visit was rich with book talk.

In Takamatsu, we visited the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in Mure, a village full of stone workers, with huge slabs and chunks of rock everywhere.

Mure and quarried mountains

In Mure, Noguchi worked with stone cutter and sculptor Masatoshi Izumi during the seventies and eighties. The day we visited was cool and drizzling rain, making the stone sculptures in every hue especially brilliant and reflective. No photos were allowed so I only have a shot taken from outside the stone circle with the saw-tooth summits of Gokenzan in the background.

outside the stone circle

We walked about the stone circle where Noguchi worked with Izumi and others in near silence, visited the house Noguchi lived in, and wandered through the kura storehouses that had been converted into his work spaces. How amazing to see his simple tools. And how incredible to have the opportunity to meet Izumi-san, to learn I'd admired his work just several weeks before at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo where I'd thought of Noguchi without knowing who the embassy roof garden artist was.

I was also fortunate to visit the George Nakashima Memorial Gallery, to see his amazing chairs, tables and chests and to have tea and cake at one of his tables.Nakashima is yet another extraordinary artist who crossed cultures in a profound and enduring way.

bust of George Nakashima

We'd planned to spend another day ferrying to the island of Naoshima to visit museums and art sites, but the typhoon scared me off. Instead we drove up to the temple on Yashima, where tanuki are a big deal...

mother tanuki with baby

and where, being number 84 of the 88 pilgrimage temples, pilgrims come by the busload. We were lucky to arrive at a quiet interval.

pilgrim visiting the temple

Finally we visited Shikoku-mura, an open-air museum with a collection of old preserved Shikoku houses set into a mountain slope: rural family homes, a kabuki theater, merchant houses, round houses where sugar cane was pressed, sheds for steaming mulberry bark for papermaking, buildings where soy sauce and sake were made, and more.

vine bridge entrance to Shikoku-mura

soy sauce bottles and jugs

Then another 9 hours back in the car...perfect for a long audio book--this trip was The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya and Shizuoka zipped by.