From the Kenyon Review, New Series, Fall 1986, Vol VIII, No. 4
When his father died in the spring of 1918, Junichiro Masanori, a curator at the Imperial Museum, took a leave of absence from his work. For as long as he could remember, he had not felt more than a moderate attachment to his father and so was quite unprepared for the depth of grief that swept through him, leaving him weak and disoriented. He needed time to recover himself. A friend recommended a retreat to the Yoshiro district, a primitive region of great beauty of a type the Chinese call Wu-hsin (No-mind). Masanori chose the village of Shionoha, more or less arbitrarily but influenced by its situation below a mountain on the shores of a small lake. There was no question of securing accommodations in advance; he would have to take his chances when he got there.
The nearest railway station left him at the market town of Nara where he had to wait several days before a farmer—returning to Shionoha after market day—could be engaged to carry him there in his cart. From this man Masanori learned that there were no inns in the village but that the blacksmith, who had recently retired and gone to live with his daughter in another town, had left a vacant house. Perhaps his nephew, who still lived nearby, might be willing to rent it to him.
The man was willing and even included the services of his wife to prepare meals and tidy up. From her he learned that the place was called the House of the Potter.
This name piqued Masanori’s interest since his job at the Museum—and indeed the great love of his life—centered on his connoisseurship of pottery. It was through his efforts that the Museum’s great collection of seventeenth-century Hagi-ware had been acquired. And, equally through his efforts, a national program had been established to discover and honor the great living potters and collect examples of their work.
The coincidence seemed meaningful to Masanori but, whatever the meaning might have been, it ended with the name. Nothing about the house itself indicated that it had ever belonged to a potter, and no one in the village remembered one ever having lived there. The name was an enigma, but one no local person had ever thought to solve; it was simply a part of the landscape.
Masanori, who had been preparing a long essay on the Raku master Chojiro when his father died, continued to work on it in the mornings, and this gave a minimal structure to his days. But his afternoons were open, and their openness was flooded with sadness. As he walked on the mountain trails tinted with spring colors, or on the edge of the blue gray lake, his father’s image would rise up before him and fill him with grief. He could not make sense of it. As a very young child, certainly before his first school year, he had loved his father in the way a small boy will—no matter what the man’s actual qualities. But this idealizing love could not survive the reality of his father’s character—a featureless, self-effacement that made the very thought of him a blur. How could it be that this man, no less a ghost in life than death, could inspire such tenderness? What Masanori came to feel in those lonely afternoons on the mountainside was a reverence for the very emptiness of his father’s memory.
One moonlit evening when he could not sleep, Masanori sat in an upper room that looked out on a walled garden overgrown with weeds. For a long while his eyes moved unfocused over the ground, seeing nothing. But at some moment a pattern emerged. Whether it was a trick of the light or the human tendency to make sense of disorder, he seemed to see an outline in the grass.
When he went to investigate, the pattern disappeared. Walking among the high weeds in the moonlight, Masanori felt himself to be as lost as in a pathless forest. It was only from the upper room that a pattern was visible.
For the next two days it rained, and he could not check his perceptions. But when he returned to the upper room on the third night, the pattern seemed even clearer. Fixing his eye on a few distinctive shrubs, he went down into the garden. In a little shed against a wall, he found a rusty spade and began to dig along a line transposed to the earth from his mind’s eye. After a few false starts and at a depth of just over one foot, he uncovered the foundations of a building.
The dig, begun in secret, became a secret obsession. The next morning, Masanori drew the shoji before the landlord’s wife arrived and then explained that the unfiltered light hurt his eyes. Behind the garden walls and the drawn screen, his activities went on unnoticed. The digging replaced his morning writing and, since it tired him out, he continued to wander the countryside in the afternoons. In this way, it seemed to the villagers that their visitor’s routine had hardly changed at all.
On the fifth day of digging, Masanori came upon a round depression lined with firebrick—the chimney of a kiln. He had solved the mystery of the Potter’s House.
Nevertheless, he continued to excavate, less out of professional curiosity than for the peace of mind that came with using his muscles and the simple pleasure of uncovering. As he worked, his grief began to dissipate.
The area around the chimney, measuring roughly sixteen square feet, was surfaced with brick. Because of the way the chimney was set into it, Masanori concluded that it formed the ceiling of an underground chamber, probably the potter’s kiln. Since he lacked the equipment, there was no way to break through and it seemed that he would have to give the project up. Then it came to him that a possible access lay through the chimney itself. With great difficulty he began to clear it, first lashing the spade to a pole and then to a longer pole until, at last, he heard it clink against a solid surface. Now to continue meant lowering himself down the chimney to find an opening into the chamber and dig it out. First he constructed a rope ladder, then a simple pulley to remove the buckets of earth and tip them over into the garden above. In fact, this part of the task, which at first seemed so formidable, went quickly and easily. In one morning he had found the entrance and cleared the opening to it. Masanori ran back to the house for an oil lamp, lit it, and went in.
As his eyes grew accustomed to the flickering half-light, he saw that the room, remarkably dry and free of debris, was lined with firebrick shelving. Each shelf contained vases, bowls, cups—every sort of vessel perfectly intact as if it had just been finished. But that was a small miracle compared to their age and quality. These were all works of the Tokugawa, the greatest classical period, and each one a masterpiece of its kind.
Feeling as if an extraordinary grace had been extended him, Masanori collapsed on the floor of the kiln and wept. When he had recovered himself, he began to examine each piece, slowly touching it with his hands and eyes. Clearly these were the product of a great master, but Masanori could not find a single signature seal. Nor was there any basis for an attribution, despite affinities with other masters of the period. When he’d examined the last one, feeling deeply exhausted, he went back to the house and fell asleep.
It would have been hard to say when the idea first came to him of making the house and its secret contents a memorial to his father. Perhaps it was on the first day of discovery or in his dream-filled sleep. But the idea grew increasingly clear as he contemplated the vessels over and over, virtually committing each one to memory.
Masanori then asked his landlord if he might do a bit of gardening for relaxation. The man had no objection. Very carefully, he cleared the remaining weeds from the garden, returned the soil he had dug up, and raked it until no trace of his excavations could be seen. Taking the young son of his landlord with him, he walked the mountain paths and lakeside, searching for suitable plants and shrubs. Then he planted them in the garden in the style called Yamazatu no niwa—an “artless” style that is meant to look unplanned. On the first market day after he had finished, a farmer took him to Nara where he boarded the train for home.
