An Architect Draws the Boundaries of His Own Life

The Summer House by Masashi Matsuie

Sensei was always the first one up at the Summer House.

Just after dawn I was lying in bed, listening to him move around downstairs. I picked up my wristwatch from the bedside table. In the dim light, I saw that it was 5:05.

The library, just above the front entrance, had a small bed, where I slept. As day was breaking, muffled sounds would rise through the old wooden posts and walls.

I’d hear Sensei remove the bar and stand it against the wall. Then he’d slide the heavy inner door into its casing on the left, and open the outer one all the way until it reached the wall outside, where he’d fasten the brass doorknob with a loop of rope. That kept the wind from blowing it shut. Finally, closing the screen door behind him, he set out on his morning walk. Cold forest air blew softly through the screen door. Soon the Summer House was quiet again.

Here in the forest, over a thousand meters above sea level, the first to break the silence were the birds, starting before Sensei stirred. Woodpeckers, grosbeaks, thrushes, flycatchers . . . the names come quickly to mind. Some I can only remember by their song.

That morning, even before sunrise, the sky was an odd shade of blue, showing the silhouettes of trees that moments before had been sunk in darkness. All too soon, without waiting for the sun, morning broke.

I got out of bed and raised the blind on the small window that looked out onto the garden. Mist, thick clouds of it, veiled the leaves and branches of the katsura tree. The birds were quiet. I stuck my head out of the window to breathe in the mist. If that smell had a color, it wouldn’t be white, but green. Careful not to make a sound, I raised the blind in the workshop next door. All I could see out of this much-wider window, facing south, was a stretch of white. The huge katsura in the garden floated in the mist. I wondered whether Sensei might get lost in the hazy woods.

But no matter how deep it seemed, the mist disappeared as soon as the sun rose. As though nothing had happened, the birds started singing again. He would soon be back. In an hour or so, everyone would be up.

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The Murai Office of Architectural Design was in a quiet corner of a residential area in Tokyo called Kita-Aoyama, down an alley you’d miss if you weren’t looking for it. It was a small concrete building with parking space under the eaves, just big enough for three cars. Every year, from late July to mid-September, it basically closed down and relocated to what everyone called the Summer House, in the mountain village of Aoguri in Kita-Asama, where there was an old colony of vacation homes owned by people who came to escape the city heat.

Once preparations for the move to the mountains started, the office suddenly got busier than usual. Meetings with clients were held almost daily to take care of any outstanding problems before we left. We also had to stock up on supplies to take with us. Styrene boards for study models. Staedtler Lumograph drafting pencils. Uni erasers. Tracing paper. Stationery. Some staff members got crew cuts so they wouldn’t need the village barber, others went to the dentist to have their teeth checked. Having worked there for only four months, I couldn’t think of anything special I’d need for this first summer in the mountains, beyond a cookbook for beginners I bought, knowing I’d have to take my turn at kitchen duty.

Ms. Yoshinaga, our accountant, stayed at the office in Kita-Aoyama, along with two other women who had families, and two men who had to oversee the construction of a building that had just begun. Sensei’s wife, whose pediatrics clinic was at their home in Yoyogi-Uehara, never left Tokyo.

The company had a staff of thirteen, including Murai Sensei. While that was about average for a business headed by one individual architect, it was pretty small considering the mark he’d left on postwar Japanese architecture. He could have hired more people whenever he wanted to. Instead, he chose to tailor the projects he took on to the size of his staff, politely refusing work that didn’t interest him, calmly letting chances for expansion pass him by.

During the 1960s the Murai Office had picked up quite a few commissions for public projects and large buildings in business districts, but by the 1970s its main focus was on private homes. An introduction was almost essential for a new client, but even then, Iguchi, the manager, would tell them, “It’ll take at least two years, maybe even longer, to build your house,” and then ask them frankly, “Are you willing to wait that long?” Few were discouraged. People who wanted to live in a house designed by Shunsuke Murai already knew it would take time. But there was another type of prospective client, with enough money to hire a famous architect but not very particular about which one. For them, Iguchi would raise the bar from “at least two” to “at least three” years. They were never that patient. Having decided to build a house, they wanted to see it completed as soon as possible, and unless it was some sort of vanity project, they weren’t prepared to wait.

When I joined the office in 1982, Sensei was in his mid-seventies. While this is well beyond the normal retirement age, in the world of architecture, where people start out in their thirties and are still considered young in their forties, it’s not unusual to stay active past seventy. Sensei not only designed the houses, but also would often go to the construction site to iron out details with his clients. There didn’t seem to be any major problems either with his health or the company’s finances. Nevertheless, although no one talked about it openly, everyone was wondering about the future, five or ten years down the road.

By the 1980s the Murai Office could already be said to be putting the brakes on, gradually slowing down in preparation for a final, quiet stop. The last staff member fresh out of university had been hired in 1979, and rumor had it that he would be the last. There were still students about to graduate who didn’t let the rumors discourage them; one or two came hoping for a job interview the following year and the year after that, yet without success.

When I was in my last year at university, I knew I didn’t want to go on to graduate school to study architecture, but doubted I’d fit into the tightly organized design department of a major construction company. In fact, I couldn’t really see myself working anywhere. Postmodern design studios were popular, but I had no interest whatsoever in doing that sort of work.

I thought of apprenticing myself to a master carpenter and working my way up. In the summer vacation of my third year, I persuaded a small building contractor to let me help on two construction sites. But by that time contractors were simply a system for commissioning and supervising workers, while the best carpenters were lone wolves, in business for themselves, accepting work from any contractor who would hire them, with no time to take on trainees. In this new era, when houses could be quickly assembled from prefabricated materials without using planes, saws, or chisels, the building trade was becoming much less dependent on skilled craftsmen.

What I really wanted to do was to work independently from the start, without being attached to any company or design office. Unfortunately, that was virtually impossible. I wasn’t a registered architect with a first-class license, and if I didn’t go on to graduate school, I couldn’t become one without at least two years of practical experience. I’d have to follow the normal route, joining some office of architectural design to get the practical training I needed, making do on a low salary for several years until I got my license.

There was only one architect I really respected, and that was Shunsuke Murai. He didn’t design any of those strikingly modern buildings that sprang up between the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the 1970 Osaka Expo. He didn’t talk much either, and since he rarely strayed into areas outside his profession, only people especially interested in architecture were likely to know his name.

From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, Murai was probably better known in America than in Japan. When an exhibition on twentieth-century architecture was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1967, he was the only Japanese architect included. The catalogue credited him with grounding his work in traditional Asian forms while incorporating elements of modernism in innovative ways. As an example of “Japanese-style modernism,” part of a major work of his from the 1960s, designed for the Komoriya, a Kyoto inn with a long history, was reconstructed in the museum courtyard, where it attracted a good deal of attention.

Visitors to the New York exhibition probably remembered having to take their shoes off at the entrance, and the smell of new tatami, rather than the name Shunsuke Murai. But he was not merely well-versed in the traditional architecture of his own country. As a young man he had made a firsthand study of older buildings in China, Korea, and Europe, becoming at the same time one of the first to grasp the simplicity and rationality of modernism, made possible by materials such as steel, glass, and concrete. From this he had developed a truly original style, of which certain connoisseurs soon took note.

From this he had developed a truly original style, of which certain connoisseurs soon took note.

At the opening party for the exhibition, one of the wealthiest men in the eastern United States asked him, without notice, to design a house for him. Jeffrey Hubert Thompson, whose grandfather had made a fortune from an East Coast railroad, taught anthropology at Harvard, his alma mater, but was better known as an art collector. He was also associated with an incident that occurred in his student days. Three months after disappearing while doing fieldwork along the White Nile in East Africa, he was found in a village several hundred kilometers away from the spot where he had last been seen. There was talk in the tabloids of a love affair with a local woman. Thompson himself never denied or confirmed it.

Twenty years later, still a bachelor, Thompson was among the guests at the private viewing. He read the article on the Komoriya in the catalogue while other guests chatted, and carefully examined the alcove, the decorative wooden panels above the sliding doors, the veranda, the doors and fusuma, made of wood and paper. He then approached Murai and asked him about the merits and drawbacks of using wood and concrete in the same structure, and how building on pliant, marshy land such as you’d find in Japan was different from working on hard, dry terrain.

Their conversation persuaded Murai to accept his proposal, and he spent several months supervising the construction of the Thompson House. It was his first long stay in America since before the war, when he had been apprenticed to Frank Lloyd Wright for two years. A sprawling project on land with a river flowing through it where deer came to drink, the result was widely featured in American architectural magazines. Though he was asked to design other houses on a similar scale, he refused on the grounds that he had too much work waiting back in Japan. “If I’d kept on building houses that big,” he later told Iguchi quietly, “I’d have lost all sense of proportion.”

Earlier in the 1960s, he had worked himself to exhaustion on a large-scale project commissioned by the government, only to end up clashing over his basic plan with the officials in charge. This experience must have made the recognition he later received in America all the more welcome, a hidden reserve of support. Many of his contemporaries who spoke eloquently on the future of urban planning were awarded contract after contract for major public projects. Sensei, on the other hand, stopped entering design competitions for public buildings; and since he’d never been one to hold forth on architectural theory, he didn’t appear much in the media either.

But as I went around examining buildings he had designed ten or twenty years earlier, I realized how remarkable his work had been during those years of silence. Without getting caught up in the excesses of Japan’s post-war economic boom, or indulging in any sort of flashy display, he had designed buildings that were simple and easy to use, yet with a beauty that didn’t fade.

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In the fall of my last year at university, as I became more and more anxious about my future, I decided to take a step toward something that had almost no chance of coming true.

It was late September. An unusually large number of red dragonflies, rarely seen in Tokyo, had flown in from the northwest, stopping on telephone wires or low concrete walls to rest their wings. I went out onto the upstairs veranda, where I saw several up close, on the pole I hung the washing from, and on the railing. Wings like paper-thin metal; deep-red bodies; the blurry brightness of their compound eyes. No human hand could create anything like this. In less than thirty minutes, they were gone. It was a dry, windless day.

After seeing the dragonflies off, I went back to my desk and wrote a letter to the Murai Office, asking politely but as briefly as possible if there was any chance of my working there. I enclosed a copy of my graduation project, a plan for a small house designed for a family with one member in a wheelchair. Days afterward I could still hear the sound of the envelope dropping down into the mailbox.

About a week later, I got a phone call from Hiroshi Iguchi, who told me he was the office manager. Although they had no plans to hire me, Murai Sensei was willing to give me a short interview.

On the appointed day, I headed for the office in Kita-Aoyama, having checked the location on a map. I met Sensei in his dimly lit office, facing north, on the second floor of a three-story building covered with green ivy.

“So you’re Tōru Sakanishi.” His voice was deeper than I expected. There was a lattice window to his left, casting a faint light on his cheek. Sturdily built, he looked serious—grim, even, though not in a nervous, high-strung way. He had the firm jaw one often sees on men who work with their hands. His tone was gentle, his face surprisingly expressive; as he listened to me, he would chuckle occasionally, or seem to be thinking about something I’d said. No one had ever listened to me more carefully.

“Does someone in your family use a wheelchair?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then why design a house for one?”

“I wanted to see how a wheelchair would affect the proportions of an entire house.”

Nodding slightly, he looked down at my plan, his hand resting on it as he asked more questions.

“What do you think is hardest about making the blueprint for a house?”

I thought for a while before answering.

“Maybe it’s that you have to create a new space within limited boundaries, without adding or multiplying anything. It involves a lot of dividing and subtracting.”

He nodded again, then looking straight at me asked, “Is that what you’re best at?”

“I’m not sure, but I do think I’m good at that sort of thing.”

“And what kind of architecture do you think is made by adding and multiplying?”

“I’m sure there’s something of that in multistory apartments.”

My meeting with Sensei over, still keyed up with excitement, I walked past the workshop on the same floor. No one spoke or even looked up from their work. Something about the old wooden desks, white walls, and wooden floor reminded me of Sensei’s face, and his voice.

Shortly after that I got a call from Iguchi, telling me I had been accepted as a provisional employee. It sounded to me as if he couldn’t quite believe it himself, though I may have been imagining this. Considering that there was a list of applicants on file in the office, many of them licensed architects with five to ten years of experience, it would have been natural for him to be surprised. I myself was amazed to hear I’d been hired, even provisionally. When I turned up the next day, Sensei looked straight at me, just as he had before, and said, “While you’re here, make sure you learn a lot and do good work.”

I myself was amazed to hear I’d been hired, even provisionally.

After the New Year, I started going there in the early morning on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays, when I didn’t have classes. I was assigned a desk in the farthest corner of the workshop. A guy named Uchida, who was about a decade older than me and had the desk next to mine, acted as my instructor. I spent my first days at the office doing the miscellaneous tasks he gave me, figuring out how things were done. Yet even with these small jobs, there seemed to be a reason for everything, down to minor details. After two or three weeks, I could see that the workings of the Murai Office were as clear as the cutaway drawing of a building. There were no unreasonable orders or wasted effort, which meant I had to stay alert.

During the early 1980s, in contrast to the hectic pace of architectural developments generally, the buildings Sensei designed tended to be seen almost as nostalgic, in the mode of Japanese tradition, but that’s not how they seemed to me. There was nothing homespun about the logical framework I saw behind either his designs or the way things were done at the office.

There was a rational explanation for that old-fashioned, comforting feeling people got from Sensei’s houses. It came from visual effects created by things like the height of a ceiling, or a light source in the floor, or a shoji lattice fitted into a window that faced south. There was nothing mysterious about it. Though he rarely tried to explain in public how he achieved these effects, he would show us in practice, not only on blueprints, by moving a ruler about on the workshop wall in relation to the ceiling, or sometimes by opening and shutting doors or windows. He was always logical, never emotional.

“You can sleep better in a small bedroom,” he’d say, “because it’s more relaxing. The ceiling shouldn’t be too high. Too much space above the bed leaves room for ghosts to float around in.” Here he would smile slightly. “The bed should be just close enough to the wall for you to be able to touch it when you have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.” On kitchens he had this to say: “You only want to smell food before a meal—there’s no point in it afterward. The height of the ceiling, and the position of the cooker and ventilator are the keys to controlling it.” The way he sounded was like a craftsman simply explaining his techniques.

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Spring came.

On the evening of April 1, when overcoats were no longer needed, a welcome party for me was held at an Italian restaurant near the office.

As we walked down the dark street, talking quietly, I smelled something sweet (Carolina jasmine, I was told by Yukiko Nakao, a staff member slightly older than me). I can remember that evening even now. I’d never eaten in a restaurant with Italian waiters and chefs before.

After the main course, a white, U-shaped cake with a square red candle in the middle was served. Uchida, my instructor, had asked the chef to make it from a drawing he’d done of the Summer House in Kita-Asama; the squat red candle was supposed to be the chimney. It was exactly one-fiftieth the size of the original, Uchida explained. “Couldn’t calculate the next one, so I don’t know how it’ll compare with the original,” he added. Just then, as if on a signal to the kitchen, another dessert was brought out. This one was a Mont Blanc, so big it had to be carried in both hands. The sides had been sculpted with a palette knife to make it look like Mt. Asama, and powdered sugar gave it a snowy summit. There were sighs of admiration from our group. Uchida frowned, looking embarrassed.

“Mountains don’t have blueprints, so getting the shape right was harder than I thought it would be. I had to dig up some old snapshots, and maps with contour lines.”

“It’s good to have old pictures,” Iguchi said cheerfully, “glad you found them.” He was a little drunk.

“I asked the chef to let me help him. I’ve been looking at Mt. Asama from the Summer House for over ten years now, so I think we got it just about right.”

“The back of the mountain, the Karuizawa side,” Sensei said from where he was sitting. “This is how it looks from Oiwake or Komuro. Very impressive. Well done.”

The cake was placed at the foot of the mountain. Uchida adjusted their positions. A flame rose from the chimney, along with a wisp of smoke. I’d already seen blueprints of the Summer House; now, I could imagine myself inside it.

Before the cakes were cut up, we had our picture taken, standing around them. Uchida peered through the lens of the Leica he always carried with him, then asked one of the waiters to press the button. “Ready? Everybody, smile!”

The office staff stood shoulder to shoulder against the wall, leaning over slightly. Sensei and I sat in the middle, the candle flame reflected in our glasses. Looking back, I realize that this is the only picture I have of myself with him. This grainy photograph, taken with a flash, would later bring back memories that meant more to all of us than we could say.

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A month later, we heard on the office radio that Mt. Asama had erupted. This hadn’t happened since 1973, nearly a decade earlier. Crops were covered in volcanic ash on the Gunma Prefecture side, and the west wind blew smoke as far away as the Bōsō Peninsula. Cinders, some small as grains of rice, others the size of peas, pelted the area around the Summer House. We heard from the caretakers’ agency in Aoguri that although ash had fallen on the roof and clouded the windows, the glass wasn’t broken, and the building itself was undamaged. Although immediately after the eruption some of us wondered if we’d be able to go to the Summer House that year, from May into June volcanic activity seemed to have stopped altogether.

Then came the last Thursday in July. After lunch, every­ one at the office was busy packing blueprints, models, files full of materials and documents, including estimates and even records of conversations we’d had with clients, into cardboard boxes, which were then loaded into three station wagons. The boxes had obviously been used before, as some were reinforced with packing tape, and all had numbers on them, indicating the order in which they should be loaded. Tightly lined up in rows from the right, they fitted neatly into the luggage space.

The radio news now said that Typhoon 10 was on its way. The Kanto-Koshinetsu area was right in the path of the storm, at present a huge spiral over the Pacific. We set off from Kita-Aoyama, the three vehicles in single file, feeling the typhoon at our back as we headed for the northwest side of the Kanto Plain like stragglers lagging behind a flock of migrating birds.

After going over Usui Pass, we headed west on Route 18, then at Naka-Karuizawa made a right turn toward the north. When Mt. Asama appeared through gaps in the trees, I peered up at it as we climbed higher, navigating a series of hairpin turns. Then the whole scene opened up, and I saw the mountain looming over us, bathed in evening light, so huge it was startling. This was a live volcano that just three months earlier had been spewing cinders and ash. Had I watched the eruption from this spot, I would have felt a raw sense of danger, but now there were only wisps of steam rising from the crater, and they could have been mistaken for clouds.

Beyond the pass was the Asama Plain. From here the road to the north was perfectly straight. When we reached the heavily wooded area around the village of Aoguri, night was falling. At the intersection on the main road we turned east, and with the old Kita-Asama Station on our right, drove for several more minutes until we reached the main street through the oldest part of the village. The Summer House was just north of here.

With its two wings enclosing a large katsura tree, the house had a concrete base with two wooden floors above it. Hidden by deep-reddish-brown cedar siding, the concrete was a half-story high, lifting the lower level off the ground to protect the wood from the moisture that rose from the forest floor.

The three cars entered the yard from the left, then swung clockwise around the katsura tree for a half circle to the parking lot. Engines were switched off. As soon as the car door opened, I could sense that the air here was completely different. The sound of branches stirring along with birdsong and the chirring of cicadas drifted down from overhead. The breeze carried a faint odor of earth and leaves. I looked up to see patches of blue sky through the trees. It was nearly ten degrees colder than in Tokyo.

The village of Aoguri was high enough above sea level for the change in air pressure to affect your ears. Water boiled at a lower temperature than down below. There weren’t many people in the vicinity, and the night sky was full of stars, the forest home to nearly eighty types of birds, plus kamoshika (goat-antelopes), monkeys, flying squirrels, rabbits, foxes, and bears.

The Summer House was smaller than I’d imagined from that white cake. The cedarwood siding was probably just as it had been when the original house was built in 1956. With a round clock on the front, it might have been mistaken for a little country schoolhouse. The yard with the katsura tree in the center faced south; a short distance away from the main building, a Himalayan cedar, the tallest tree in the area, loomed over the garage.

The entrance was slightly off-center, and to the west. When Iguchi opened the door, the air inside was heavy and damp. We all started hauling boxes from the station wagons into the house. Several steps up from the entranceway, off to the right, was a spacious dining room. The workshop was on the second floor, at the top of the stairs. It was dark inside, and smelled of wood. The heavy wooden rain shutters were pulled back one after another to let in the last rays of sunlight, which reflected dully on the polished oak floor. As if she’d done this many times, Yukiko whisked the white cloth off the big oblong dining table and folded it up. Red-tinged light lay over the fine-grained maple tabletop.

Next to the dining room, on the eastern side, were the kitchen and a room for ironing and other household tasks. A right turn from there took you into a sort of service area, along one side of the U-shape, with the women’s laundry room, a pantry, and a storehouse for gardening tools, from which you could go directly outside. To the west of the dining room was a place to keep blueprints in, and next to it, linen. From there you turned a corner into the opposite side of the U, where you found the men’s laundry room, the boiler room, and more storage space, with a ping-pong table, a tall stack of garden chairs, two bicycles, and a motorcycle that belonged to Uchida, who had arrived ahead of the rest of us.

The women’s bath was on the second floor, east of the workshop, and on the western side were the director’s office, the library (where I slept), and the men’s bath. In both wings, the second floor was lined with single rooms for staff members. The five rooms for women in the east wing faced the five for men in the west one, with a wide corridor and the yard with the katsura tree in between. Tables, chairs, sofas, and cabinets—all trial items made at the Tokyo office—were placed here and there in the corridor. We sat in the chairs and sofas to read, talk, or take afternoon naps. For Uchida, who was in charge of furniture, this was also storage space for samples, so that he could check on their size or other details. He repaired this furniture when needed, and kept it waxed, so all the pieces were in excellent condition.

After putting away my things in the library, I took off my socks. The cool wooden floor felt good under my bare feet. I remembered my childhood, when I used to go barefoot all summer. I pushed open the window looking out on the yard, to see the katsura tree right in front of me. Kawarazaki, one of the most important members of the team, was just driving past it into the parking lot.

All the windows were open. Slowly, the Summer House was beginning to breathe again.