David Elliott
THE HOUSE BEYOND THE HORIZON HOUSES, DREAMS AND POEMS
“Inside the high garden walls, one came upon the latticed front of the house. An earthen passage led from the entrance through to the rear. In the rooms, lighted even at noon but by a dim light from the courtyard, hemlock pillars rubbed to a fine polish, gave off a soft glow… Sachiko sensed that much of her sisters’ love for Osaka was in fact love for the house… She had often enough joined Yukiko and Taeko in complaining about it—surely there was no darker and more unhygienic house in the world and they felt thoroughly depressed after no more than three days there— and yet a deep indefinable sorrow came over Sachiko at the news. To lose the Osaka house would be to lose her very roots.” Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, 1949 1
Leiko Ikemura was born in Tsu, a small Japanese coastal town in Mie Prefecture not far from the ancient building complex of the Ise Grand Shrine (Fig. 1, p. 246). Set against surrounding woods and mountains, these fountainheads of pantheistic Shintoism, torn down and identically rebuilt every twenty years, were not only a national centre of p ilgrimage but also, paradoxically, an embodiment of the impermanence of all things in the death and renewal of nature. Although she did not realise it while she was still living in Japan, the beauty and transient spirit of this special place was later to become of lasting significance for the development of Leiko Ikemura’s art. The town of Tsu itself, however, was much less prepossessing than the famous shrines. It had been heavily bombed during the Second World War but quickly rebuilt. Ikemura’s
1
Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters (1949), Book 1, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, London, Vintage, 2000, 99.
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