Three Days in Kanazawa, Slowly

He sweeps the wet leaves into a black plastic dustpan, then taps the dustpan twice on the rim of a metal cart. The sound is precise, almost musical, and it is the first thing I hear after stepping out of the ryokan on a Wednesday morning in late October. The man is maybe sixty. He wears a navy jacket with a name patch and rubber boots the color of old pennies.

He does not look up. The street is Owarichō, a side lane in the Higashi Chaya district, and at this hour, just past six, the cobbles are dark from overnight rain. Two crows are arguing on a tile roof across the way. A vending machine hums.

Somewhere down the block a metal shutter rolls up, then stops halfway, then rolls up the rest of the way, as if the person inside changed their mind and then changed it back. I had come to Kanazawa because a friend in Iowa City, a woman who teaches printmaking, said it was the only Japanese city she had visited that did not seem to be aware of her. She meant this as a compliment. She meant it had not been arranged for her benefit.

I understood what she was saying and also did not believe her until I got there, because almost every city now performs in some register for the people passing through. Even small towns put out their good silverware. Kanazawa does not, or did not in the seventy-two hours I was inside it, and the thing is, I am not sure I would have noticed if I had been moving faster. ## Day One

The Hokuriku Shinkansen arrives from Tokyo in just under three hours. I had taken an earlier train than I needed and got in at noon on Tuesday with a duffel bag and a soft-cover notebook I had bought at a stationery shop near Tokyo Station. The station itself in Kanazawa is famous for its wooden gate, the Tsuzumimon, which is shaped like two enormous drums. People photograph it.

I walked past it without stopping because I had read enough about it on the train and wanted to come back when I had earned the look. The bus into the city takes about ten minutes. I got off near the Korinbo intersection because that is what the woman at the ryokan had told me to do, and I walked the rest of the way with the duffel slung across my chest. The afternoon was gray and warm.

I passed a bicycle shop where a man in a green apron was truing a wheel, holding the spoke wrench between his teeth while he spun the rim. I passed a shop selling only umbrellas. I passed a bakery whose front window held nothing but six identical loaves of pain de mie, arranged in a triangle, and a hand-lettered sign that said, in English, “Bread is finished at 3 p.m.” It was 12:40. The ryokan was on a narrow lane near the Asano River.

The woman at the desk was in her fifties and spoke a careful, deliberate English that she had clearly worked at for a long time. She gave me a key on a wooden fob and pointed to a paper map with a pencil mark where we were and another pencil mark where the public bath was. She did not give me a list of restaurants. She did not ask what I had come to see.

When I asked her if she had any suggestions, she thought about it for a long moment and then said, “The river is good in the morning.” That was all. I went to my room and sat on the floor for a while. The tatami smelled like dry hay and faintly like cedar. The window looked out onto a small courtyard with a single maple, its leaves not yet turned.

I could hear water moving somewhere, either a fountain in the courtyard or a drainage pipe; I never figured out which. After about twenty minutes I went back out. What I keep coming back to about that first afternoon is how little anyone in Kanazawa seemed to care that I was there. I do not mean that anyone was rude.

People were the opposite of rude. They held doors. A woman at a soba shop near the Omicho market drew me a small map on the back of my receipt when I asked, in stuttering Japanese, how to find the Nagamachi samurai district. The point is that no one performed for me.

No one tried to upsell me an experience. The restaurants did not have laminated photographs of their food. The shops did not have signs in five languages. The city was busy being itself, and I was permitted to walk through it.

Omicho market is a covered arcade of about a hundred and seventy stalls, most of them selling fish and produce. I spent an hour there in the afternoon, when the lunch rush was over and the vendors were standing around with their hands behind their backs. A man at a crab stall was hosing down the concrete floor in front of his counter. The water ran along a shallow gutter and disappeared.

Snow crab was in season, and the crabs were lined up by size, their shells the color of brick. A woman at the next stall was weighing something into a clear plastic bag using a small brass scale that looked like it had been in the family for a generation. She did not look at me. She looked at the needle on the scale, and when it stopped moving she nodded once and tied the bag.

I ate lunch standing up at a counter near the back of the market. A bowl of rice with raw tuna and salmon on it, plus a piece of pickled radish and a cup of green tea, for fourteen hundred yen. The man who served me had a small radio playing what sounded like a high school baseball broadcast. He listened to it more than he watched the counter.

When I paid he counted my change twice, both times silently, and then bowed about an inch. I want to be careful here. There is a kind of travel writing that takes a small encounter like that and makes it stand for an entire culture, which is both lazy and a little colonial. The man counted my change carefully because he was a careful man, or because the previous customer had short-changed him, or because that was how his father had taught him.

I do not know. The part that catches me, and the only part I trust to report, is the silence of it. He did not narrate the transaction. He did not thank me three times.

The work was the work. That evening I walked along the Asano River. The light went out of the sky at about five. The willows on the bank were still mostly green but a few of the lower branches had gone yellow, and they reached down toward the water in a way that made the water seem lower than it was.

A heron stood on a flat rock in the middle of the river and did not move the entire time I watched it, which was probably four or five minutes. I crossed the Umenohashi bridge and walked into Higashi Chaya, the teahouse district, where the lattice fronts of the old wooden buildings are kept up and the cobblestones have been laid and re-laid for two hundred years. The thing about Higashi Chaya is that it could easily be a stage set, and in fact at midday it nearly is, with the tour groups and the rented kimonos and the women in those kimonos posing in the alleys for their friends with phones. But at six in the evening on a Tuesday in October, it is mostly empty, and the wooden buildings, lit from inside by paper lanterns, look the way I imagine they have looked on most Tuesday evenings in October for a long time.

I stopped at a small shop selling gold leaf. Kanazawa makes most of the gold leaf in Japan, and the city sells it pressed onto everything: chopsticks, hand mirrors, sake cups, soft-serve ice cream cones. I did not buy anything. I watched a woman in the back of the shop separating sheets of gold leaf with a bamboo blade.

Each sheet was about four inches square and so thin that the air from the doorway lifted the corners. She worked with her shoulders rolled forward and her face about ten inches from the table. She did not look up when I left. I had dinner at a counter izakaya near the ryokan.

Six seats, three of them taken. I pointed at things on a chalkboard that I could not read, and a man in his thirties with close-cropped hair brought me grilled mackerel, a cold tofu with grated ginger, and a small clay pot of rice with mushrooms cooked into it. I drank one glass of the local sake, then another. The two other customers were older men, possibly in their seventies, and they spoke to each other in low voices about something I could not have understood even if I knew the language, because it was a private conversation that had been going on for years.

One of them laughed twice. The other never did. When I left, the chef thanked me and went back to wiping down his cutting board. ## Day Two

Wednesday I walked. This is the day I want to spend the most time on, because it is the day the city stopped being a destination and started being a place. I left the ryokan at six. The street sweeper was at his cart.

The crows were on the roof. I walked west toward the Kazue-machi district, which sits along the Asano River opposite Higashi Chaya and is in some ways its older, quieter twin. The cobbles there are narrower. The buildings lean a little.

A black cat was sitting on the threshold of a closed teahouse, washing its paw with the kind of attention that animals give to small tasks when no one is asking anything of them. I stood at the end of the lane for a long time. I could smell the river, and underneath that, woodsmoke from somewhere, and underneath that, the faint sweetness of fermented rice, which I think was coming from a brewery a block south but might have been my imagination. I walked from Kazue-machi up to Kenrokuen, the famous garden, arriving just as it opened at seven.

There were maybe a dozen people inside. Kenrokuen is one of those places that has been written about so many times that I had given up on it before I arrived, the way I had given up on the Grand Canyon before I first saw it, and the way the Grand Canyon then defeated my cynicism within about ninety seconds. Kenrokuen did not defeat my cynicism. It is a beautiful garden.

It is also, more than anything else, a working piece of ground — men in rubber boots pruning pines at seven in the morning, using bamboo ladders tied together with rope. I watched one of them for about fifteen minutes. He was working on a single black pine, removing the old needles from the inner branches by hand, dropping them into a canvas bag tied to his belt. He did not use clippers.

He used his fingers. The tree was perhaps three hundred years old. There is a stone lantern at Kenrokuen that has been photographed more than almost any other object in Japan. It has two legs of different lengths, one resting on a stone in the pond, the other on the shore.

I went and looked at it. It is a fine lantern. I did not photograph it. I sat on a bench near the lantern and watched a woman with a small dog walk past three times, in three loops around the pond, and on the third loop the dog stopped to drink from the pond and the woman waited and then they walked on.

I left the garden at about nine and walked down toward the Saigawa River, the larger of the city’s two rivers. The Saigawa is wider than the Asano and feels more like a working river: there are concrete embankments, and the path along the top is used by joggers and old men on bicycles. I walked downstream for about an hour. I passed a baseball field where three middle school boys in white uniforms were taking turns hitting fly balls to each other.

The crack of the metal bat was different than the crack of a wooden bat — flatter, with less travel in the sound. One of the boys missed a fly ball, and the ball rolled down the embankment toward the river, and he sprinted after it without saying anything to the others. Lunch was at a soba shop in the Nagamachi district, where the old samurai residences are. The shop had four tables and a counter, and the owner was a woman in her sixties who was making the noodles by hand in a small glassed-in room at the front.

I sat at the counter and watched her roll out the dough with a long wooden pin, fold it, and cut it with a heavy square knife that I would later look up and learn is called a soba kiri. She made a rhythm out of it: rock, slide, cut, rock, slide, cut. The noodles fell into a wooden tray in even bundles. I ate cold soba with grated daikon and a small dish of tempura’d vegetables.

The bill was nine hundred yen. The woman bowed and said something I did not understand, and then said, in English, “Thank you for waiting.” I had not waited. The food had come quickly. I think she meant something else and could not find the words, or I had misheard her, or she said it to everyone.

The afternoon I spent in the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, which is a circular glass building in the middle of the city designed by SANAA. To be honest, I had not expected to like it. I generally do not like contemporary art museums in cities I do not live in, because they all feel slightly interchangeable, and the work inside often feels like it was selected by a committee whose first language is the international biennial. The Kanazawa museum was different in one specific way: it was full of people from Kanazawa.

School groups, retired couples, two women in their thirties having an argument in low voices in front of a Leandro Erlich installation. The famous swimming pool piece, where you can stand under what looks like water and look up at people standing above, had a line of maybe twenty children waiting their turn. They were not excited the way children are excited at a theme park. They were patient the way children are patient at a doctor’s office, and when their turn came they walked under the water and looked up and then walked out, and the next child went in.

To put it less politely, the museum was not a stop on anyone’s itinerary. It was a place people in the city went on a Wednesday afternoon because it was their museum. I walked back to the ryokan in the late afternoon. The light by then had turned thin and yellow, and the shadows of the buildings reached most of the way across the streets.

I passed the bicycle shop again. The man in the green apron was gone. A different man, older, was sweeping the floor inside. I passed the bakery.

The sign now read, “Bread is finished. Thank you.” It was 4:15. That night I went to the public bath. It was a sentō, not an onsen, and it cost four hundred and seventy yen.

The water was hot enough that I had to ease into it over the course of about a minute, sliding down the tile inch by inch. There were five other men in the bath. None of them spoke. One of them was washing his back with a long-handled brush.

Another was sitting on the edge of the pool with his feet in the water, his head tilted back against the tile wall, his eyes closed. The room smelled like minerals and faintly like soap. After about ten minutes I got out and sat on a low plastic stool by the wall and rinsed off, and the man with the brush nodded at me, and I nodded back, and that was the entire exchange. I want to say something here about the difference between solitude and loneliness, because I think Kanazawa understands it.

But I do not trust myself to say it without lapsing into the kind of writing I have promised not to do. So I will just report that I walked back to the ryokan with my hair still wet, and the wind off the Asano River was cool but not cold, and I slept that night more deeply than I had slept in months. ## Day Three

Thursday morning the rain came back. I woke at five-thirty to the sound of it on the courtyard tiles, and I lay on the futon for a while listening, because I knew it was the last morning and I wanted to register it. The maple in the courtyard had started to turn overnight — not all at once, but at the tips of the upper branches, where the leaves had gone the color of a copper pot. I had coffee at a kissaten near the Owarichō intersection.

A kissaten is an old-style coffee shop, the kind that mostly disappeared from Tokyo a generation ago but still survives in cities like Kanazawa. The one I went to had wood paneling stained almost black, a long counter, and a master in his seventies who made each cup of coffee by hand with a metal drip cone over a small glass pitcher. The process took about four minutes per cup. He did not hurry.

There was a younger man at the counter, maybe forty, reading a newspaper and drinking what I think was the same cup he had ordered when I came in, because the level in the cup did not seem to change. The master ground the beans in a hand grinder that he turned slowly with his right hand while holding the body of the grinder against his stomach with his left. The sound was a low burr. He poured the water in a thin spiral, starting at the center of the grounds and moving outward and then back.

The coffee came in a small porcelain cup with a saucer. It cost six hundred yen. It was the best cup of coffee I have had in probably a decade. I asked the master, in halting Japanese, how long he had been making coffee there.

He held up four fingers. I said, “Four years?” He shook his head. “Forty,” he said, in English. Then, after a moment: “Forty-three.” He went back to his grinder.

I spent the rest of the morning in the Nagamachi district, walking the narrow lanes between the old samurai walls. The walls are made of earth and topped with tile, and in winter the city wraps the lower portions in straw mats to protect them from the snow. The mats were not on yet — that happens in November — but the workmen had already begun delivering the straw, and stacks of it sat at the corners of the lanes, tied with twine, smelling like a barn. A canal ran down the middle of one of the lanes, and carp moved in it slowly, their backs nearly the color of the water.

I stood on a small stone bridge and watched them for a while. A woman came out of one of the houses with a bucket and threw something into the canal — vegetable trimmings, maybe, and the carp moved toward the trimmings without hurrying. She nodded at me and went back inside. I had lunch at the same soba shop from the day before, because I had liked it and because three days is not enough time to find another.

The woman remembered me, or pretended to, and brought me the same cold soba and the same small dish of tempura without my having to order. She added, this time, a small piece of grilled fish that I had not ordered and that she did not charge me for. When I tried to pay extra she waved her hand and said something that I think meant “service,” in the Japanese sense, which is to say a gift. I bowed.

She bowed. I went out into the rain. The train back to Tokyo left at four. I had an hour before I needed to be at the station, and I spent it walking back to the Asano River.

The rain had let up. The heron was not there. The willows had not changed in three days, which I knew was impossible, but they looked exactly the way they had looked on Tuesday afternoon. I stood on the Umenohashi bridge and watched the water move.

A man in a yellow raincoat walked past with a small dog. A woman on a bicycle rang her bell at no one and crossed the bridge in the other direction. The water kept moving. I want to end this without ending it the way travel pieces end, which is to say I do not want to tell you what Kanazawa taught me or what you should do when you go there.

I do not know what it taught me. It might not have taught me anything. I spent three days walking, and I ate well, and I drank one good cup of coffee, and I watched a man pull old needles from a pine tree with his fingers, and I watched a woman cut soba noodles with a heavy square knife, and I watched a heron stand on a rock for five minutes, and none of these things were arranged for me to see. They were happening anyway.

I was permitted to walk through them. That is, I think, the best thing a city can offer a person who has come from far away, and it is the rarest, and Kanazawa offered it for three days in late October without once asking me to be grateful. The train pulled out of Kanazawa Station at four-oh-three. The Tsuzumimon was behind me by then, in the rain, and I had still not photographed it.

I do not regret that.