Shell on the Beach

All of the old doors and windows have been removed and loaded onto the trucks, for transportation to the komuten’s office for storage while the new house is built. I’ve stripped as much usable materials as I could (you can see the hallway on the left where I’ve taken up the flooring, which I hope to use for desktops and bookshelves), though I could do with a few more weekends. If I had the time and the space, I think I would have taken the whole place down myself. But the workmen are showing up on Monday—that’s tomorrow—to start taking the place apart.

It’s been quite an emotional couple of weeks. Luckily, the run of Golden Week holidays was mostly fair weather, which let us enjoy the house to the last moment. Our good friend, awesome photographer, and soon-to-be-Akiya neighbor Ben came over and spent one whole day (and early the next morning) shooting the place. It was fascinating to watch him study the place for the right angles and the right light, and we’re dying to see the photos.

The last day of the holidays was pouring rain, and I spent it mostly by myself doing the last runs carrying stuff between Akiya and our Tokyo house.

For some reason, I started getting visitors. These completely unfamiliar faces knocking on the door, telling me that they’d heard that we were tearing the place down, and how they’d like to see it before we do. hey’d walk in the room and see that view of the sea rising outside the bare tatami room and wooden engawa, and they’d just plop down on the floor and sit there for a while, making sighing noises. One was a potter, there were a couple of architects, and a mix of weekend Akiya people and natives, but they all reacted the same way.

I spent a lot of time talking to the house, thanking it for all the incredible times I’ve spent there: from moments of introspection and meditation to wild parties where you couldn’t see the tatami for all the spread of wasted bodies. (Though the latter, I have to admit, have not been a part of the last few years as maturity, I mean geezerhood, has caught up with me.) I moved all the shoji doors and wooden fusuma doors into an approximation of what the new house will be like, and explained to the house why we were tearing it down. I drank a glass of sake from a bottle I found in the last cleanup, and poured another glass onto the floor of the engawa, and said goodbye.

When we came back on Saturday to take the windows, etc., I felt like it was already an empty shell.