Fold in Your Mirrors and Pray

A three-day weekend, which we'll be spending partly down at Akiya, partly up in Hodaka, at the foot of the Northern Alps, where M's parents have retired after building their own place. We've got to go to Akiya and start going through things that can be saved and stuff that will have to go. By February or March they'll start tearing down the pre-fab structure where the obaasan, our landlady, lived next door. It's part of the property, an unremarkable place, and pretty ugly, but it will be even hard to see that go.

Three years ago, when Akakura-san was 94, she finally allowed her sons to talk her out of living alone and moving into a home. When we heard that, our first thought was, "Why?" She was still getting around, even putting make-up on every day to go down to the bus stop and take an hour roundtrip ride to do some grocery shopping. Our second thought was, "Well, that's the end of our weekends at the beach." We were sure that her sons, who she told us were not at all interested in the property, would want to sell it, and we knew that market prices were way beyond our reach.

But thanks to her, they were pretty much told to try to sell it to us at what we could afford, and we ended up doing the buy directly, even dodging the need for a real estate agent.

The prefab house is basically two rooms and a kitchen and bath. But it's got steel beams in its structure that will have to be struggled with. The one drawback of the property is a very narrow driveway. I mean, "fold in your mirrors and pray" narrow, so it's going to be hard to get much bigger equipment than the smallest back hoe into the space. That means destruction by hand, and loading and unloading trucks parked in the street, and that's also added cost to the whole operation.

We'll drive up to Hotaka tonight, after the Akiya chores. It's going to be cold, I'm sure, but the wood stove keeps the big house comfortable, and I'm going to try to get M's dad to give me tips on how to keep a wood stove operation affordable, since we're going that route in Akiya as well. He gets a lot of his wood from the apple orchards that surround his place, and the winters there are so cold that the wood stacks run almost all the way around the house. But it's a beautiful place, built in a kind of Nagano style, with 10-meter ceilings and dark beams everywhere. Hearing about their experience building it did get us thinking of doing something similar.

Swim, Shower, Shit and Shove Off

I don't have any photos of when I first started sharing this house--with a German-Swiss windsurfer and his Austrian friend, but it didn't look like this. It had been in the hands of Western weekenders for many years (I heard the German ambassador for a while), and the house was obviously just a place to swim, shower, shit and shove off. There was carpet tacked into the straw of the tatami--red, I gathered, from the few threads that weren't completely worn down to the backing. Four huge heifer-hued faux leather chairs obviously pilfered from someone's boss's office sat around the living room like a posse of 19th-century robber barons. The wooden floors of the hallways were black from water stains and shoe soles. On one whole side of the house, the wooden storm panels had been nailed shut over old windows. None of the sliding shoji or wooden doors slid. Someone had nailed plastic boards over places in the wall where the original earth-and-bamboo wattling had eroded.

For the first year or two, I used the place like everyone else. I'd drive down on Saturday morning, hungover as hell, and undergo the ocean cure of swimming, barbecuing and lying passed out under a beach umbrella. Often, also like everyone else, I wouldn't even bother opening up the house, which does entail a rather complex series of sliding recalcitrant storm doors into their respective boxes.

One day, bored from a Robert Parker novel that I was sure I'd read five or six times before, I found an old handleless claw hammer poking out of the rubble under the veranda, and started pulling the nails out of the storm doors that covered the southeast side of the house. I slid them into their boxes, and went inside for a drink. Just then, the mid-afternoon sun hit the window glass--and suddenly I could see the texture of the water surfaces on which they had been made. I rubbed the glass and scratched enough grime off the wood lattices to see the signs of a beautiful piece of craftwork. The liberated windows not only brought a whole new time of day into the room, they showed me that there was more to this place than a beach shack for sweating out the excesses of the week.

I bought a sander, a real hammer, a Japanese saw and garbage bags, big ones.