1Sensei 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.
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.
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.
Copyright © 2025 by Margaret Mitsutani. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
