Japan for Silence Travelers

About this book

Most guidebooks compete for your attention. This one gives yours back. Two hundred journeys, each one a day composed around silence itself: the garden read by its empty approach, the forest path walked at half pace until the birds resume, the lake kept company at its still hour, the slow train taken wordlessly, the quiet table earned by the silent morning, the town arrived at on the morning after its festival, and the week, deep in the year, when the traveller stands on a familiar garden step and meets the first snow silence on its own ground.

The unit of the book is the journey itself — not the place, not the quiet spot, not the sound the silence frames. A garden matters because of the bench its quiet is sat on from; a forest because of the pace its path imposes; a table because of the hushed room it is set in. Eight parts: setting out into the quiet country · garden and temple-ground silence days in the green rooms of the quiet · forest and mountain silence journeys · still-water journeys on lakes, bays and slow rivers · the wordless road of trains, ferries and old highways · silence table journeys to hushed tables · quiet-town and working-silence journeys · and the silence calendar and the turn, closing with the two hundred and first journey — the reader's own street, in its silent hour, at home.

Because opening hours, closures, fares, event dates and crowd conditions change, the book never asserts them as current fact: every one of the 200 entries closes with its own official check — the named official source (garden, temple and shrine offices, railway, bus and ferry companies, town and prefectural tourism associations, museum and park authorities, the onsen association, the forest office) whose information settles what is current before you travel. Seasonal patterns are described as patterns, which are permanent; the day's arrangements are always referred to official information. Written and created in Japan.