House with shifting walls

Puccini’s Madama Butterfly opens with the American Navy Lieutenant B. F. Pinkerton arriving at his new house with the Japanese broker Goro:

I grew up in such a house.  The sliding doors by the engawa (raised veranda) facing the backyard had screens covered by shoji (thin rice paper).  On sunny afternoons, they let gentle lights into the rooms.  One could easily poke a hole through the paper, peeking through the screens to observe everything on the other side.  The interior fusuma (sliding doors/walls) were covered by paper with elegant designs.  The big closets behind two sets of fusuma were perfect for hide-and-seek.  We would shut the doors tight and hold our breath to avoid being caught.  All these doors can be removed to create open spaces or installed to make separate rooms.  Sometimes, we could see to the backyard from the front entrances.  Whenever the paper screens and panels of the doors needed to be replaced, craftsmen would come to the house.  They brushed the adhesive paste made of rice flour on the wooden frames.  Quickly and precisely they cut and paste the paper over.  Everything would be beautiful again.

The house might have been built around the time of WWII.  So, there were glass windows on the front side.  The exterior doors of the veranda also had glass panels.

Several rooms had tatami floors.  We played, ate our meals and slept on these straw mats.  They were smooth and cool in summer time.  I loved to watch 師傅 (masters) fixing tatami: tying up rice straws with long sharp pins.  Their hands moved swiftly, and their arms pulled powerfully.  The smell of new straws, grassy and slightly earthy, would linger around the house for days.

From the outside, the black tiled roof gave the house a stern appearance.  Through the small porch one entered the genkan, a vestibule where one would remove the shoes before stepping up to the raised the floor.  In our house, there was a large mirror on one side, above it a panel honoring my father’s contribution as an educator.  The need to remove and/or put the shoes didn’t stop me and my brother to chase each other “around” the house: in one side and out the other side.

The gardens in the front and back of the house brought softness to our surrounding.  On hot summer evenings, we would enjoy our supper outside under the shades of threes.  At night, shadows of plants threw phantasmic figures on the shoji.  Sometimes we would be so frightened that we wouldn’t walk down the long engawa alone.  Other times, we would conjure up ghost stories as we fell asleep.