A room that asks nothing.

on silence, and the room upstairs.

In Kyoto there is a small upstairs room above a cedar workshop. The stairs creak in a familiar order, the door slides without announcement, and inside — a single square of light rests on the paper wall. No one hurries. Even the tea takes its time to arrive.

We have come to think of it as a room that asks nothing. The bowl on the low table — kept in our study as Chawan, black glazeOn the reading shelf — arrived with instructions on how to warm it in winter, and none on how to use it. The same is true, we think, of most things worth keeping.

Wenders’ Perfect Days is a film about the same room, without the room. And there is — a sentence we overheard at Nanzen-ji↝ — that keeps arriving in the pauses between the film’s small acts.