Kyoto Streets In Rain

Kyoto understands rain. It has been receiving it for twelve hundred years.

The autumn rain is not a problem here. It is a condition. The city has built its relationship with rain over centuries, and the result is architecture and garden design and a sensibility that treats rain not as weather to endure but as light to use. Everything looks better when it is wet in Kyoto.

The narrow streets of Gion in the rain. The cobblestones glistening, each stone holding a small mirror of grey sky. The wooden machiya townhouses with their latticework facades absorbing the water, which darkens the wood and deepens its colour to something almost black. The paper lanterns at restaurant doors, their warm light reflected in the wet ground below them.

An umbrella opens and closes as someone enters a low doorway. Traditional umbrellas here, the Japanese wagasa, paper and bamboo, do something to rain that plastic umbrellas do not: they make contact with it differently, the rain sound on paper is softer, more resonant, a drum rather than a lid.

The smell. Wet wood and the particular mineral smell of old stone wet with soft rain. A hint of incense from an open temple gate. The specific herbal smell of the gardens when they are damp, the moss especially, which in Kyoto is an art form in itself, cultivated over centuries and perfected to a green that has no equivalent in nature outside Japan.

A temple garden half-visible through a gate. Moss and stone and carefully trained pine. The rain falling on the moss producing no sound that carries, just the visual impression of falling, the pattern of drops on still water in the garden basin.

A geiko, perhaps, moving quickly between appointments, her obi bright against the grey, a paper umbrella keeping the rain from the elaborate work of the wig and costume. The colour is extraordinary in this light, the rain making the grey city backdrop for a single moving thing in red and gold.

Duck into a small café. The warmth inside. The smell of dashi and something warming on the stove. The window running with rain outside, the street reduced to streaming light and sound. A cup of something warm in your hands, ceramic, heavy, the kind of vessel that takes seriously the thing it holds.

Outside, the rain is settling in for the afternoon. The city has accepted it. Kyoto in rain is complete, not diminished. The rain is part of the composition. The aesthetic that built this city planned for rain. Wabi-sabi, the beauty in impermanence, including the impermanence of a dry day, says: this too is beautiful. This grey and wet and quietly extraordinary moment.

The rain on the roof. Light and steady. The sound of it accumulating into something that fills the space in the way that silence fills a room: completely.

Let it rain. Let it change the quality of everything it touches.

Be inside a city that has always known how to receive it.

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