Dani Karavan’s list of materials for Murou Art Forest begins with sunlight and ends with singing birds. In between come rice fields, cedar trees, stone, Corten steel and glass. A work made partly of weather and birdsong can’t be finished in a studio. It’s finished each time someone walks into it, and it’s different depending on the hour they arrive.
We think a marriage is made the same way. The vows set it in motion, and everything after is the walking. This couple’s elopement in Japan made the case for us. They gave their one day to places other people had shaped: a garden in the hills of Uda that borrows its mountains, a hillside above Murou-ji that an artist turned into a single work, and last, a potter’s wheel, where they made something of their own.
They’re a California couple, deeply in love and deeply drawn to art. They didn’t come to Japan for a long guest list or a hundred tables of flowers. They came for story and for beauty, and for a memory the two of them would carry home.
It was an elopement, just the two of them and our team. Every hour was theirs to spend looking, and we loved them for spending it that way. They looked closely all day, and at the end, they made something. The day before, they were in Kyoto, a city that protects its borrowed views by law.
What the Film Keeps
Karavan’s forest was made to be walked, and walking is the one thing a photograph can’t keep. The film gives them the day at the pace they lived it. Our photography and film are made as one piece of work for exactly this reason: some places need both. Their vows film stays private, as vows should.
Kyoto, Where a View Can Be Protected by Law
At Entsū-ji in Kyoto, the garden takes Mt Hiei inside it as its backdrop. The city has written that view into its building rules: nothing nearby may rise above 110.2 metres above sea level, the height of the temple room the mountain is seen from. Kyoto’s landscape white paper counts 49 protected views and describes them as something handed down by those who came before. It’s a city that treats looking as something worth defending.
The couple spent the day before they married on a Kyoto pre-wedding shoot, in a private moss garden in the north of the city, with the maples at their peak. On the old calendar it was the last kō of rittō, the start of winter, a five-day season named for the narcissus coming into flower. Nobody makes a moss garden in a season. Someone keeps it, year after year, and the people who stand in it rarely meet them. It was a fitting eve for two people about to marry inside other people’s work: a garden held together by keeping, the day before a garden completed by borrowing.
Morning at Ozunu, Facing East
Ozunu is a new house under an old kind of roof. It’s one of two villas at Sasayuri-Ann, a place in Nara we return to, in Fukano, a hamlet in the hills of Murou that’s listed among Japan’s hundred best villages. Each villa is given whole to one party a day. Zao is a thatched farmhouse of about 150 years, restored. Ozunu, where the couple married, is newer: built under thatch, with modern comfort.
Within its gardens stands a tea room a century old, rebuilt. The villa’s own words say guests would feel as if they were staying in a famous temple. Ozunu shares its characters with En no Ozunu, the founder of Shugendo, and the man who keeps the villas is himself a Shugendo monk.
He has written about why the place exists. The thatched house and the sasayuri, the rare native lily that gives Sasayuri-Ann its name, had both nearly disappeared. Globalisation, he writes, has made Japan’s towns look alike. He quotes Bruno Taut: “Tradition speaks through architectural structures.”
Since 2006 the people of Fukano have protected the wild lily, work now registered as a UNESCO Association of Japan Future Heritage project. A thatched roof here is somebody’s argument, made by hand, about what deserves to be kept.
Ozunu’s main house faces south and east, so the morning arrives across the ridges before it reaches the rooms. For a couple getting ready, that’s the first thing the villa gives: the view comes to them. The house was theirs alone for the day, the hearth room and its round windows included. When we plan an elopement, those unhurried first hours are the ones we build the day around.
Shakkei: Vows in a Borrowed Landscape
Most gardens end at their walls. A shakkei garden ends at the mountains. Shakkei means borrowed scenery, and the Japanese dictionary definition is exact: a garden-making technique that takes in the scenery beyond the garden, its mountains and trees, as the backdrop that forms the garden. The term first appeared in Chinese poetry, and Japanese gardeners practised the idea for centuries before scholars gave it a name. Ozunu is a quieter case than Entsū-ji, and a wider one: where Entsū-ji borrows a single mountain, Ozunu borrows a whole range.
The villa describes its garden in three layers: nearest, the dry rock garden inside the grounds, then the pine garden just beyond them. Past those is what the villa itself calls a borrowed-scenery garden made of mountain peaks. These are the ranges of the Murou-Akame-Aoyama Quasi-National Park, protected since 1970, and the highest peak in the view is Mt Kuroso, at 1,037.6 metres. The first two layers are tended by hand. The third lies well beyond the grounds, and the garden is incomplete without it.
They saw each other first in the nearest layer, the raked dry garden, where everything asks you to look closely at something small. The vows came later in the same garden, with the farthest layer, the mountains, behind them.
A garden that borrows its mountains has accepted that the most important part of it can’t be owned or held. It commits to the view anyway, and arranges everything within reach so the far thing can be seen. We think that’s close to what a vow is. It’s hard to imagine a better garden to make one in.
They married on the first day of shōsetsu, light snow, in the five days the old calendar calls niji kakurete miezu: the rainbows hide. Their cask for kagami biraki was marked 祝, the character for celebration. With no guest list to toast, the whole of that word was theirs.
Murou Art Forest: A Village’s Idea, a Friend’s Hands
It began as one man’s idea for his birthplace. The sculptor Inoue Bukichi was born in the old village of Murou, and he imagined a corridor through the forest that would turn the village into a museum where people and nature live together. The village took it up as the Murou Art Arcadia plan in 1997, and Inoue died that September without seeing any of it built. His friend Dani Karavan, whom the city calls the world’s leading figure in environmental art, took on the design and saw it through. It was completed in October 2006.
Murou Art Forest in Nara is, by the city’s own account, a single sculpture of 7.8 hectares, with twelve works set into the slope. Uda City is careful to say that the word “park” came only from the public-works budget that paid for it, and that what was completed is Dani Karavan’s work of art. It sits on the mountain above Murou-ji, the temple known as the women’s Kōya because it welcomed women when Kōya-san did not. The park was paired with the Murou roadside station: the station was made to evoke earth, and the park, heaven.
Karavan also left a trace of his friend in it. A wavy path leads to Kōbō’s old well, narrowing as you walk it, and when you turn back the lines look parallel. It’s an illusion from Inoue’s own work, kept here as a homage. Uda’s tourism office says what connected the two men was respect, for each other and for Murou’s nature.
So the couple walked from their vows into a place built on one man’s care for another man’s idea. Part of a marriage is carrying your partner’s ideas as seriously as your own, sometimes further than they could carry them alone.
On the Road of the Sun
Much of the park is built to follow the sun. A steel rod in the spiral water channel works as a sundial, and the channel’s form is said to come from a coiled snake slipping away, with a single sweet osmanthus where the flow begins. The Astronomical Tower stands in the second lake, and a slit in its south face draws a line of light inside it that moves with the hour and the season.
A narrow bridge crosses the water on the Road of the Sun, the line of latitude, 34°32′ north, that links Murou-ji to important shrines and temples. Sasayuri-Ann, by its own telling, sits just north of it. Karavan meant the line to reach on across the sea and connect places beyond borders. Their wedding day ran along it, from a villa just north of the line to a bridge laid across it.
Karavan hoped people would gather and talk on the pyramid’s island. Step inside the pyramid and the Corten steel, left to rust on purpose, becomes a frame that cuts out the sky and the land around it. Ozunu frames its views too: the villa says the round window of its storehouse holds each season “like a painting”. The window gathers the seasons and the pyramid gathers the sky. The rhyme is our own, but the couple began their day among round windows and spent the afternoon beside a frame of rusted steel.
It’s hard not to see shakkei in the whole place. Uda comes close to naming it: the city describes the park as taking in the landscape of Murou’s mountain forests, with the verb torikomu, the same word Kyoto uses for the way Entsū-ji takes in Mt Hiei. The park’s own description speaks of using nature to make a second nature. A centuries-old garden principle and a piece of modern land art arrive at the same place: a work that finishes itself with a landscape it could never own.
An elopement at Murou Art Forest takes some care to arrange. The city requires a permit for professional photography there, and the park keeps its own seasons and closing days. We handle all of it, so what the couple meets is the work, the light and each other.
Clay at the End of the Day
After a day spent moving through things other people had made, a garden and a sculpture the size of a hillside, they ended it by making something themselves, at a local pottery studio. Whatever each of them made alone at the wheel, the piece we remember is the one they shaped together: a moon vase, each of them making one half. A moon vase is thrown as two bowls and joined at the middle, and it only becomes the vase once the halves meet.
There’s a quiet reversal in that. At Murou Art Forest, the work stays still and you move through it. At the wheel, you hold still and the work turns through your hands. A marriage asks for both, and they began theirs by doing each in turn.
Clay is honest about hands. Every pressure you give it stays, and once it’s fired it stays for good. The potter fired it and sent it home to them. Whatever else that vase becomes, it’s the first thing they made together as newlyweds, and it carries both of them in it.
Borrowed scenery and land art ask the same thing of the people standing in them: finish the work by being there. They answered it twice on the day they married, once in a garden and once on a hillside. A marriage asks it too, every day after the vows, and no one else can do it for them.
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