The building dates to the Meiji period (1868–1912) — a merchant's townhouse, later a private residence, now a place where the city's older rhythms remain audible beneath the quiet. Six rooms, each named for a season or a flower. The garden changes weekly; the menu follows.

Chef Nakamura trained in Kyoto before returning to the neighbourhood in which he grew up. His cooking is grounded in a dashi clear enough to see light through, vegetables from a single farm forty minutes north, and a restraint that only years of practice can yield.

The menu moves with what Japanese cooks call the three moments of a season: hashiri, an ingredient's first appearance, still unripe with promise; shun, its peak, when flavour requires no intervention; and nagori, the last of it, offered in the knowledge that it will not return until next year. To dine here is to be seated within that cycle. You would be most welcome — at whichever moment of the season you choose to join us.

Japanese painting — nihon-ga — works with materials and instincts quite unlike those of Western oil traditions. Pigments are ground from minerals and shells, then layered onto silk or washi paper (handmade mulberry-fibre paper); the surface breathes rather than seals. These materials and methods carry centuries of refinement.

Yet the artists in this exhibition were working at a pivotal moment. During the Meiji and Taishō eras (1868–1926), the arrival of Western visual languages forced a question that would define modern Japanese art: what to preserve, what to absorb and how to make inherited techniques speak to a changing world. Their answers are worth lingering over — nihon-ga rewards a particular kind of attention.

The mineral pigments catch light differently as you move, giving the surface a depth that reproduction cannot capture. Notice what each plant or bird implies: a sprig of plum blossom signals not just spring but its anticipation, carrying associations a Japanese audience reads instinctively. And look at what is not painted. Snow may be the bare paper itself. The ink around it describes branch and dusk, so that the untouched surface becomes the brightest passage in the picture. These are works that ask for — and reward — unhurried looking.

The shrine stands at the end of a cedar avenue that takes 12 minutes to walk — long enough, it is said, for the mind to arrive before the body does. Founded in the ninth century by a retired emperor seeking a place of retreat, it has since become one of the most quietly significant sites in the region: not famous for spectacle, but for something harder to name.

The main hall dates to the early Edo period (1603–1868) and has been rebuilt twice since, each time to the same plan, in the same cypress wood, by craftsmen trained in the same lineage. The large camphor tree beside the approach is older than the current hall. Those who live nearby still leave small offerings at its roots.

Visitors are welcome throughout the year, and no particular occasion is required. The avenue is there in every season. Time spent in quiet has a way of saying rather more than one might expect.