The Best of Wanderlust (A GeoEx eBook)

The Best of Wanderlust

On a Quest in Kyoto for Traditional Woodblock Prints

nights before continuing to her home island of Shikoku. The next day, while they went clothes-shopping, I went woodblock print-hunting. Jim hadn’t remembered the name of the shop, so I had done some searching on the Internet. My cyber-sleuthing turned up one good candidate: a sleek-looking woodblock print shop called Art Shop Ezoshi, which had a handsome website and what looked to be a large inventory of both traditional and modern woodblock prints. The only disconnect was that even though it was located not far from the river in Gion, a very traditional quarter and a suitable location for a woodblock print-selling shop, it was not in a covered shopping area. I took the train from our hotel’s neighborhood to Kyoto station, got out, and looked around. Suddenly the folly of my quest hit me. Here I was in a city of 1.5 million people—many of whom were streaming around me at that very moment— with one day to locate a specific woodblock print shop and find some suitable catalogue covers. I was the Don Quixote of woodblock print-shopping. I found an information desk in the train station, brushed off my somewhat rusty Japanese, and asked the woman there how to get to the covered shopping area near the river. She cocked her head a bit and a worried look shaded her eyes. “Which river?” she said. Ah, I thought. Which river. Here was a possibility that had not presented itself to my innocent brain. From previous visits to Kyoto, I thought I knew the area that Jim was referring to, and I remembered that there was a Starbucks very prominently situated right on the river near the shopping area. “The one near the Starbucks,” I said. She looked at me with increasing worry. “There are many Starbucks,” she said. “Ah, yes,” I said. “Um, I’m looking for a shop that sells

traditional woodblock prints.” I could tell that she wished her coffee break had come ten minutes earlier so that some other colleague could be dealing with this hapless foreigner. “Just a minute, please,” she said, with a slight bow. She skipped into a nearby office where I could see her huddling with a klatsch of colleagues, each of whom took turns glancing with barely disguised astonishment in my direction. By the time she came back, I had decided to postpone the search for the covered shopping area and try Ezoshi first. “I spoke with my colleagues,” she began, “but we are not sure which shopping area you are seeking.” I unfurled print-outs of the Ezoshi website and showed them to her. “That’s OK,” I said. “Thank you for trying. Could you tell me how to get to this shop?” She looked at the print-out, and relief swept like sunshine across her face. “Oh, yes!” she said. “Gion. Shinmonzendori. This is the old antiques area. You exit through those doors”—she pointed behind her—”and look for the bus number 4A. You should get off at the intersection of Shijo and Kawaramachi streets.” Eventually I danced my way through a Busby Berkeley choreography of flowing people and buses to the 4A stop, got on the bus and asked the driver to tell me when we reached the Shijo-Kawaramachi stop. Twenty minutes later, he nodded kindly at me and I disembarked. A few minutes of walking took me to the river and then across it to an area where green willows bowed gently over glittering canals and narrow slick-stoned alleys were framed with weathered wooden shops. I passed enticing closet-sized eateries and an exquisite cobbler’s shop where strips of leather were displayed like museum pieces and an elderly artist in an apron crafted shoes the old-fashioned way. I picked up his card and vowed to come back someday. I paused at a storefront stall to buy a green tea soft ice cream,

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