MONAS | Tone 1 | Phrase 7: The Clay Wall of the Donketsu Garden

‘Star-Crossed Souls’ [Tone 1. Shiga: The Sea of Niho] 〜 This muddy vesture of decay 〜 

“Back in Wales, they had me applying nothing but lime plaster, but when I apprenticed under my master in Japan, clay walls were our bread and butter. That’s precisely why I can see the sheer, staggering genius in how these umeishi are laid out...”

Folding his towering 186-centimetre frame, Kai stared intently at what appeared to be an entirely unremarkable space—a spot where, to the untrained eye, stones had merely been buried in the ground. Watching him sprawl in a low, crawling posture, completely unbothered by the dirt smudging his clothes, Kaho thought to herself:

And there he goes... the wall-plastering yōkai.

“What exactly is so extraordinary about it?”

“Right here. Look closely. To embed a stone means you have to excavate an even deeper pit beneath it. What you see on the surface is merely a fraction of the whole.”

Kai shaped his hand into a right angle, mimicking a carpenter’s square (kanejaku), and placed his index finger down to gauge the level of the stone against the ground.

“This side is three centimetres. That side is four. That massive garan-ishi—the temple foundation stone acting as the crossroads—is set almost level and parallel with the ground, yet they’ve introduced a micro-fluctuation in the surrounding earth to give it life. When you place a stone that large, it naturally pulls the eye, so they created these subtle variances to keep the landscape from becoming monotonous.”

“Oh, you’re so right! I’ve never paid attention to details like that before. I was always far too busy trying not to trip over my own feet during tea gatherings...”

“Exactly! That stride—that very gait—is the gardener’s ‘viewpoint’,” Kai replied, slapping his knee in triumph.

“Viewpoint?”

“Normally, the stepping stones in a Japanese garden are spaced forty to sixty centimetres apart. But because Donketsu was trained in the tea aesthetics of the Enshū school, he spaced them slightly closer in some areas to match the rhythm of a tea garden. And see over there, how the path curves so you can’t peer into the depths?”

Following the direction of Kai’s finger, Kaho saw a path of stepping stones inviting the eye towards a forest-like depth, with low and medium shrubs clustered in the foreground and towering trees lined up behind them.

“That’s called an ō-magari—a grand sweep. It’s designed to form a wide, winding path, allowing you to enjoy the shifting scenery and focus points as you stroll. They align the stones rhythmically to match the natural stride and tempo of the walker. Go on, Boss, try walking it.”

With light, rhythmic taps of her sandals—ton-ton—Kaho skipped across the stepping stones, coming to a halt atop the massive garan-ishi to survey her surroundings.

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