I arrive at the inn where I am to stay in Kyoto and lug my bag up the steep stairs to my room. The inn was once a geisha house and the room is barely furnished, though it does have a tiny lacquered dressing table with a long narrow mirror. A balcony offers a view over the street, and the houses on the other side are nearly close enough to reach out and touch. The ghostly notes of a shamisen float up from nearby. Someone is practicing.
I'm in the Sawai ryōkan (traditional inn) in Miyagawa-cho, a backstreet in the maze of lanes behind the Minami-za kabuki theater, in the shadow of the Higashiyama hills. I lived in this very room for six months in 1999 when I was researching a book I wrote on geisha.
It's thrilling to be back. I walk down the road, swept up once again in the magic of the place. It really is still old Japan — the dark wooden houses, none more than two stories high, with bamboo blinds shading the upper floors, round red lanterns outside each door and tiny lanes beetling off around dark corners.