In the castle town of Angers, in France's Loire Valley, Nobuko Kiyomiya made a discovery nearly 25 years ago that would change her life. She had just divorced the man she married straight out of university in Japan and needed to start over "from zero," exhausted in mind and body from the painful breakup. She was studying French in Angers, with a view to becoming a translator, when she came across an unassuming workshop in an old building.

"It was a world without sound," she recalls. "There were five or six people working quietly in a darkish room, a truly silent world."

She began to visit regularly and before long, "it was as if I was being swept away into another universe — as if I was leaping into another dimension."