I waited for the performance to begin, sitting amid the audience of 30 people or so, packed into the ground-floor room of a new building in the sprawling, nondescript suburbs of Yokohama.
The building was like any other concrete utilitarian structure, common to the ubiquitous shopping streets scattered throughout Japan, but the performance space was unique. The cold, bare concrete floor and walls had been made comfortable and even handsome by an overlay of old wood recycled from Japanese minka farmhouses. Seasoned, dark-brown cherry wood was used to make a raised stage, and the audience sat along its edges, as if peering into the living room of an old Japanese house from the sunken ground floor. Large slabs of keyaki (zelkova) wood were set as steps onto the stage, and overhead cabinets of old paulownia wood, sanded down to reveal new surface layers, emitted fresh, fragrant odors.
The evening performance we all waited for was Tsugaru shamisen and te-odori dance.