THE JAPANESE HOUSE: Architecture and Interiors. Photographs by Noboru Murata, text by Alexandra Black. Boston/Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2000, 216 pp., copiously illustrated, 4,500 yen.

Though the architect Le Corbusier learned a lot from Japan, he could not have been thinking of this country when he wrote his well-known dictum: "A house is a machine for living in."

This is because of all national architectures, the Japanese is traditionally the most organic, the one that listened least to the hubris of the machine age.

Perhaps the French architect was merely rephrasing the better-known passage in Tolstoy which maintains that "our body is a machine for living, it is organized for that, it is its nature." Even so, this emphasis on function ignores the effects of many architectures.