When Sachiko Yatani began living in her house among the bamboo groves on the slopes of Hayama’s Mineyama hill, she started by closely observing the luxuriant vegetation that grows there. She didn’t set out to create and manage a garden, opting instead to trust nature to do what it does best and satisfying herself with keeping an eye on how things developed. “I watched very carefully and intervened a little here and there to boost the plants that are the main players in each season,” she says. “After that, I left it to the plants to reproduce on their own. After about three years, those that were there from the start began to achieve a harmony, without me even having to do any weeding.”
Before she arrived here, Yatani was already making thread from plant fibers, then dyeing and weaving them into cloth. She would go into the hills to commune with the plants, and was enchanted to see them assume new forms under her hands. “To me, that exchange with the plants was what was most important, and the works I created were simply byproducts of that. Over time, I became more and more uncomfortable with being labeled a textile artist, and so I’ve taken a break from that work. Right now I’m at the stage where I’m spending time with the plants here in order to see what comes next,” she says.
Yatani wanders the ridges of Mineyama wearing traditional split-toed slippers, so she can nimbly climb steep slopes whenever she sees a plant she particularly likes. And she cuts bamboo and takes it with her to use back home. She laughs happily as she claims that the inconveniences work well for her. “It’s truly dark at night, but on nights with a full moon there’s an otherworldly beauty in the way the moonlight reflects on the ocean surface,” Yatani says. “It’s amazing that beauty like this still exists. Even now, every day is a rediscovery of that amazement. I never get fully used to it.”