Articles Available Online

The bike wheels skit and bounce on the loose dirt path The smell of hot rubber and the smell of the sea: waves, to the left, and the final site coming into view from behind its fan of magnolia, cypress, and Japanese spruce Completely unassuming, the final building on the tour through Teshima is nothing but dark wood and a plain, low roof Compared with the gossamer space on the hillside, the pored concrete and soft wind of the Nishizawa and Naito museum, this last building could be mistaken for an office But the way it looks out on the bare feet of sand that parts it from the sea, gives the sense that it is almost alive That it sees something out there, where the waves break in the light of the white spring sun   We lock the rented bikes outside and enter the last building on our tour of the island, which unlike the others does not have a Japanese name, but the French title of Les Archives du Cœur The archives of the heart   Inside is almost clinical: three rooms, different functions Behind a glass partition an elderly Japanese man in a fedora sits in a chair, wires trailing from the exposure of his open shirt to a recording device, which seems to be registering the beat of his heart On seeing us attempt to peer in through the openings of the venetian blinds, a woman in a pale blue smock stands and twists a glass wand to the side White slats shutter: the glass opaque, though we still hear, very faintly, the sound of the heart   ‘This way, please,’ a woman says to us, and leads us to a door marked Heart Room When she opens it, there is nothing but black And the sound, far off, of a heart, under glass, pounding its affirmation We look at each other — unsure, excited, ready to be lost — and step into the dark   *   The words echo into the auditorium: along velvet seats, over the heads of state dignitaries, up into the upper level where booths of smoked