SPIRITED AWAY

TOTTORI

More than 50 years ago, Teratani and her late husband wanted to live in the forest, in a village that had a restaurant, a tea house and a shop selling local produce. So they built it

The weather is raging midway through a typhoon. The path before us is blocked and the muddy ground of the forest floor is heavy with rainwater. In the few minutes it’s taken to walk up to the shrine that Teratani had carved from the root of a tree, the footpath has turned into a miniature version of the river that curls around this mountain village in the forest.

Teratani, who built this whole complex using only natural materials, is a few metres ahead of me. She’s wearing a duck blue kimono jumpsuit, white tabi socks and sandals. She’s ditched her umbrella and is using her hands to scoop up great armfuls of mud, carving a path for the water to flow towards the river, giving us a way back.

“Everything here is made by locals and by hand,” she says to me later that afternoon once we’ve made it back to the thatched teahouse. Seated on tatami mats that wrap around an fireplace, she pours me tea and continues: “My late husband wanted a waterfall so we could always hear the peaceful sound of water, so he built it. We wanted a tea house, so we built one.

The shrine we just went to? The artist carved a face with gentle features into the tree to portray the sense of softness this place represents. Everything here has its purpose and place.”

All the food served here is foraged or grown on site, and on the short walk from the teahouse to the village’s tiny restaurant I pass a crop of shiitake mushrooms, blooming from the ground like brown clouds. Inside, I sit down to a feast of wild deer, braised tofu and chestnut rice, and Teratani tells me a little more about the village’s history: “My grandad used to sit in this chair — now my daughter’s built a coffee shop around it. Everyone has put their own stamp on the place.”

But Teratani has seen a lot of change in the past 15 years, and gesturing to the storm still howling outside, worries that this is only the start of what’s to come. “Now is a difficult era — for people and for the planet,” she tells me. She hopes, however, that this little village will continue to keep the culture she’s known all her life alive and flourishing — and to offer a different, sustainable way of life for future generations.