Gardens of Genji Kyoto

By Marc Peter Keane

Gardens played an important role in the Tale of Genji, and so too are they important to Genji Kyoto, which features a central garden next to the lobby, the Sky Forest Garden on the roof, and private pocket gardens within rooms and suites.

The central garden next to the lobby is called the Ukifune Garden. The name is taken from a chapter at the very end of the Tale of Genji, in which a young lady is buffeted by the inexorable winds of life and love. Ukifune, meaning "a boat adrift", is a metaphor used in a poem in that chapter to express the ephemerality and evanescence of life. 

In our Ukifune Garden, a single boat-like stone captures that image, but also extends the reference beyond the Tale of Genji to suggest that our Earth itself is also a drifting boat of sorts, carrying its ephemeral cargo of life through the galaxy.

The Ukifune Garden is designed as a contemporary karesansui  garden, what is often called a Zen garden in the West. Below picture of Zuihoin is an example of a karesansui dry garden, where sand and gravel are used to express flowing water while stones and boulders depict land and mountains.  

On the roof is the Sky Forest Garden, which includes many plants that were mentioned in the Tale of Genji. It is not intended to be a replica of one of the Shining Prince’s many gardens, but rather encompasses the passion for the subtlety and complexity of Nature that is expressed in the Tale. 

Guests are invited to retreat from the city for a while here and enjoy a drink, a conversation with friends or just a quiet moment alone. This sort of retreat away from the city, within the city, has been referred to in Japan as a "Hermitage within the City" (shichū’in 市中隠) or a “Mountain Hut within the City” (shichū no sankyo 市中の山居).

In addition to the communal gardens, guestrooms at Genji Kyoto have pocket gardens within them, each featuring a single antique stone object.  These small spaces are known as tsubo, a term that was already in use a thousand years ago at the time that the Tale of Genji was written.  In the Tale, the court ladies who lived next to such a tsubo garden took the featured plant in that garden as their own name, and so we find Fujitsubo, named for the wisteria, and Kiritsubo, named for the paulownia.

Marc Peter Keane, designer of the hotel’s gardens, has lived and worked in Kyoto as a landscape architect, writer and artist for over 20 years. The author of many books on gardens and nature, he taught in the department of environmental design at the Kyoto University of Arts and Design, and is presently a fellow at Columbia University's Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies and Kyoto’s Research Center for Japanese Garden Art. His designs reflect his background, blending Eastern and Western aesthetics and philosophies. His latest book is Of Arcs and Circles. See more of Marc’s works at mpkeane.com