In life, we all have the experience of some event and memory that gives rise in our minds to a certain street. It could be the nostalgic road leading home, one’s daily school route, or a street leading to a place where something special to you waited.
The house where I spent my childhood faced a narrow Kyoto backstreet. There, where cars rarely entered, day after day I enjoyed such little girl pastimes as playing jump rope, hopscotch, make-believe walking on stilts, and blowing soap bubbles until the sun went down. There was a gentle breeze in the shade, the smell of slightly damp earth, fragrant olive tree flowers, fish being grilled for dinner, the “toot toot” of the tofu vendor’s horn, the sound of the downwind from Mount Hiei blowing through at night. Like this, the seasons came to our little alley.
Even today, if you walk around the alleyways of Kyoto you come across scenes just like those of my memories. Probably this is because there is a lifestyle here in Kyoto deeply rooted in local custom, linked from the past to the present and into the future.
The alleyways in the evenings are filled with a nostalgic, magical atmosphere. In the dim light of an alleyway freshly swept clean by the residents, something around the Jizo shrine seems to have found its way there over and beyond time and space, into the old neighborhood block. Going into the tangled bystreets is like entering a maze. No doubt the local spirits and protector deities reside deep down here and there.
I do not exactly recall when I came to want to create photographic records of these sorts of impressions I have of these alleys ― the scenes I encountered, the words I exchanged with people, the air and smells and light, and such plain moments in life. The images are not flowery and do not present a gorgeous image of Kyoto. But now, more than a decade since I began photographing the alleyways of Kyoto, I have come to think that perhaps, for one like me who was born and raised in the town of Kyoto, these alleyways are my heart’s homeland.
MIZUNO Kayu “Kyoto Alleyway Scenes” Foreword