14m 55s: Lenght

K's House in Itō is the only hostel with onsen registered as tangible cultural property of Japan. It was going to be our weekend retreat from Tokyo, but I arrived just as a typhoon was beginning to rattle the windows, so it proved more of a shelter from the storm than a place to bed down for the night. Fortunately I had with me Edmund de Waal's 'The Hare With Amber Eyes', the perfect book to read in such a setting. And the following day, when the weather cleared, I was joined by George Pittard and by Kazuo Kubo, who had known one of the book's principal characters, a member of the  Ephrussi family and inheritor of its netsuke collection.