Yokohama Art Museum

The Yokohama Museum of Art is the setting for an October visit that turns an art outing into a conversation about memory and belonging. Amid an almost empty exhibition of young artists’ work, Kido and Misuzu encounter an installation that makes a childhood living room enormous, prompting Kido to reflect on how a home looks from a child’s height and to speak candidly about his Zainichi background and naturalization. The museum’s importance lies less in the exhibits as a collection than in the way one work changes what the two visitors can see—and say—to each other.

The October visit

Misuzu invites Kido to join her at the museum in Minato Mirai for an exhibition called “New Visions in the Twenty-First Century.” She also wants to consult him about the search for Daisuké Taniguchi, so Kido rearranges his schedule and makes time for lunch as well. Their visit thus has two purposes from the outset: to see art together and to continue a search that connects Misuzu to her past.

They arrive on a weekday before noon, when the museum is nearly empty. The exhibition features work by young artists, and the pair move up and down stairwells resembling miniature versions of those in the Musée d’Orsay, speaking little as they look. Kido prefers the cultivated simplicity of Fontana’s Spatial Concept and finds much of the exhibition unappealing: cardboard boats, violent anime-themed sketches, and a portrait of an elementary-school student assembled from repeated impressions of three commendatory stamps. He watches Misuzu for signs of interest, but neither of them lingers over those works.

A childhood room made strange

On the second floor they find Three Years Old, A Memory, an installation that holds both visitors’ attention. Its artist is a Japanese woman in her late twenties based in Berlin, whom Kido has not heard of before. She has constructed a large, theater-like box set reproducing the living room of her childhood, but at a scale that makes its furniture and household objects gigantic.

The installation recreates the artist’s first memory by inviting visitors to experience bodily the world as it appeared to her at three. A square wooden dinner table rises to about Kido’s eye level; the chairs are too tall to use without climbing. Even the saltshaker and the grains of sugar on pancakes loom large, while knives resemble short swords. Rather than simply showing a childhood room, the work changes the visitor’s physical relation to familiar domestic objects: they become difficult to reach, and the adult body feels small inside a world built to its own scale.

That change in scale brings Kido to thoughts of Sota wandering through the family living room and kitchen, and to memories of his own gradual growth. As a small child he could not see the bathroom mirror; later he could catch the reflection of his hair by jumping, then see his face, and eventually brush his teeth alone and see himself to the waist. The installation gives material form to a question about what the world might have felt like before a child could command it. Kido does notice a weakness in the work—the somewhat shoddy sculpture of a mother in the kitchen—but its central effect is strong enough to draw him into this recollection.

Home, identity, and the meaning of normal

The installation also prompts Kido to describe his own childhood home. He says that his family was normal in one sense, but that he is third-generation Zainichi and became a Japanese citizen through naturalization in high school. The home he knew therefore differed slightly from what was commonly imagined as a typical Japanese home: it contained Korean calligraphy and commemorative photographs of his grandmother and mother wearing jeogori. He presents these as small details, but they expose the assumptions concealed in the word normal.

Kido reflects that overseas visitors might connect the installation to their own memories of being toddlers in different countries, while in Japan the work might be criticized for its portrayal of the so-called normal home. He connects that possible reaction to the growing number of people in Japan with roots in different countries and to the widening gap between rich and poor. The work, in his view, invites thought about those conditions precisely because its domestic scene can be read against an unstated standard of ordinary life.

The openness of Kido’s remarks marks a change in the conversation between the two visitors. When he first met Misuzu, he had been highly guarded about his ethnic background. At the museum he discloses it without hesitation, realizing only afterward that he has done so. The change is linked both to the installation and to his growing familiarity with Misuzu’s outlook over the preceding months. Misuzu shows no visible surprise, though her eyes suggest that she is reconsidering how she had behaved toward him before. She says the discussion makes her want to look at the work again; Kido replies that her own observation about its mother figure had made him want to do the same.

From the gallery back to Sunny

Misuzu jokes about returning to the gallery after lunch, then asks whether their earlier conversation at Sunny had made Kido uncomfortable. He answers that it had not, acknowledging that abduction is a real problem while conceding that her boss had pressed his point too heavily. Misuzu clarifies that there is more to it: Takagi is deeply prejudiced toward Chinese and Koreans. The museum visit does not resolve that earlier tension, but gives the two of them a different setting in which to discuss it, after Kido has spoken plainly about the identity that he once concealed.

The contrast between the nearly silent galleries and the conversation they eventually make possible gives the visit its narrative shape. At first the pair pass through works that leave them unmoved; the oversized room then slows their looking and redirects it toward childhood, family, and the social meaning of domestic normality. The Yokohama Museum of Art becomes a place where an artwork’s unusual scale makes familiar experience newly visible—and where Kido’s account of home becomes part of the encounter rather than a guarded fact kept outside it.