Kanazawa Nishi-chaya Museum

This guide to the Kanazawa Nishi-chaya Museum opens with a small mystery about the lord who shaped this ground: records disagree on whether Maeda Narinaga was the eleventh or twelfth head of his family, though not on what he did in 1820, when he ordered every teahouse and every geiko in his merchant city walled into two sealed districts. You'll hear how the smaller Nishi Chaya quarter grew up around this building, once a teahouse called Yoshiyonero, and how a boy named Shimada Seijiro grew up inside its walls to write a novel about his short, restless life before dying at thirty-one. The museum keeps his notebooks downstairs, and a very different mood upstairs.