An ordinary morningin a hundred-year-oldKyoto townhouse

Morning in a kyomachiya, one of Kyoto's traditional townhouses. The kitchen here is tiled the old way: a white-tiled sink and a counter of blue-patterned tiles. On the cutting board, I sliced an onion thin. This morning's breakfast would be oyakodon, chicken and egg over rice.

In a pan on the stove, the chicken and onion simmered while I beat eggs in a black lacquered bowl. When I poured the beaten egg into the bubbling pan, the yellow spread softly over the chicken and onion.

I put the lid on and waited a moment for the egg to set soft. When I lifted it, the chicken and onion had soaked up the broth, and the egg lay over them, barely set.

Into a red lacquered bowl went a pink lump of flower-shaped fu, wheat gluten, and then hot water. The color loosened, and carrot and other bits floated out: a clear soup. I spooned the chicken and egg over rice and scattered mitsuba on top. Breakfast in the machiya was ready.

I ate at the table by the window: an iron kettle and mandarins on a red flowered tablecloth, soft light coming through the shoji screens.

The kyomachiya, I learned, has its roots in the mid-Heian period, when people who came to the capital to make and sell things built small houses facing the avenues and lanes. The form we see today took shape in the mid-Edo period. Above the kitchen rises the hibukuro, an open well of space that lets heat and smoke escape, and that keeps a fire from the stove from spreading to the other rooms. The tsuboniwa, a small inner garden, brings light and air deep into a house that is long and narrow.

In this house's garden, an iron pot catches rainwater under a chain of rain cups, and bamboo stirs beside it. Looking up, I found a single bare bulb hanging in the open well of beams and ties. An elegant house, filled with the wisdom of people who wanted to live comfortably.

Now that the rain was over, it was time for a walk through the streets of Kyoto. Seen through the bamboo blind, the wet garden was deep in color.

I followed the stone paving along the Shirakawa stream. Townhouses with red-ochre lattices stood in a row above the stone embankment, and a leafless cherry tree reached its branches over the water. Then through a narrow lane between wooden houses, and down a dim passage toward the light at its end.

Kyoto is a city of fierce ramen competition, and Tenkaippin was born here. For lunch I went to the sohonten, the original shop, in Ichijoji. By the door hung a wooden sign reading "Chuka soba specialists, founded 1971," and a paper lantern that said "Main Shop."

The bowl that arrived was kotteri, the rich one: a thick, almost velvety soup of chicken bones and vegetables, topped with green onion. Kimchi goes well with kotteri, but add it from the start and it takes over, so the trick is to add it partway through and enjoy the change of flavor. I shook on plenty of pepper and ate it the proper way.

On the walls were a kotteri poster and a map of Japan marking the shops across the country. This is where that flavor began.

In the afternoon I went from the banks of the Shirakawa up to Kamigyo. A townhouse with a blue noren curtain, a red lantern beside a purple noren, white plum blossoms just opening on a mossy branch: the end of winter in Kyoto.

My destination was Toraya Karyo Kyoto Ichijo, near Karasuma-Ichijo, the tearoom of the confectioner Toraya in the city where it was founded. Under a cedar ceiling that curves in a gentle arch, I took a seat looking out through the glass onto the garden.

On a black tray came a seasonal sweet layered in yellow, white and pink, a white bun stamped with a pink mark, and a bowl of freshly whisked matcha. Tea time, looking out on a garden, the Kyoto way. On the table stood pink chrysanthemums. A slow afternoon. A happy hour.

After dark I walked into the lanes of Gion. Lantern light lay on the wet paving stones, red paper umbrellas stood open under the eaves of the townhouses, and through the lattices glowed the lights of a tatami room.

A Spanish Baroque building rises beside the Kamo River. Tohkasaikan's home was built in 1926 to a design by William Merrell Vories; it began as the Western restaurant Yaomasa, and at the end of 1945 it became a Beijing-cuisine restaurant. I had admired the building from outside, and tonight I finally walked in.

At a table with a white cloth, I poured bottled beer into a glass and ate pan-fried dumplings and fried rice with shrimp: authentic Beijing cooking inside a historic building. Below the window lay Shijo Bridge, the Kamo River and the lights of Kyoto.

I took the elevator down. Made by Otis in the United States in 1924, it is said to be the oldest elevator still in service in Japan. The inner door is a folding lattice gate, closed by hand, and an operator drives it. I walked home through the night feeling as if I had been to some faraway country.

To end the day in Kyoto. I set a red-painted rice bowl in front of the white-tiled okudosan, the old stove, and boiled water in the iron kettle. In the tatami room, a paper lamp with the silhouette of a maiko was lit.

Rice into the bowl, then a plum-blossom-shaped monaka wafer on top, and hot water from the kettle over it. The wafer shell softened and opened, and rice crackers and other bits floated out. Would you care for some bubu-zuke?

In Kyoto, ochazuke, rice with tea or broth poured over it, is called bubu-zuke. Being offered it, they say, means "it's time you went home." Whether that is true, I can't say. In my case, I would take the words at face value and gratefully eat. Saying things gently and indirectly rather than head-on: I feel a kind of consideration in that. Sitting on a red flowered cushion, I slurped it down with a beer.

Small lights glowed in the garden at night. I looked at it through the shoji for a while, then up at the round lamp on the ceiling. A day in the machiya was quietly coming to an end.