The garden is looked at from a window, not walked in. The gardens at the Adachi Museum of Art cover fifty thousand tsubo — dry landscape, white sand and pine — and they are viewed through the windows of the building; visitors do not go out into them at all. Trees and stones are placed so that each window frame works as a picture frame, which means a step to the left or right recomposes the whole scene, and the same window becomes a different picture depending on where you stand.

The museum opened in 1970 and holds a hundred and twenty works by Yokoyama Taikan, so the paintings and the gardens are seen one after the other inside the same building. Yasugi's town centre is about fifteen minutes away by car and Matsue about thirty, which makes it reachable despite sitting back in the hills. Gardeners work out there every morning, and seeing them at it changes the experience considerably: what looked like a picture turns out to be a condition being maintained, hour by hour, by people with rakes.

A garden nobody enters is designed differently from one that is walked. Because the viewing positions are fixed and known, the composition can be extended past the property line to take in the hills behind — and those hills are themselves managed, thinned and shaped so that they hold their place in the picture. The visitor's restriction is the designer's freedom, which is an inversion worth sitting with for a moment. Not being able to walk in is precisely what allows this garden to be composed as a single image, held steady, all the way out to the horizon.