Emi makes dinner for us. It is rice made in the rice cooker, and a kind of sauce, containing meat and vegetables, which she heats, still in its plastic packaging, in the microwave. I lean against the cupboards and tell her about tyger, about the strange way that all the computing and telecommunication intermedia have both facilitated a relationship between us and simultaneously guaranteed that it remains completely mental. Emi doesn’t see what I am getting at. I change the subject.

Emi gives me both a fork and chopsticks, but uses only a fork. We watch television while we eat. Or rather, Emi watches television, and I watch her. After she clears up, and is standing at the sink I spend a minute straightening my aching legs, then walk up behind her and put my arms around her waist. She curves away from me with surprising determination. I am at a loss, so I weakly thank her for the meal and act as if I had not been making a pass. After her formal do itashimashite, addressed, apparently, to the sink, I resume my place at the table and pretend to watch television. Something has gone wrong, but I don’t know what. Later, when Emi gives me a lift back to the hotel, we are silent and uncomfortable.

The following day we meet at my hotel early. It is still dark and we have a long way to go. In Emi’s little car we do 80 kph in a 40 zone, 150 kph in an 80 zone. So does everyone else. It feels absolutely helter-skelter, and makes me so tense I have to ask Emi to slow down.

I am the navigator. It is a difficult assignment, as I have to match the unfamiliar kanji on the map to the kanji on the street signs, and cannot pronounce them to tell Emi which town to head for; I can only point ‘that way’ when I see a character that matches one on the map. My reading speed is often too slow. Signs pass by before I have a chance to check them.

Our route goes east through mountainous country. We negotiate countless bridges, innumerable tunnels, and uncountable switchbacks. Evidence of landslides, long vertical gashes through the mountain forest, show that this is active mountain terrain. The mountains here are precipitous. Often the dark dense forest plunges vertically into deep blue or milky white mountain lakes.

Our chosen route is closed due to landslides. We are forced to make a long detour, as the roads are literally few and far between. Everywhere rain is falling. The brooding dampness worsens my mood. My relationship with Emi is still unconsummated, as it were. I thought that once she agreed to come travelling with me we had an unspoken understanding that this was to change. Her rejection of my advances last night scuppered that idea, and now the prospect of chaste nights, sharing a room but not touching, is dispiriting. I don’t yet know what to talk about, or how to act with her.

In many places the steam from hot springs rises dense and white against the dark blue-green of the mountain forest. Clouds drift both above and below us. Sheets of mist hang against the valley walls. Rivers crash down the mountainsides and fall vertically into lakes. We are surrounded by water in all its forms, a water world, a floating world. Appropriately, we are now to visit a metaphorical floating world in Matsumoto.

At the Japan Ukiyo-e Museum in Matsumoto we settle down to a long visit. Wood-block printing was influential in propagating visual ideas through Japanese society, since multiple prints could be made from one design, and consequentially prints were cheap enough for many people to afford. As with many popular art forms, ukiyo-e are notable for both the beauty of the design and the craftsmanship of the technique.

The artistry of ukiyo-e is so elaborate it can be described only inadequately or at length. Firstly, one notices the purity of line. In mathematical terms this purity can be expressed as lines having a constant second derivative, in aesthetic terms it is a fluidity, and naturalness that only the most skilled can capture – particularly by a method as unforgiving as wood-carving. Next, there is the fine balance of colour, technically very hard to achieve, given the irreversible printing methods. Then there is the humour and subtle eroticism of the content. Many of the prints have such a lively feel that one has a sense of being there with the characters, of knowing what they are thinking or trying to do.

Many prints are of courtesans with mirrors, cats, and glorious flowing kimono falling open suggestively. These prints often served as a form of advertising, helping to enhance the desirability, and price, of the woman concerned. The sexuality of the images serves to remind me of the vexatious stalemate that seems to hold between Emi and I.

Emi calls me over to look at a print in which a society girl is being prepared for her wedding night by other women of the court. The ideal preparation will leave the girl neither too surprised, nor too knowing, when her husband first enters her. To achieve this perfect balance she takes part in a dance with an older woman who has a long wooden implement in hand. At some moment in the dance this implement is pressed into the girl, enabling her to get some idea of what sex will feel like, without actually having to practice it for real. I try but fail to read between Emi’s lines.

In a sub-genre of ukiyo-e, known as shunga, sexual intercourse is depicted explicitly, and often with great exaggeration. This form of ukiyo-e has many adherents in the west, but to me shunga have curiosity value only and today with so many other riches on display I do not want to look at any of them.

The three most revered masters of the art of ukiyo-e are Hokusai, Utamaro, and Hiroshige. Hokusai is known for his landscapes, such as images of Mount Fuji, and the stations along the Tokaido. Utamaro is known for his endlessly repeated images of women, all of whom have the same face – approximations of his ideal, it is supposed. Hiroshige is also known for landscapes, but with the struggles of the people within them forming a stronger component of the scene than in Hokusai’s case.

Once the design of an ukiyo-e has been drafted, it is traced many times onto sheets of transparent paper. Each tracing is glued backwards (this reverses the design) to a flat piece of wood, to form a template. The wood surface is then meticulously carved away so that only parts of the design remain in relief. These raised parts are inked with a single colour, though it may be applied in varying strength to create shading. The block is then pressed onto a piece of paper (reversing the design once more) to transfer the colour. This whole process of carving, inking and pressing must be repeated for each colour. It is not unusual for there to be a dozen or more blocks for a single image. The alignment of colour blocks is crucial to the final composite print. Any misregistration of colours renders the print worthless.

The carving must be of a very high quality. This is especially evident when the design contains, as many do, clothing of complex patterns and textures, since each tiny detail must be carved into the wood. And since carving is a subtractive technique, a single slip of the chisel can ruin a whole block.

For each multicoloured print, there once existed a set of original wooden blocks. In some cases, the complete original sets still exist. This means that occasionally contemporary masters of the craft can reproduce the classic prints of the great artists of the past. This is an exciting prospect, since it means that ‘new’ originals can be made. They will differ from the old originals in colour, since the inks of the originals have inevitably faded, particularly in the blues, which tend to be the most fugitive of colours. The only drawback is that the wood, like anything else that gets used repeatedly, will begin to wear away and eventually lose its usefulness.

So, let us imagine that we wish to obtain a print of the most famous of ukiyo-e, Hokusai’s The great wave off Kanagawa. The costliest option would be to negotiate with a current owner of an original. This will set us back at least five million yen.

The second option, which would be less expensive, but still not cheap, would be to find a ‘new’ original, as just described. It will not differ in design, since the wood-blocks used would be the same, only in the vibrancy of colour. It will look the way the originals did when Hokusai made them, rather than how they look now. The thrill of this is that, like the great shrine at Ise, which resembles itself at any point in its own time because it is new and has always been new, a new print from old wood-blocks leaps through time and brings the past to the present.

The third option, which will cost about 10,000 yen, is to buy a ukiyo-e made from a new set of blocks copied from the old. This will be a true ukiyo-e, in fresh vivid colours, but there will probably be detectable differences between the design and the original, particularly, in the case of the Hokusai, much copied, in the drops of sea-spray. The differences may be exceeding difficult to detect, if the intention of the copy was to deceive. Japan’s most notorious forger, Takamizawa Enji, duped many a collector by cutting new blocks of formidable accuracy and printing ‘faded’ ink colours with them. Some art historians believe Takamizawa even went to the extent of reproducing the wood-grain patterns of original blocks.

The final option, at about 2,000 yen, is to buy a photographic reproduction of the original. This will look like the original in detail and colours, but it is a photographic print, not an ukiyo-e.

I desperately want to take prints away with me, but manage to quell the materialist urges, and enjoy the prints as fleeting experiences rather than as possessions. I have too many possessions already, and feel I need to train myself in the Japanese experience of aware – sympathy for the transient, the helpless, instead of desperately trying to hang on to everything that is important to me.