You Will Not See Kyoto in Time
I have never been to Kyoto.
I know it through articles—through arguments about height limits near Kyoto Station, where buildings may soon rise sixty stories into a sky that was once left alone.
I first imagined a crane.
Not the bird.
The other kind.
It stands above the station, turning slowly, its arm crossing the roofs the way a shadow might, if shadows were allowed to stay.
They say the city risks losing its identity.
From here, that sounds familiar.
Where I live, nothing is officially lost. A shop becomes a mall. A house becomes a location people describe using what used to stand there.
No one notices the exact moment it stops belonging to them.
I search for Kyoto anyway.
Temples. Gates. Stone paths arranged carefully enough to survive being seen.
I try to picture it.
A glass tower where a wooden house should be.
A shadow falling where something once stood without needing to be seen.
The crane turns again.
I realize I have been imagining it incorrectly—not as intrusion, but as interruption.
Something that refuses to agree with the story.
And I wonder if that is why it is not photographed.
Not because it does not belong—
but because it cannot be made to mean anything yet.
I realize then:
I have never known Kyoto as it is.
Only as it is described.
Or defended.
Or feared lost.
Perhaps the city is not changing.
Perhaps it has always been changing.
And what they are trying to preserve—
is not Kyoto,
but the moment they first believed in it.
Or perhaps
Only as something people are trying to hold in place.
But perhaps a place that needs holding
has already begun to move.
Vidushi Sharma is based in New Delhi, India. She grew up reading world literature in Hindi translation, which shaped her lifelong interest in people, countries, and cultural identities. She enjoys writing children’s fiction across genres and explores social themes and child development in her essays and creative writing.
“You Will Not See Kyoto in Time” won the Yamabuki Prize in WiK’s Tenth Kyoto Writing Competition. The prize is awarded to the national of a country in which English is an official language. Here’s what some of the judges said:
“A journey into change and its ramifications for a city steeped in history” is how one judge described this piece.
Another expressed appreciation that it “dives deeper into the undercurrent of inevitable change in juxtaposition with Kyoto’s traditional image,” while another said it gives “a novel meaning to the concept of ‘preservation’…Where in the past does one draw the line of ‘old’ in the sense of needing to be preserved?”
Yamabuki (Japanese yellow rose, or Kerria japonica) is a flower which frequently appears in haiku. The Yamabuki Prize winner receives a copy of Future of Kyoto (Writers in Kyoto Anthology 6), and inclusion in a future WiK Anthology.
See the full list of this year’s competition winners.
See this year’s competition notice with prize details.