Beaten Until It Almost Is Not There

Down a side street of ordinary houses, a doorway opened onto a workshop where the noise was steady and mechanical, a heavy thud repeating about once a second. Inside, an artisan worked at a low bench between tall stacks of square paper, and between every two sheets of that paper lay a piece of gold so thin that it shivered when the door opened.

Kanazawa makes roughly ninety-nine percent of all the gold leaf produced in Japan, and has been doing it for about four hundred years. The numbers are hard to hold in the head. A piece of gold the size of a coin, beaten correctly, becomes one sheet large enough to cover a tatami mat, the straw floor mat that sets the size of a Japanese room. Finished leaf is around one ten-thousandth of a millimetre thick, which is thin enough for light to pass through.

The reason the craft settled here has as much to do with weather as with skill. Gold leaf hates dry moving air, and this city is damp, snowy and still for months at a time. The paper matters as much as the metal: the beating paper is made and treated by hand, and the surface of that paper decides the surface of the finished leaf. Workshops guard their paper recipes more closely than anything else they own.

Leaf this thin cannot be touched by fingers, so it is lifted on bamboo tools and settled onto lacquer bowls, temple pillars and altar doors, where it may stay for centuries. Polly stood very still at the end of the bench while a sheet crossed the air in front of her, and did not so much as ruffle.