The room is almost black. In the middle of that darkness stands a single paper window, and thin wooden mullions divide the paper into squares large and small. Across the lower half, the shadow of leaves has spread. The outlines of the leaves are not sharp, and toward the edges they soften and come loose.
Had it been glass, the shadow would have fallen on the floor still sharp. Hanji does not do that. It holds the light for a moment and then gives it back evenly. Only the narrow band of glass across the middle of the window shows the texture outside raw, and all the rest is light the paper has filtered.
There was a time when paper, made by beating mulberry bark, sheeting it and drying it, became walls and doors. Instead of shutting the outside out, that wall copied the outside down. When the leaves stirred, the leaves on the paper stirred too, and as the sun sank the shadow moved little by little along the mullions. A person sitting in the room read the time outside without opening the window.
The floor is sunk in darkness too, but it is not entirely black. Light spilling down below the window grazes the grain of the floorboards, and the joints between board and board appear as fine lines. The light the paper has softly loosened is taken up again by the wood, broken along its own grain. Counting it as the same leaf copied down twice, each surface in the room takes it down in a slightly different way.
So the oldest thing in this photograph may be the paper rather than the wooden frame. Even now, in some room, the same leaf is being copied down in the same way. Look once more at the lower part of the paper. At where the edge of the shadow begins to blur.
