The thing that first surprised all of us was that the Bird Theatre, Tottori wasn’t in Tottori City, as we’d imagined, even though it appears as part of its address. Even from the University campus on the edge of town, where I stayed for the first three days, Shikano, the actual location of the theatre, is thirty minutes drive away, whether past Lake Koyama and along the coast road or up over the ‘mountains’, depending on which route Megumi Shiozaki, native of Shikano, fabulous mezzo and our ‘Nurse Suzuki’ wished to chauffeur me in her dad’s car.
Shikano lies on a river plain, a small country town – really just a large village – surrounded by rice paddies, the approaches dotted with little clusters of plastic greenhouses and single dwellings, framed by pine clad mountains. Ignoring the major crop, it could easily have been somewhere in Austria or Italy. California even. It was late summer. The equinox. But the temperature was in the 30’s every day with blue skies.
