Ideally, Murakami explains to me, this gate would just be the beginning of a larger, quasi-mystical complex. “I’d been wanting to make a temple,” he says, “kind of a sightseeing thing ... when people are traveling and have to go looking at museums and temples.” If he can get someone to pay for it, and the right location, he’d like to “make a big temple for my painting,” which would be built, in traditional fashion, beyond the gate (which, the translator translates, has a sign over the doorway: The gate that eats the demons' dreams). “This is my first step, this is the gate,” he says. “And then, you know, if we can make big-budget temple … ”
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