It is only a short walk from Kinkaku-ji, and yet at some step along the way the sound of Kyoto stops.
The line is a real one: cross the gate and the city stays outside it, and ahead of you is forest. Moss covers the stone steps, the sound of water keeps pace beside you the whole way, hinoki cypresses stand up one after another, and the light comes down cut into strips.
This woodland was first conceived as the garden of a textile museum. The museum was never built; the garden remained, and the ryokan that came later was built holding it — so the path under your feet is older than the buildings.
It is not a grand venue; it runs in exactly the opposite direction. The rooms are few enough to count one by one, and the few places that can hold an event are all small and seat very few. For the whole forest to belong to one party alone for those days, the way is direct: take the entire house. It cannot host an annual convention of three hundred. What it can give is something else — tonight, there is no one else on this mountain.
Dinner is kaiseki at Taka-An, at a counter of raw timber; rest an elbow on it and the wood is cool. When the meeting ends, people drift off one by one into the trees, and no one disturbs anyone else's quiet.
So this is not "a venue in Kyoto". It is the walk: first you leave the city outside the gate, then you pass through a forest, and then a small group sits down in a private garden next door to Kinkaku-ji to eat a meal the kitchen is cooking that night for them alone. Whoever is invited understands at a glance — the list is short, and he is on it. He will also feel there, perhaps for the first time, that the highest form of privacy is not a display staged for others to see; it is that for these few hours no one can see him. There are things he will probably only say in that kind of quiet.