Mure, Japan ? Inside a sprawling ring built of roughhewn rocks, American sculptor Isamu Noguchi once said he “conversed with stones.”

Called the “Circle,” the dirt yard in the southern Japanese village of Mure served as one of Noguchi’s main workshops from the late 1960s. It’s now part of the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum that was opened to the public in 1999.

From the towering, granite trapezoid “Energy Void” to dozens of unfinished works, the museum’s 150 sculptures offer a snapshot of Noguchi’s art during a period — from the late 1960s until his death in 1988 — when he made many of his masterpieces.

Although its collection can’t compare to the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, N.Y., the Mure site attracts Noguchi fans, modern-art buffs and adventurous tourists alike. It’s also fascinating for anyone who wants to see Noguchi’s works-in-progress, which bear the stamp — if not the signature — of the artist.

Born on Nov. 17, 1904, to Japanese poet Yonejiro Noguchi and American writer Leonie Gilmour, Isamu Noguchi was a giant of modern, abstract sculpture. During a 60-year career, he shuttled between New York, Italy and Japan, creating 2,500 pieces that explored ideas about nature, space and eroticism. Many of Noguchi’s works reflected his mixed heritage, as he married Japanese garden aesthetics with grand ideas about the American frontier.

Noguchi’s urban landscapes have become landmarks. In New York, his “Red Cube” balances on its corner on Wall Street, and his bas-relief sculpture, “News,” looms above the doorway at The Associated Press’ former offices in Rockefeller Center. Among his biggest projects were the gardens at UNESCO headquarters in Paris; the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas; the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden in Israel; and the South Coast Plaza shopping center in Costa Mesa, Calif.

An avid experimenter, Noguchi also designed ceramic pots, bamboo-and-paper lanterns, steel playground equipment and even stage sets for dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. A current exhibit at the Noguchi Museum in New York, “Noguchi and Graham: Selected Works for Dance,” highlights nine of the 19 collaborations between the celebrated sculptor and modern dance pioneer, from 1935’s “Frontier” to “Phaedra,” in 1962. Replicas of these sets are still used in current performances by the Martha Graham Dance Company.

Force of nature

Only Noguchi’s sculptures and paper lanterns are on display at Mure.

Visitor Chang-Ran Kim plays on one of Yasuda Kan's stone sculptures, The

The village, facing the Seto Inland Sea, is the traditional home of stonecutters who work Japan’s prized “aji ishi” granite into lanterns and Buddha statues. It is here that Noguchi shaped the stones he called the “bones of the earth” with the help of skilled masons, including collaborator and patron Masatoshi Izumi.

At the museum, the tour only lasts an hour — barely enough time to see everything. Besides the Circle, there is Noguchi’s two-story Japanese-style wooden home, Isamuya, and the hillside he formed above it.

Most stones scattered about the yard bear crude drill marks or have sides that are only partly polished, left unfinished after Noguchi died. The handful of completed works showcase the artist’s attempt to render forces of nature in a tangible form.

“Helix of the Endless” is an alternating granite-and-basalt totem that spires with geometric precision toward the sky. Housed in a converted sake warehouse, Noguchi’s “Energy Void” and “Sun at Midnight,” a black-and-scarlet granite ring, are variations on the circle, which he saw as a symbol of life’s origin. All the stones are wet.

“Noguchi frequently talked about how stone, water and soil go well together. He always wanted the stones watered before visitors arrived,” a guide explains.

The museum’s most hallowed ground is a landscaped hillock, where part of Noguchi’s ashes rest inside a persimmon-colored, egg-shaped stone. Noguchi’s private home and garden are not open to the public, but you can peek through the window to see “Wave in Space” — a rounded African-granite sculpture that Noguchi once described as “a man’s testicles.” From outside a fence, “Ground Wind,” a six-piece granite rod half-buried in the garden, can be seen.

A couple of huge stones stand outside the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in the Japanese village of Mure. Called the Circle, the dirt yard in the village served as one of Noguchi's main workshops from the late 1960s.

Unspoiled environment

A ferry can take visitors across the Seto sea to Naoshima, off the main southern island of Shikoku. Once a tiny fishing community of about 3,500, Naoshima’s modern art museums and outdoor installations now attract visitors from around the world. The island is a paradise of unspoiled beaches and fresh air, art and architecture.

One museum on the island, The Benesse House, was designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando and opened in 1992 by education company Benesse Corp. The museum is a concrete-and-glass maze filled with artwork by Jasper Johns, David Hockney, Richard Long and others. In rooms with a view of the sea, Johns’ 1968 “White Alphabets” hangs near Long’s “River Avon Mud Circles by the Inland Sea,” which he splattered onto the gallery’s walls during a 1997 stay. Hockney’s “Poll With Reflection of Trees and Sky” is also on view.

Yukinori Yanagi’s “Banzai Corner” shows concentric, circular rows of plastic figures of Japanese superhero Ultraman, their arms raised as they face two mirrors in a corner. Yasuda Kan’s stone sculptures, “The Secret of the Sky,” are displayed in an enclosed open-air courtyard.

A ramp hugging the wall of a circular room runs above the flashing neon messages of Bruce Nauman’s “100 Live and Die.”

Elsewhere on Naoshima is the Art House Project, a collection of old restored homes and newly built temples with permanent exhibits. At the Kadoya house is Tatsuo Miyajima’s “Sea of Time ’98” — a pool of water containing 125 digital counters set to varying speeds by local residents, young and old, representing the islands of Kagawa and differing perceptions of time. And beneath Go Shrine is Hiroshi Sugimoto’s “Appropriate Proportion” stairway of glass.

The Chichu Art Museum features the works of only three artists: James Turrell, Claude Monet and Walter de Maria. The museum, another Ando creation, is built into a seaside cliff.

In a white room hushed by patrons’ slippered feet and lighted only by indirect natural sunlight, Monet’s “Water Lily Pond” spans 10 feet along the far wall; four other Monet water lily paintings hang on other walls.

There are twice weekly after-hours light shows in Turrell’s “Open Sky” exhibit. Through a square hole in the ceiling of an empty room, visitors can peer at the sky as it turns from azure to lavender to blue-gray, framed by contrasting hues of light-emitting diodes and xenon lamps cast on the ceiling.