Japanese garden?

[mungouk]

OK I'm a little embarrassed to be posting here rather than the Signese blog, but I think this is probably Japanese rather than Chinese.  It's from a Garden somewhere in England.

 

 

If I read correctly on the left-hand side of the door it says 不可居無竹 which in Chinese traditional would be something like "cannot live without Bamboo"?  (Maybe this is metonymy using bamboo refer to all plants?)

 

On the right-hand side it says 寧可食無肉 which I thought might read as "preferably can eat no meat"?

 

I couldn't make much sense of the top part, which could be read either L-R or R-L but is maybe something about a lord or master (君)...?  It's this bit that makes me think maybe it's Kanji.

 

Of course if this is Kanji then the above could be total nonsense.

 

Any suggestions?  ありがとうございました!

[Jim]

The two vertical columns will be something like "can't live without bamboo [ETA as in live in a place with no bamboo], would rather go without eating meat" I suspect, going off very rusty classical Chinese which might not be right at all. The no meat part actually might come first if it also follows right-to-left classical reading direction.

Top part then would be along the lines of "How can I spend a day without this gentleman" - not in the company of some respected friend/owner of the pavilion perhaps?

[Jim]

Oh look, the top line is a famous quote and does mean what I thought: https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/59162927.html ETA though the "friend/gentleman" is bamboo if I'm reading that right.

ETA https://baike.baidu.com/item/何可一日无此君 so passage has a scholar staying somewhere temporarily, he hires someone to plant bamboo and someone asks "Why bother?" (it's only a short stay) and yer man replies "How can i spend a day without bamboo?"

[mungouk]

So is it Japanese or classical Chinese?

 

 

[Jim]

Classical Chinese then.

[Jim]

Further adventures with a search engine reveal the other two lines (bar a single character) are from Su Dongpo: https://www.slkj.org/c/32956.html Seems he was riffing on the earlier reference.