Put tofu into this water and it stops behaving like tofu. The spring at Ureshino comes out of the ground somewhere between eighty-five and ninety-five degrees, mildly alkaline, and the balance of minerals in it breaks down the protein, so the cubes lose their corners and the pot goes cloudy white. It does not so much cook as dissolve.

What arrives at the table is a plain earthenware pot of something pale. You go in with a ladle and lift out shapes that no longer have edges to them. In the mouth they are gone almost at once, leaving a faint sweetness and the flat mineral taste of the water itself.

Do not pour away the broth. Everything the tofu has given up is in there, and by the end of the pot the liquid holds more of the bean than the bean does. Drinking it is not an afterthought but the second half of the dish, and it is the reason a cook will keep the pot going long after the tofu has surrendered its shape entirely.

The tofu is a firm-pressed kind, made entirely from Fukuyutaka soybeans grown around the town, and five small producers between them make all of it. Ureshino sat on the old road to Nagasaki, and travellers are said to have eaten this after the bath for as long as there have been inns here. It is a dish that works in one town only, because it is largely made of the town.