The river is louder than anything the inns announce indoors. Shima Onsen runs in a thin line along the Shima River in northern Gunma: wooden inns, a shooting gallery, and pavilions built for drinking the water, strung along a single road that climbs, crosses a bridge, and climbs again. The valley is narrow, so the buildings grow downward rather than outward. An entrance that meets the road at ground level is the second floor on the river side, and a corridor will quietly take you down a storey by the time it ends. None of this was arranged for the view. It was arranged for the width of the gorge.

The drinking pavilions are worth stopping at, because they are not decoration. Guests once came here to drink the water as much as to sit in it, and the pavilions are what remains of that arrangement, still at the roadside where they have always stood rather than relocated somewhere more photogenic. The centre of Nakanojō is about thirty minutes away by car. Most people living here work in the inns or in the places that feed their guests, and the winters are colder than the same prefecture is down on the plain, which shapes the year more than any calendar of events.

Guests arrive for the water and are distracted, within minutes, by the noise of it. Windows get left open at night and people fall asleep that way, which is the local explanation for why nobody has bothered to soundproof anything. The shooting gallery survives less out of nostalgia than out of arithmetic: after dark there is nowhere else within walking distance, and the town settled the question of what to do with the hours between the bath and bed sometime in the Shōwa era and has not seen a reason to reopen it. That is not preservation. It is an answer that kept working.