A flat arcade by the water, and stone steps going up from it. Onomichi's Hondōri shopping street runs a long way along the shore, and from it a series of stone stairways climb the hillside behind it at intervals. The flat street is where the shopping happens; the steep lanes above are where people live, and the two meet each other at right angles without any transition. Temples are scattered up the slope, and among them, guesthouses made out of houses that had been standing empty for years before somebody took them on. Carry a bag up one of those stairways and you learn, physically and without anyone explaining it to you, what moving house costs in this town. Most of the houses above the steps cannot be reached by car at all, which is why so many of them emptied in the first place.

The San'yō line reaches Fukuyama in about thirty minutes, the reuse of vacant property is well advanced here compared with most of the country, and premises are advertised for anyone wanting to open something. There is almost no flat ground anywhere, the sea and the hill being as close together as they are.

A view and an easy life are generally traded against one another wherever you go. Cats are everywhere on the steps and have been for long enough that they appear on the maps. The arcade below has the ordinary shops a town needs, so the two levels divide the work between them rather than competing. Several of the guesthouses were converted by people who arrived from elsewhere and stayed, and their presence is now unremarkable. In Onomichi the exact terms of that trade are written into the ground, where you cannot possibly miss them.