A day in Hakone

This day starts in the Hakone hills with a morning walk on an old stone highway, then drops down to the Odawara coast and comes back up at night. It is built around the afternoon at Enoura Observatory, an art site on the coast.

Morning

The Tokaido was the main road between Kyoto and Edo, the old name for Tokyo, and above the village of Hatajuku a stretch of its original stone paving still runs uphill through the woods. The driver drops you at the bottom and meets you at the top, about fifty minutes up on stones that are uneven and slick when wet, under leaves that are turning in November. At the top is Amazake Chaya, the last of the old teahouses where travelers stopped to eat on the way up, run by one family for thirteen generations. You sit around an open fire in a sunken hearth under the thatch and drink amazake, a thick warm rice drink made here with no sugar and no alcohol. The rice cakes are pounded that morning and grilled over charcoal, and your clothes smell of wood smoke afterward.

Afternoon

Lunch is fish at a port on the coast road down toward Odawara. Enoura Observatory is an art site on the cliffs above the sea that Hiroshi Sugimoto, one of Japan's best known photographers, built as his life's work. A rusted steel tunnel runs seventy meters through the dark to a rectangle of sea and sky, and halfway along a shaft drops daylight onto a pit of glass chunks. The stage over the sea is optical glass on a cypress lattice joined without nails, and you see the joinery under your feet. You crawl into the tea house over a glass step that glows at its edges, and its roof is rusted iron from an old mandarin orchard shed. It is the rare place that is better in the rain, when water falls down that shaft and drums on the tea house roof.

Evening

Every room at Kinnotake Sengokuhara has its own open air bath of milky white hot spring water, looking out over the mountains or into the bamboo, and dinner is brought to the room, so the whole evening happens there. It is a ryokan (a Japanese inn) for adults only, with about ten rooms in a grove of eight thousand bamboo, about an hour's drive back up into the hills. Wash at the shower before you get in, because the bath is only for soaking. Dinner is kaiseki, many small seasonal courses brought one after another, cooked by a chef trained in Kyoto and served in the room. The five desserts are themed on the old folk tale of a princess found inside a glowing bamboo stalk.