Naruko Onsen

You smell Naruko before you see much of it — that eggy sulfur tang that means the earth is doing something serious just under your feet. We came in autumn, which everyone told us to do, and for once everyone was right. The town runs along a valley in the mountains of northern Miyagi, steam leaking from grates and gutters, and the surrounding slopes had gone the full spectrum of red and gold. Lia leaned out of the train window before we’d even stopped and said it looked like the hills were on slow fire. Our inn had a bath the color of weak tea and a window that fogged the moment you opened it.

The gorge in full blaze

Naruko Gorge is the reason most people come, and we walked out to it on our first morning. The Ofukazawa Bridge arcs red across the ravine, and from the overlook the whole gorge drops away in a chaos of maple and rock, the river a thin bright line far below. It was crowded — this is the one genuinely famous sight — but the scale swallows the crowds. We took the trail that runs partway down along the old road, and within ten minutes had it almost to ourselves, leaves loud underfoot, the color close enough now to touch. Lia kept stopping to photograph single maples she couldn’t bear to leave. The air was cold and clean and faintly sulfurous, the whole valley exhaling steam into the trees.

Kokeshi everywhere

Naruko is one of the ancestral homes of the kokeshi, those slender wooden dolls with painted kimono and a faint squeak when you turn the head. Every second shop sells them, and a few still have a craftsman at the lathe in the back, curls of wood spilling onto the floor. We watched one old maker turn and paint a doll in maybe twenty minutes, chatting the whole time without ever looking at his hands. Lia counted the kokeshi in one window and gave up at forty. We bought a small plain one, no bigger than a finger, and it sits on our shelf at home now — the least touristy souvenir I’ve ever loved, because we watched it made. The town wears its craft lightly, as a job rather than a show.

Takinoyu, the old bathhouse

Our last night we soaked at Takinoyu, the town’s historic public bathhouse — dim wooden interior, two baths of milky, faintly green sulfur water, the smell strong enough to make your eyes water at first. There’s nothing luxurious about it; it’s a proper old sento the town has kept running for centuries, locals coming and going with their little basins. The heat sinks into you differently here, mineral and deep, and afterward Lia and I walked back through streets where the streetlamps caught the rising steam. We stopped for chestnut manju still warm from the steamer and ate them on a bench, watching the mountains disappear into the dark, thoroughly, satisfyingly cooked ourselves.

Getting There

Naruko Onsen lies in the mountains of northwestern Miyagi, on the Riku-u East Line. The usual approach is Shinkansen to Furukawa (about two and a half hours from Tokyo), then a local train roughly forty minutes to Naruko-Onsen Station — the town’s inns are a short walk from there, downhill toward the steam. The gorge is a further twenty-minute walk or a quick bus from the station. Autumn is the season everyone chases, so book your inn well ahead; come midweek if you can, and give yourself a slow two nights rather than one.