The gorge is deep, and the depth is the first thing you feel. Takachiho was cut by water through old lava—the volcanic rock of Aso, sliced over millennia by the Gokase River into a narrow canyon of columnar cliffs that lean in from both sides, their basalt fluted into vertical pillars as though the stone had been combed. Between them the river runs, green and cold. From the cliff top the Manai Falls drop seventeen meters straight down the rock face, and in autumn the trees around the rim color and frame the white of the water. You can take a rowboat to the very base of the falls and look up, and what you see is a long thin slot of red leaves and falling water and sky, the world narrowed to a single bright seam overhead. This is also a place of myth, said to be where the grandson of the sun goddess first descended to earth. Standing at the bottom of the gorge, with the cliffs closing the sky to a ribbon, you understand the choice of setting. If a god were going to come down anywhere, it would be somewhere this deep, and this quiet.