Turn into the lanes and the smell tells you where the breweries are. Yuasa is a soy sauce town: fermentation warehouses and kōji rooms stand directly on the lanes, and the smell comes out between the latticed townhouses without any need for a sign. It was designated an Important Preservation District in December 2006. The district is not large — an hour is enough to walk every lane in it, including the ones that turn out to be dead ends.

A kōji room has small windows, because temperature and humidity have to be held steady inside it, so from the street these buildings read as thick-walled and closed, quite different from the houses around them. Wakayama city is about forty minutes away by car. The work here is soy sauce and citrus, and the town sits where the coast and the hills are both close, which is what made it a place where things could be brewed and shipped. The strength of the smell varies with where the brewing cycle has got to, so the same lane in a different season is a noticeably different experience.

In a brewing town, the air changes before the architecture does. How strong the soy smells at any given point depends on the width of the lane and which way the wind is coming from, so in a town of narrow streets it thickens and thins as you turn each corner, without any obvious relation to what you can see. Deciding what to walk next is one of the very few navigational problems better solved by the nose than by a map, and in Yuasa the nose is also the faster instrument, since the signs on these buildings tell you almost nothing about what is happening inside them.