The bus from Tazawako Station takes the better part of an hour, climbing through cedar and beech before the road narrows and the settlements thin to almost nothing. Nyuto Onsen is not one place but several — six solitary inns scattered across the lower slopes of Mount Nyuto at somewhere between six hundred and eight hundred metres, each standing alone in the manner of a house that has simply always been there. Tsurunoyu, the furthest from the road by several kilometres, sits at a remove from the others that feels less like distance than a different order of quiet altogether. You arrive not quite certain you have arrived.

What holds the place together is the water itself, and a small notebook given to guests — a yu-meguri-cho, a bathing passport of sorts — that allows you to move between the inns and their baths across several days. This is the old practice of toji, the unhurried therapeutic tradition of staying with a hot spring rather than merely passing through it. To soak at Kurogyu in the morning and walk a forest path to another inn by afternoon is to understand that the waters here are not an amenity but the reason for everything else.

Nyuto was designated a national health resort in 1967, which suggests something of its character: less resort than refuge, less destination than a place where staying several nights begins to feel like the only reasonable thing to do. The inns along Route 194 are quiet; the one at the end of the road, rather more so.