Kagawa is not a prefecture that announces itself loudly. It sits on the northern edge of Shikoku, known mostly for udon and a pilgrimage that draws the faithful in white. But inland, following the Koto River into the fold of the hills, the prefecture quietly holds something older. Shionoe has been drawing people to its waters since the early Nara period, and both Gyoki and Kukai are said to have passed through — names that appear across so much of Shikoku's interior, as if the landscape itself keeps their memory. The spring that rises here along the fault line is a cold mineral water, classified as a simple sulfur spring, and something in its unhurried chemistry seems to suit a place that has never been in a hurry.

What greets you now is a small, contained town — perhaps ten lodgings, no more — that has settled into a different rhythm from its more festive prewar self. The crowds that once filled a livelier entertainment quarter have thinned, and what remains is something quieter: a place oriented toward recuperation rather than celebration. After the Russo-Japanese War, wounded soldiers came here to mend. That history of the body's slow repair is still present in the atmosphere, though it asks nothing of you directly.

To stay several nights at Shionoe is to relinquish the itinerary. The Koto River runs nearby. Fudo Falls exists somewhere in the surrounding hills. The Shionoe Art Museum is close enough to visit without effort. The bus from Takamatsu takes an hour, and that hour of winding road is itself a kind of preparation — the city releasing its hold gradually. Shionoe calls itself the inner parlor of Sanuki, and that phrase carries the right sense of enclosure, of being received rather than exhibited.