# Tsukigadani Onsen

The road into Kamikatsu follows the Katsuura River upstream, and the valley grows quieter the longer you drive. An hour from Tokushima, the mountains close in around you, and the inn at Tsukigadani appears almost inevitably — a single building beside the water, with nowhere further to go. This is the kind of place that exists at an ending, or perhaps at a beginning, depending on which direction you are moving.

The water here is a cold spring, rising naturally from the rock of the mountain called Tsukigadani. It is said that Kūkai once practiced here, and that the mountain carries a quality that draws people inward rather than outward. Whether one comes with those associations or without them, the cold water does its own quiet work. Bathing in water that has surfaced from deep within the earth, unchanged by heating or treatment, carries a different weight than ordinary bathing — it asks something of you, asks you to remain still long enough to feel the difference.

To stay several nights at a lone inn beside a river is to be returned, gently, to the simplest measures of time: the sound of the current, the gradual change in the light between the trees, the interval between one bath and the next. The campsite beside the inn suggests that others have found their own terms for staying close to this water. The valley offers little in the way of distraction, and that, it turns out, is rather the point.