OUT OF EDEN WALK

Yoshiko Yamana sits cross-legged in her century-old guesthouse. She wears a fuchsia t-shirt and baggy tobi trousers. Her frizzed hair is dyed so indomitably black the highlights shine blue under the bare lightbulb. She is telling her life story. This clearly amuses her. Whenever she hits a speed bump in her biography, she claps her hands and throws back her head to guffaw. She does this describing her marriage.

“I was 26 years old when I first came here,” Yamana says. “I had just divorced. I was married for six months.”

Clap. Laugh.

Energetic and still single at 84, Yamana’s face settles into a Zen smile that invites few follow-up questions.

Migita guesthouse is a ryokan, a traditional traveler’s inn, the claimant of a fading legacy of hospitality that stretches back 13 centuries to pilgrims’ roadhouses in Japan. The sprawling building occupies a corner of a low-slung and nondescript neighborhood in the city of Shunan, near the southern tip of the main island of Honshu. Like Yamana herself, Shunan has seen both worse and better days. Once a busy oil and petrochemical port, it was bombed to ash by the Americans in World War II. The guesthouse somehow survived that inferno. Yamana bought the structure in 1965, when it was already derelict, locked up, its windows dark as the eye sockets in a skull. She borrowed the money.

“Every month for 30 years I paid down my loan from the agricultural bank,” says Yamana. “I knew I could earn. I could be independent. I had my freedom.”

Migita guesthouse is all but invisible on the internet. It advertises, if you can call it that, by word of mouth. It accepts only cash. This is why my friend Soichiro Koriyama and I could lodge there. We are walking across Japan. Outside the country’s big cities and throbbing tourist zones, accommodation is astonishingly tight. Koriyama swiped through all the usual hotel apps. Not one vacancy appeared in Shunan, population 140,000. Undaunted, he began cold-calling local businesses. This turfed up a phone number. “It’s an old lady,” he hissed excitedly, holding a palm over his iPhone the way actors do with rotary phones in black-and-white Kurosawa films. “She can take us for a night. Even two!”

The Migita ryokan is one of those wormholes into an alternate universe that you occasionally stumble across in unlikely geographies across the continents. Like the defunct pension in downtown Khartoum out of which the owners, three Greek brothers, once ran logistics, going back to the ’50s, for every major archaeological, humanitarian, and secret diplomatic mission in turbulent Sudan. (Needed emergency cash? Ask manager Thanasis Pagoulatos, and if he liked your story, he might yank open the heavy door of the family safe in the back room.) Or the basement dive in blacked-out Osijek, in wartime Croatia, behind whose door with its speakeasy spyhole lay a secret geometry of candles, wine bottles, and bowls of goulash, all strategically arrayed on long tables to accommodate the muddy, stomping combat boots of drunk tabletop dancers of both sexes. Or Madame Heba’s place on Zamalek island in the muddy Nile of Cairo. The Paleolithic lift had a caged door, and the Anglo-Egyptian lobby—her living room, really—had a metal detector against concealed pistols. But Heba’s mint tabouleh disarmed everyone.

Migita ryokan is such a looking-glass portal.

Its 30 simple rooms are arrayed organically, asymmetrically, one might even say evasively, like chambers in an ant’s nest. To reach them you must crouch through a maze of dark and crooked corridors with squeaking floorboards that defeat both sleep and skulking ninjas. The futon pillows are stuffed with rice husks. The room doors slide open and closed with a tired shhhhhh. Walls of rice paper oblige you to whisper in any case. Huge and gnarled tree trunks harvested from a vanished cherry orchard prop up a tiled roof. Tatami mats comprise the furniture.

“Young Japanese don't come here,” huffs Yamana. “They don’t like sharing toilets.”

She gestures out a window to an alleyway. What she is really pointing to is how the view is warped and whorled through handmade glass. She nods up at the imperial chrysanthemums carved into ceiling molding. Her ryokan housed navy officers during the war.

“When the carvings break, I can’t replace them,” she says. “All the craftsmen are too old or dead.” She claps and giggles.

Yamana is a village girl.

She grew up in a hamlet in Toyoura district, more than a hundred kilometers from Shunan. She recalls watching B-29s arrow in formation over the rice paddies, en route from China to bombing runs over Tokyo. Her father reappeared four years after the war, a man with a gingery step, lately released from a POW camp in Manchuria. He tried reopening the family sake brewery but metabolized the profits. Yamana escaped to the big city.

“Business was very good,” she says. “My place was popular. I had 10 workers.”

Today, Migita guesthouse is far quieter. The COVID pandemic shuttered her for a year. Trade never recovered. When we stay, there are only two other guests, a postman and a traveling construction worker. Yamana passes her days in the kitchen. Two middle-aged staff help prepare dinners amid shelves stacked with hundreds of tin, wood, and porcelain cooking implements. (“They have been with me their whole lives,” Yamana says, speaking of both helpers and the tools.)

I ask about retirement.

“After five years, maybe my body will be out of business too,” Yamana says, grinning. “Sometimes I think, Sell this! Be free once again! But then I say, No, I’ll continue. My neighbors joke about me. They say I’ll still be here washing sheets in 30 years.”

She claps and hoots. That night, Koriyama and I eat Yamana’s homemade tuna and rice, with miso soup. It’s workmen’s fare. Her bright pink gari, pickled ginger, which is both bitter and sweet, washes clean the memory of every mouthful.