BYAKU Narai

Few hotels can claim such an absolute sense of place as BYAKU Narai. Occupying four restored Edo-period merchant buildings at the center of Narai-juku, the longest and best-preserved post town on the Nakasendo, this sixteen-room inn opened in August 2021 on a road where travelers have sought shelter since the seventeenth century. The buildings carry names that predate the modern inn: 歳吉屋, 上原屋, and others whose house signs, or yagoū, were retired generations ago and quietly restored when BYAKU assumed the tenancy.

The architecture is the central argument of this place. Designed by Takenaka Corporation and honored with the 2022 Good Design Award, iF Design Award, and Architecture Masterprize, the interiors preserve original roof structures, earthen tsuchi-kabe walls, and the cedar-and-lacquer proportions of the Edo streetscape while opening rooms to the mountain light of the Kiso Valley. Rooms range from tatami suites with semi-open-air baths overlooking courtyard stone gardens to a detached former storehouse with its original beam ceiling held intact above a single bed, and a maisonette suite in the Kaneueya annex with a separate Japanese-style room and private sauna.

The culinary program at Restaurant Kura (嵓) occupies the restored Suginomori Shuzo sake brewery, founded in 1793 and a symbol of the town for over two centuries. The menu is supervised by Hasegawa Zaisuke, head chef of Den (傳) in Tokyo. What arrives at the table draws from the mountain vegetable culture and river fisheries of the Kiso watershed: wild mountain wasabi, charcoal-grilled iwana, fermented condiments produced in the valley, and courses paired with Kiso-region sake presented in Kiso urushi lacquerware. The original brewery well, visible through glass set into the floor, anchors the room in the weight of the building's history.

The 山泉 SAN-SEN bathhouse draws mountain spring water from the headwaters of the Shinano River, the watershed that has sustained the town since its founding. This water is not certified as a hot spring under Japan's 温泉法; it is cold spring water heated and delivered to a bathhouse lined with Kiso hinoki, sawara cypress, hiba, umbrella pine, and arborvitae. The facility includes a semi-open rotenburo, heated rock bathing (岩盤浴), a sauna, and private kashikiri-buro available by reservation. Guests whose primary measure of a ryokan is the geothermal credentials of the water will find this substitution significant; those drawn by architecture, landscape, and cuisine will find it recedes.

The image a guest carries from BYAKU Narai is quiet rather than theatrical: dinner ends, the lacquerware is cleared, and through the glass floor the 1793 brewery well holds the stillness of the Kiso night while, beyond the cedar-frame windows, the lanterns of the post town come on one by one along the Nakasendo.