Atami has been a hot-spring town for about fifteen hundred years, on the Sagami Bay coast, and it has stayed in fashion through the shogun era and the whole of the twentieth century. It is still the quickest real escape from Tokyo: about ninety minutes by road. THE HIRAMATSU sits on a headland above the bay. The building went up in the 1980s as a private state guest house, in sukiya style, by the master carpenter Koichi Kinoshita, and only became a hotel later. That history shows in what is absent. No gloss, no ornament. Plain wood, tea-room proportions, and terraces where the water sits still enough to hold the sky. Thirteen rooms, every one facing the sea. Each has its own bath fed by Atami's spring water: a granite tub half open to the air beside a wide window in most rooms, and in the two suites a bath set in a garden with nothing overhead. Dinner is French, which is the surprise. It is served in a sukiya dining room above the water, built on kinmedai landed at Atami, Amagi black pork and black truffle, from a cellar the house is quietly proud of. A Japanese building with a French kitchen in it sounds like it should not work. It does.