Arrival: After the Last Bus Leaves

By four in the afternoon, the last tourist buses have departed and the UNESCO World Heritage village of Shirakawa-go becomes something it never manages to be during the day: quiet. The gassho-zukuri farmhouses — their steeply pitched thatched roofs angled like hands pressed together in prayer — stand in the gathering dusk with smoke rising from interior hearths, and the mountains surrounding the valley close in with the darkness to create a sense of absolute enclosure. You are given a room on the second floor of a farmhouse that has been continuously inhabited since the early Edo period, on a low platform of tatami with a duvet filled with locally produced silk and a small window that looks out through the thatch to the frozen paddies below.