Sandan-kyō

This guide to Sandan-kyo, a river gorge outside Hiroshima, opens with the photographer Kuma Nanpo climbing into the ravine in the nineteen-tens without a trail and naming it gorge of three steps. It follows how that name never quite fit what is actually there, a string of cascades and tiered falls, and cliffs so narrow at one bend that it earned the name Monkey's Leap. A flat-bottomed boat still threads that gap today, the boatman poling off stone close enough to touch on both sides.