Yagenbori

This guide to Yagenbori in Hiroshima starts with a puzzle: hundreds of bars packed into two short streets, on ground never built for drinking. It traces the name back to the V-shaped castle moat once shaped like an apothecary's medicine mortar, and to a vanished stream at neighboring Nagarekawa paved over in 1913. It also follows the district's quieter past as a haunt of writers and artists before postwar reconstruction rebuilt it block by block. Best heard after dark, when the doorway barkers take the stage.