Yuwaku Onsen

This guide to Yuwaku Onsen, a small hot-spring valley in the hills behind Kanazawa, opens on a night in October 2011 when hundreds of visitors turned out for a lantern festival that had never actually happened before. It reaches back three years to the flood that swamped this valley's eight ryokans and gutted its only economy, and to a television series that imagined a lantern festival for a fictional hot-spring town much like this one. Stand among the paper lanterns strung along the river at dusk, where the story and the real valley meet.