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"View Slideshow\n\nIn the overcrowded, over-developed confines of Japan, the ryokan, or inn, provides a tranquil retreat for a fortunate few and an insight into traditional culture for the adventurous foreigner. In his classic novel Japanese Inn, Oliver Statler emphasized how little this institution has changed over several turbulent centuries. Now as then, the traveler exchanges his street clothes for a crisply ironed yukata, or cotton robe, on arrival and is absorbed into a languid ritual of dining, bathing, sleeping on a soft futon and contemplating the beauties of nature from a private sanctuary of tatami mats and sliding screens. Television, telephones and quotidian frenzies are held at bay.\n\nAsaba is an exemplar of this luxurious tradition, and its present owner, Aiko Asaba, represents the ninth generation of the family that established the inn 350 years ago. Such continuity is a rare occurrence, even in a country as devoted to familial enterprises as Japan, but the inn has quietly moved with the times, guarding the essentials while enhancing its amenities.\n\nIt is located on the outskirts of Shuzenji, a hot-springs town near Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, two hours by train from Tokyo. One steps through a massive gate into a forecourt, ducks under a boldly printed curtain across the entrance, removes one's shoes and steps into the past. Creaking wood corridors and stairs lead to the 19 guest suites, which look out over a narrow pond to an open-air Noh theater, a waterfall and a densely wooded hillside.\n\nThe setting is idyllic year-round. The waterfall masks the noise of traffic. Trees rustle in the wind, scattering leaves and petals across the still water. There are hot-spring baths for every season, including a large outdoor pool that juts into the pond and is enclosed by smooth rocks, and another that is sheltered from the elements and surrounded by a wood deck. The yuzu-yo, a citron bath, is dedicated to the day of the winter solstice, and the shobu-yu, or sweet flag bath, is intended for early summer, though one can ignore the calendar and sample them at any time.\n\nEach of the suites has a similar combination of interconnecting spaces: two main rooms sandwiched between an enclosed porch overlooking the pond and a long entrance hall, with a bath that offers a cedar soaking tub and the latest plumbing fixtures. The older rooms have paneled ceilings, sand-plaster walls, and openings embellished with bark, twigs and bamboo. Cedar lintels are carved with picturesque landscapes: Mount Fuji (which is only 30 miles inland) framed by wisteria, waves breaking on rocks, and arched bridges flanked by willows. Each suite has its own character, and regulars request their favorites. Hagi has a deck extending over the pond; another, called Heaven's Dream, has a stone doorstep leading out to a glass-enclosed bath that is surrounded by a private garden and a peeling wood fence.\n\nSkilled carpenters from Kyoto recently created six new, minimalist rooms in the spirit of the old, substituting excellence of finish and joinery for ornament. Here one can appreciate close up the subtle harmonies of construction and proportion that so beguiled Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. All the pieces fit effortlessly together. The smooth planes of plaster, straw and wood; the spare post-and-beam frame; the shutters, windows and shoji screens sliding open on parallel tracks: Here are the seeds of modernism as we know it in the West, perfected in Japan at a time when Shakespeare was still alive.\n\nWoven-rattan chairs with indigo cotton cushions are arranged around a low lacquered table in one room. The other room remains bare until the futons are pulled out of the closets. Dinner is served in the suite, one course at a time, kaiseki style, drawing on the seasonal resources of local mountains, forests, rivers and sea.\n\nFor a change of pace, the inn also has a modern bar with white brick walls, checkered sisal carpeting, Bertoia chairs and a French Art D\u00E9co champagne trolley. The waterfront deck of concrete slats is furnished with Kaare Klint's Safari chairs.\n\nA unique feature of Asaba is the Noh theater, added by Yasuemon Asaba, a seventh-generation descendant of the first owner, who loved this stylized form of theater. The open-air structure was removed from a shrine in the port district of Tokyo and reassembled here as a gift from Maeda Toshika, lord of the Daishoji Clan, in the 1890s. Performances of Noh and modern dramas, traditional mai dance and recitals of biwa (a Japanese lute) and plaintive Shinnai singing with samisen accompaniment are given throughout the year and can be watched from one's room or from the terrace.\n\nFew foreigners and ever fewer Japanese truly enjoy Noh, with its elusive plots, harsh tonalities and glacial movements. But the spectacle of gorgeously attired figures shuffling down the runway to declaim before a painted cedar tree, of masked ghosts, and musicians playing on a platform to one side can be mesmerizing\u2014never more so than here, where stage and actors appear to float on the water and the darkness is relieved only by lamps and an open fire. Just as the ryokan preserves an ancient tradition of hospitality, so does this otherworldly ritual put one in touch with the eternal Japan."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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