Hoshinoya Kyoto

In 1606 Suminokura Ryōi, a Kyoto merchant, paid to have the river above Arashiyama dredged so that boats could use it. Heian nobles kept retreats along this stretch long before, and the land is said to have been Suminokura's own; the inn built on it about a century ago became Hoshinoya Kyoto in 2009. The way in is still by water: a covered wooden boat, fifteen minutes upstream from the pier at Togetsukyo Bridge. Low pavilions under grey tiled roofs climb a mossy bank above the gorge, and roof tiles turn up again in the garden, smoked and set on edge in white sand, curving like the ripples raked into a dry garden. All 25 rooms look over the Oi to Mount Ogura through windows framed in paper screens, with Kyoto woodblock-printed paper on the walls and a cypress tub. A 300-year-old maple overhangs the rooms nearest the water, its mossy limbs filling their windows. The rooms have no television, and in those it would only block the tree.

Recommended for couples, and for anyone happy to keep central Kyoto a boat and a taxi ride away; children are admitted, but the facilities are meant for thirteen and over. The boat runs back down to the pier for the Sagano Bamboo Grove and Tenryu-ji, both a short walk from it. There is a monko incense ceremony at the hotel, and in summer a cormorant-fishing dinner on the river. The kaiseki dinner, which guests praise, is cooked by Ichiro Kubota and takes two hours or two and a half. Suminokura cleared the river to carry rice and timber down into Kyoto; the hotel's boats carry people the other way.