Inside the Miyake Arcade, we melt with pleasure at the sight of a doll-sized coffee bar with a skinny counter and precisely three stools—far less space than is given the shelves of old jazz records, everything from Dizzy Gillespie to John Coltrane. The cigarette smoke of the willowy proprietress lingers in the air, and Chet Baker is singing. Just as we sit down and say, "Kohi o kudasai" ("Coffee, please"), we see an RCA Victor turntable from the 1960s spinning in the corner. The place is so fabulously quirky and unfranchisable. "Why can't we have places like this at home"Δω my cousin asks. I can't help but wonder too.

We emerge from the warm cocoon of the arcade to face the brutal reality of Hokkaido at dusk: an arctic wind that blows straight from Siberia. After one block, we're so cold-shocked and tired we can barely walk.

Making matters worse, there's a dark mountain looming over our heads. It has the strange shape of a lava dome—lumpy and menacing, like something you'd have a nightmare about. As Tanaka-san had explained earlier, the mountain is a spirit called Tengu, a red-faced goblin with a long nose and a nasty expression. He's anthropomorphized and dangling on every charm and trinket in Otaru. Goblin is a nice word, I think, for demon.

"Geez, what a face," Leslee says. "Do I really have to ski him?"

"Let's not think about that," I say, shivering. Who knows what the weather will bring? "Let's get settled into our ryokan and submerge ourselves in the bath."

Leslee grows quiet. I had sent a book to her, How to Take a Japanese Bath, but it seems to have increased rather than quelled her anxiety about public nudity. Most foreigners look for authentic Japan by visiting Shinto shrines and seeing geisha dances and other cultural artifacts that the country is so adept at preserving, without realizing that they can be more than observers of stage-set versions of the past. As I tell my cousin, to follow the rules of hot springs bathing is to participate in a ritual thousands of years old.

"All right," she says hesitantly. "I'll gather my courage."

Located in a hot springs canyon on the outskirts of town, Kuramure, our ryokan, was designed by architect Makoto Nakayama to weave the modern and traditional together, as well as echo Otaru's historic warehouse tradition. The exterior is austere, almost forbidding: a black edifice surrounded by a wall of rocks lashed into place by wire. Inside, it is a warm oasis of dark wood, brown stone, soaring glass windows, and human-scale spaces. The young attendants show us our suite, which looks out onto a private garden where a thick-needled Japanese pine is half-buried in snow.

The communal baths are down the hall and separated by gender, as they are almost everywhere in Japan these days. We remove the wooden geta, or sandals, that the ryokan has given us to wear and put our clothes into a basket in the changing room. Leslee carefully looks around, opening the doors to the indoor and outdoor baths, and realizes to her great relief that we are alone.