Autumn leaves in Narai-jukuand an autumn table in Shinshu

I woke up in an old farmhouse in Nagano. When I drew back the curtain by the window of the shoji-screened room, it was already bright outside.

The house has a resident cat. A ginger tabby sat curled up on a wooden chair with its eyes closed. A cat, soba, and an old post town: one peaceful day in Nagano was about to begin.

For breakfast, I decided to try making oyaki, Nagano's specialty dumplings. I poured water from a measuring cup into a steel bowl on the table. Wheat flour is the usual choice for the dough, but today I would make it with rice flour.

I worked the water into the flour by hand, then pressed and kneaded the dough in the bowl until it came together, smooth and white, and lifted out in one piece.

For the filling, it had to be nozawana, another Nagano specialty. I chopped the pickled greens on the board and stir-fried them lightly with fried tofu. The smell of soy sauce catching in the pan made me hungry.

I flattened the dough in my palm, spooned on the nozawana, and folded it closed. I had wrapped gyoza before, so I knew roughly what to do. By the window, the cat watched my hands.

Into the pan they went, turned with long chopsticks. Before long the white dough had taken on a toasty brown crust.

I cut one open on the board. Oops: not much filling in there. Even so, the rice-flour oyaki were ready. Out in the garden, a persimmon tree hung heavy with orange fruit.

I stood in the open doorway at the far end of the shoji room and looked out at the garden, then carried the fresh oyaki out on a tray.

Sitting on the veranda in the morning sun, I bit into one. The filling was thin, but the rice-flour dough was pleasantly chewy, and my homemade oyaki tasted far better than I expected.

Firewood was stacked high beside the house, with work gloves hanging under the eaves. As I carried an armful inside, the cat trotted along at my feet.

I lit the wood stove. Once the flames were dancing behind the little door, the room slowly warmed up. The cat stretched out on the tatami, then curled up with its back to the kerosene heater. I'm going out for a bit.

The road through the hills was at the height of autumn color. Through leaves of red and orange lit from behind, I could see the mountains.

I walked beneath a great maple along a road carpeted with fallen leaves. Looking up, crimson branches spread across the whole blue sky.

My destination was Narai-juku, a post town on the Nakasendo, the old highway between Edo and Kyoto. It sits almost exactly at the midpoint of the road and is the highest of the eleven Kiso Valley post towns. With the steep Torii Pass just ahead, it bustled with travelers and was known as "Narai of a thousand houses."

Wooden townhouses line the street for about a kilometer along the Narai River. A post office sign and a red postbox, a navy noren curtain beside a barber's pole. Walking past the houses with their overhanging second floors, I felt as though I had wandered into an Edo-period post town.

Along the street were water stations where water pours from a wooden spout. They once gave drinking water to travelers crossing the Torii Pass and served as firefighting water for the town. The townscape was designated a national Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings in 1978. At the end of the street, the autumn mountains rose close.

Nagano means soba, above all. I stepped into a handmade soba shop halfway along the post town. What arrived on the tray was hot soba with wild vegetables: a steaming bowl piled with bracken, mushrooms and green onions.

The thin noodles glistened with broth as I lifted them with my chopsticks. The flavor of the soba and the mountain greens seeped into the soup, gentle, deep, and quietly delicious. Sitting in the tatami room, I cradled the bowl and savored it to the end.

Outside, a paper lantern sign reading "handmade soba" hung by the latticed wall, where a pot of yellow flowers had been set.

I came back to the farmhouse, wrapped in autumn leaves, past the inn's standing signboard in the yard and the wooden sign under the eaves. I'm home. At the far end of the room, where light came through the shoji, the cat was watching me.

On the stove, a yellow enamel pot was heating water. I poured it over the dripper and watched the coffee gather in the glass server. Sitting at a desk in the shoji-screened room with a globe and a lamp for company, I let the afternoon pass slowly.

As the sun went down, from a rise above the town I could see a lake fading into dusk and the lights coming on below.

Dinner was sukiyaki with beef from Nagano. I sliced a leek on the board and arranged maitake mushrooms and leek on a plate, then set the pan on a tabletop burner and laid the beef in the sweet soy broth.

Shinshu beef is a premium brand from Nagano, also known as "apple-fed beef" because the cattle are raised on feed that includes apple pomace. I cracked an egg into a bowl, beat it with chopsticks, dipped the simmered beef in it, and took a bite. It was astonishingly tender.

Into the pan went tofu, maitake and rounds of leek, with more beef added as I went. I like sukiyaki because you get to enjoy the cooking itself: the sound of the simmering, the meat changing color.

In the darkened room, I sat before the pan on the table, served myself more beef, and looked back on the day over a glass.

Next time, I'd like to come to Nagano when snow is on the ground. I'm looking forward to seeing another face of this place.