If, when you think of Japan, you imagine bullet trains and capsule hotels and narrow lanes ablaze with winking lights, then replace those images with empty space. Put aside every dystopian thought you've ever collected from Blade Runner or Lost in Translation and, instead of yellow-haired punks and gothic Lolitas, picture heaps of autumn leaves. Bundle together the din of J-pop, baseball fanatics, and the world's most crowded train stations and superimpose upon them pure silence.

Now you're in something like the vast open space that is Nara, twenty miles south of Kyoto. The little sign in my engagingly unglamorous room at the Nara Hotel reads please, no fire in the fireplace. The photographs on the wooden walls of the creaking two-story room are of earlier visitors—emperors and their families, some offering ghostly waves as if from another world. Behind the wooden front desk stands an enormous old black safe, almost as tall as I am, and across from it, in the lobby, is what could pass for a little Shinto shrine complete with growling leonine temple guardians. The hotel, which could stand in for a Scottish hunting lodge in a local production of Ivanhoe, is more than a hundred years old, and the only staff in evidence this sweaty midsummer dawn are two deer, waiting at the entrance where doormen might be expected. I walk along the driveway, under the Prussian-blue skies of 4:45 a.m., and orange lanterns lead me deeper into the silent dark.

A hotel close to the middle of a deer park? A bustling city of almost 400,000 people—more populous than Pittsburgh—that has at its heart nothing but rolling hills, ancient temples, and 1,200 imperious Bambis walking through its central streets at their whim? Nara is not your usual 1,300-year-old ancient former capital. The signs on its narrow roads, not far from City Hall, direct you toward the Kasugayama Primeval Forest. My map pointed out ancient burial mounds all around downtown. Centuries before anyone had heard of Delhi or Shanghai or London or Paris—and long before anywhere called Kyoto (let alone Tokyo) existed—Nara was the first permanent capital of Japan, and the place where the country began to establish itself as a Buddhist kingdom. But in a.d. 784—seventy-four years after the court arrived here—the capital moved to Kyoto, and over the next thousand-odd years, Nara's neighbor became the center of imperial refinement, where kimono and Zen gardens and geisha and tea ceremonies flowered and came to define the spirit of Japan.

Today, most visitors favor Nara with an easy day-trip from Kyoto. But I live in Nara, and have grown to see how absence can have a power of its own, and how what's overlooked may pack a punch that the visited often lacks. Kyoto may be where Japan learned to wrap everything in courtesy and gossamer surfaces and smiles that leave you at once warmed and a little shut out. But Nara is the enigmatic, plain stone object—very probably sacred—which sits inside that beautifully wrapped box.

Like most foreigners, I went straight to Kyoto twenty-four years ago when I left New York to live in Japan, knowing that it would put me right in the heart of the Basho poems and Hiroshige woodcuts I'd savored from afar. But five years later, my Japanese sweetheart found herself moving to Nara, and I ended up in a modern suburb called Shikanodai, or "Deer's Slope." As I settled in, I learned how rich a city can be if it's not burdened with self-consciousness—and all the attention that comes from being a capital for ten centuries.

Before Nara was made the center of the newly forming nation, the capital had moved each time an emperor died, so that it would not be contaminated with the memory of an imperial death. And so prior to Nara, the court had settled in Asuka, only twelve miles away. And before that, Prince Shotoku—generally described as the founding father of Japan—had built a great temple in Horyuji, just nine miles from central Nara. Indeed, in Japanese mythology, the very first human ruler of the land, the Jimmu Emperor, set up his palace in the Yamato Plain, south of Nara, almost 660 years before the birth of Christ. Which means that all of Japan's earliest history is set amid the rice paddies and running streams of greater Nara, where grand temples like Murou-ji and Hase-dera tower above villages, and even the latticed windows in the central shrine known as Kasuga Taisha are officially designated "Important Cultural Property."

And so it is not surprising that Nara is, in many ways, where Japan became Japan. When the empire arrived in Nara in the eighth century—and decided to stay—the new court became the place where the folkloric animism of Japanese-born Shintoism merged quite naturally with the Buddhism that was streaming in from China. Shintoism gave the city—and Japanese culture as a whole—its sense of hills and fields teeming with spirits (and an emperor who was said to be a direct descendant of the Sun Goddess). Buddhism gave it its sense of gravitas and a grounding for a life that never forgets the inevitability of death. In 768, a deity was rumored to have been seen riding a white deer over the hills in Nara; that image seemed to echo the deer park where the Buddha was said to have delivered his first discourse, near Varanasi, in India. (Ever since, the deer here have been considered sacred.)

Yet even during its seven decades of power, Heijokyo, as Nara was then called, was never a glittery place. Its single-story unpainted palaces and temples were laid along a Chinese grid, making the land itself a kind of shrine. Today, many of these structures remain. The oldest wooden buildings in the world, dating back to 607, are at Horyu-ji. The largest wooden structure in the world is said to be Todaiji, the great temple at the heart of Nara, containing a 250-plus-ton Buddha, the world's largest bronze casting. Kasuga Taisha, a thirty-minute walk through the deer park from Todai-ji, is the second-most important Shinto shrine in the land (after Ise, to the east), the long tree-lined walkway leading up to it guarded by two thousand stone lanterns and what feels like centuries of spirits, haunting relics of its former, fleeting glory.

For my Kyoto-born wife, Nara is the last word in backwardness: a rural outpost without any of the stylish boutiques, exquisite manners, or cosmopolitan flavors of her hometown. There was a Starbucks outlet in the basement of the Kintetsu Nara train station, but it closed down. There was an eight-screen cinema near Sarusawa Pond, the central body of water, where an empress once plunged to her death, but it shut its doors last year. In the Nara Hotel, certainly the most distinctive place to stay—as incongruous as Dr. Who's telephone booth in the middle of streamlined modern Japan—all you can hear, often, is the grandfather clock ticking away in the lounge.