Some fireworks announce an ending. These announce a beginning. On the eve of the Kanto Festival—one of the three great festivals of the Tohoku north—the sky over Akita fills with fire, and the city understands that summer has truly arrived. The Kanto itself is a thing of strange beauty: long bamboo poles hung with dozens of paper lanterns, balanced by performers on palm and forehead and hip, swaying like heavy stalks of rice ready for harvest. The festival is, at bottom, a prayer for a good crop in a region that has grown Japan's finest rice for centuries. The fireworks on the river the night before are the overture—the sign that tomorrow the lanterns will rise. The summers are short this far north, and that shortness gives them an edge of preciousness you do not feel in the long humid south. People gather on the banks of the Omono River knowing the season will not last. Each night counts. The fire climbs over the water, the crowd looks up, and somewhere in the dark the great lantern-poles wait for their turn, and the whole brief northern summer seems to gather itself into a single bright held breath.