Arita is a town in a narrow valley in Saga, and it has been making porcelain there for four hundred years. This is not background information. It is the explanation for everything you see.

In February the dolls come out. All over Japan, families set out tiered displays for the girls' festival in March — emperor, empress, attendants, musicians, arranged in strict order on red cloth. Elsewhere the dolls are silk and clay and painted wood: soft-edged, faintly melancholy things.

In Arita they are porcelain.

They stand in shop windows, in kiln showrooms, in the entrance halls of houses along the main street, and once you start noticing them you cannot stop. White bodies. Cobalt blue. That particular red the town has never given up. The glaze catches the grey February light and throws it back at you.

Touch one and your finger goes cold. That is the difference, and it is not a small one. A cloth doll absorbs the room; a porcelain doll refuses it. These are hard, smooth, faintly ringing objects, made by people whose grandparents made teacups, arranged in the shape of a court that vanished long ago.

The valley is quiet in winter. The kilns keep working. The dolls stay out until the peach blossom festival has passed, and then the town puts them away for another year.