Many performing arts converge in a single festival. Hanamaki's autumn celebration fills the streets for three days with kagura dances, deer dances, festival music, ornate floats, and portable shrines. The deer dance is especially striking, a performer wearing antlers and a long bamboo plume on his back, leaping and drumming in a style unique to the Tohoku region. The festival is said to have begun more than four centuries ago, when the people of this domain started it out of gratitude to a beloved local lord. Hanamaki is also the hometown of the poet Kenji Miyazawa, who loved the deer dance so deeply he wrote a children's tale about its origins. On a night when more than a hundred shrines pass and the flutes and drums layer over one another, the soul of Tohoku that Kenji saw is still breathing here.