Yokohama is a city of famous fireworks, but only one display lets you watch them from an actual beach. At Umi-no-Koen, the seaside park in the city's Kanazawa ward, the fireworks are launched from a platform out on the water, framed by three islands — Hakkeijima, the park itself, and Nojima — so that the light opens over the bay and you watch it from the sand.

About three thousand five hundred shells go up over the course of an hour on the fourth Saturday of August. It is a display built on rhythm: long runs of starmines coloring the bay in sequence, building toward an oversized final shell that closes the night. Food stalls line the shore. People come early and stake out the beach.

The festival dates only to 1975, when the first Kanazawa Matsuri was held at Nojima Park, and it has grown into a pair of seasonal events — the fireworks in summer, a community festa in autumn — that mark the local year.

There is something fitting about a beach for the last big fireworks of Yokohama's summer. The season is ending; the fourth Saturday of August is already tilting toward autumn. You sit at the waterline, the bay dark in front of you, and watch the great blooms of light open and fall and reflect in the shallows — the summer seen out, quietly, from the edge of the sea.