The floats move through a town of storehouses. Kawagoe is sometimes called little Edo, and the name is earned: black-walled merchant storehouses still line its streets, and through them, each October, tall festival floats pass with barely a hand's width to spare on either side. Each float carries a mechanical figure at its summit—Ieyasu, a carp, a celestial maiden—and each neighbourhood brings out its own, twenty-nine in all. The drama comes at night, in the hikkawase: two floats meet face to face in a narrow street and their musicians compete, lanterns raised, flutes and drums driving harder and harder, neither side willing to give way or turn aside. This is the old festival of Edo, preserved. In Tokyo itself the great shogunal processions are long gone, but Kawagoe inherited the form and kept it—three hundred and seventy years of it—so that the music of a vanished city still echoes, here, off the walls of the storehouses.