The floats in Kuji move. Not merely along the street, which any float does, but upward and outward: figures and ornaments telescoping into the air until the structure fills the width of the road. They are mechanical, worked from inside, and the moment of full extension is what the crowd has come for.

Eight float groups build them, and they build them new every year. Whatever went through these streets last September no longer exists. The theme changes, the mechanism changes, and the group's reputation for the coming twelve months is settled in three days.

The festival belongs jointly to three shrines, Daijingu, Akiba and Tatsumiyama Inari, and the structure is a departure and a return: floats and portable shrines process out along the main avenue on the first day and back along it on the last.

The middle day belongs to something older. The floats rest, and the street is given over to folk performance, including Nanyadoyara, a dance whose words nobody can translate. They have been sung anyway, unchanged, for generations, and the untranslatability has become part of what is handed on.

Kuji is a town where amber comes out of the ground and women dive for shellfish off the coast. For three days at the start of autumn, all of it stops and becomes this.