There is a town in Japan that holds the record for the country's highest temperature, and once a year it chooses to become hotter still. For three days in the middle of July, Kumagaya gives itself over to the Uchiwa Matsuri, a festival of the Yasaka shrine whose name means, simply, the fan festival. The name is almost a joke against the heat. Fans are handed out; the air does not cool.

Twelve floats move through the streets, each carrying its own drummers and flute players, each with its own rhythm. For most of the festival they roam separately, their music a distant thing you follow by ear through the crowds and the food stalls. Then, on the final night, they converge. Every float gathers at one intersection, and the drumming that had been scattered across the town collapses into a single competitive roar. This is the tatakiai — the clashing — and it is the reason people come. The Kumagaya-bayashi music, played by rival neighborhoods, does not blend so much as contend, each group trying to drown the others, all of them together shaking the summer dark.

Roughly seven hundred thousand people pass through over the three days. They come for the floats, the lanterns, the fried food, but mostly they come for that final convergence, when the heat of the day and the heat of the music become indistinguishable. It is worth remembering that this is farm country, flat and open, the kind of place summer settles into and does not leave. The festival does not fight the heat. It agrees with it, and turns it into sound.