At midnight, it leaves the house.

Kure, a fishing town on the Pacific coast of Kochi. On the fourteenth night of the eighth month by the old lunar calendar, a great torch is set moving — six metres long, close to a tonne in weight, carried by some forty men who take turns under it. Ahead of it goes the sacred grain, borne from the home of the year's host family towards the shrine of Hachiman. The procession arrives around four in the morning, in the grey before dawn.

In the shrine grounds the still-burning branches are thrown down, and people scramble for them. Take an ember home and it will keep misfortune away, they say. They call it picking up the embers.

The role of host passes around the town in an eighteen-year cycle. Preparations begin a month earlier, at the last day of the seventh lunar month, and every hamlet brings its offerings in turn. All of it converges on this one night.

It is counted among the three great festivals of Tosa. Because it follows the lunar calendar, its date drifts by nearly a month from year to year — sometimes mid-September, sometimes early October. The people of the harbour keep track without being told. They call it, fondly, Omikoku-san.