In the town of the Dogo hot spring, you watch the fireworks. Matsuyama, the largest city on Shikoku, is home to Dogo Onsen—said to be the oldest hot spring in Japan, soaked in by emperors and immortalized in literature—and on a summer night its festival fireworks open over the Iyo sky. This is a castle town with a literary soul. The poet Masaoka Shiki grew up here; the novelist Natsume Soseki lived and taught here and set one of his most beloved books in the city. To watch fireworks in Matsuyama is to watch them above a place that has shaped Japanese letters, the star-mines bursting over streets that writers walked and wrote. The castle on its hill by day, the ancient hot spring, the fireworks by night—Matsuyama's summer unfolds at an unhurried pace, with the gentleness Shikoku is known for. The local custom is to soak in the bath and then step out into the warm evening to look up at the fire. After the hot water, the fireworks: that is simply the shape a summer takes in this old, literary, easygoing town.