Here lanterns and fireworks overlap on the sea. Miyazu Bay is known for Amanohashidate, the pine-covered sandbar counted among Japan's three most beautiful views—and at the close of Obon, the festival of the dead, glowing lanterns are floated out across the water to send the returning spirits back. Above them, the fireworks rise. Ten thousand lanterns drift slowly over the bay, a soft procession of light carrying the souls of the dead toward the other world. It is one of the gentlest sights in all of Japanese ritual—not a blaze but a scattering of small flames, moving outward on the dark water in no hurry at all. And overhead, the fireworks. Lanterns on the sea, fire in the sky, the living and the dead beneath the same summer night. These are not celebratory fireworks but okuribi, the sending-off fire, the flame that lights the way home for those who have gone. There is a quietness to Miyazu's night, and beneath the beauty, an ache—the year's most luminous moment also being its most freighted with loss.