On Saturday afternoons from May through November, the Zaimokucho district of Morioka becomes something between a market and a gathering place. Farmers from the surrounding Iwate countryside, young chefs with portable kitchens, craftspeople who set up workshops in the city, people who moved here from Tokyo and Sendai — all of them, on Saturday evenings, in the same place. Morioka has become, in recent years, a reference point for a particular kind of Japanese aspiration: the small city with excellent infrastructure, a functioning cultural life, a relationship to the land that Tokyo cannot offer. The market is where the transplants meet the long-term residents, where the person making lacquerware for forty years sells adjacent to the person who started last year. The market runs until eight in the evening — late enough for the summer light to change while you are there. Morioka's summers are cool and extended, with the Kitakami River a few blocks away. The evening market in this light is one of the better arguments for living somewhere that is not the center of anything.