Hiraizumi in January is snow, and darkness, and a great deal of history compressed into a very small area.

Eight hundred years ago this was among the wealthiest places in the country, the seat of a northern house that built temples to rival the capital's. Almost none of it survived. What remains at Motsuji is a garden pond with the foundations of vanished halls set around it, and one working building.

For a week in the middle of January, prayers are offered inside that building to the god who guards it. On the final night, the town comes.

People in their unlucky years walk up from the station behind burning torches, carrying vegetables — daikon, cabbage, whatever the fields gave. These are set before the altar. There is nothing symbolic in the offering. It is food, brought through snow, by people asking to get through the year.

Then the dancing starts.

It is called ennen, and it has been performed in that hall, in something close to this form, since the Heian court was still standing. Flutes. A slow drum. Voices pitched in a register modern Japanese has no use for. The dancers move in short measured steps, and the effect on someone watching from the cold edge of the hall is that time briefly stops behaving normally.

It continues past midnight. Outside, snow goes on falling over the foundations of everything that is gone.