On the evening of August 16th, the last day of Obon, people gather on the riverbank of the Naruse, just upstream of the Naruse Ohashi bridge in Higashimatsushima. The evening opens not with spectacle but with a Buddhist memorial service, the segaki rite for the hungry ghosts. Only after the sutras are read do the lanterns go onto the water. They are set down one at a time, by hand, and then let go — a slow procession of small lights drifting toward the river mouth and the sea beyond it. The Naruse has taken people. Some were lost to the river itself, in floods and in accidents across the generations. Others were taken in 2011, when the tsunami came in from the coast and pushed upstream along this same channel, turning a river into a road for the sea. The people being mourned here do not belong to a single disaster. When the last lantern has gone out of sight, the fireworks begin. They are not staged for an audience in the usual sense. They are chinkon — fire meant to settle the dead. Each shell opens once against the black sky and a second time on the surface of the water, and the two openings are not quite the same. Obon ends here, at the river, with light being sent away rather than kept.