Fireworks stand up against the Pacific. Oarai is a seaside town on the Ibaraki coast, and what opens before it is the great unobstructed ocean—no far shore, no enclosing land, only the horizon where the fireworks rise into a sky that meets the sea at the edge of sight. The entire beach becomes the best seat in the house. People settle onto the sand all the way down to the waterline, and the ocean wind carries the smoke out to sea, keeping the sky clear for the next burst. The light scatters across the moving water; the boom of each shell arrives alongside the steady percussion of the waves, two rhythms overlapping in the dark. There is a humbling quality to fireworks set against so much emptiness. The Pacific is enormous and ancient and entirely indifferent, and against it both the fireworks and the people watching them are very small. Perhaps that is exactly why the light moves you here—because it flares so briefly and bravely against a darkness that has no end, a little human brightness thrown up at the edge of an ocean that goes on forever.