There is an old Edo story that on New Year's Eve, foxes from all over the Kanto plain would gather beneath a great hackberry tree in Oji, in Tokyo's north, put on formal dress, and process by foxfire to pay the year's first respects at Oji Inari Shrine — the head Inari shrine of the eight provinces. Farmers read the coming harvest in the number of their lights. Hiroshige painted the scene in his One Hundred Famous Views of Edo: a field of luminous foxes waiting under a winter tree. Then the tree was felled, the city grew, and the foxfire went out.

In 1993, the neighborhood lit it again. On New Year's Eve, residents in fox masks and painted whiskers gather at Shozoku Inari — the small shrine marking the old tree's site — and at the stroke of midnight, some three hundred foxes set off with yellow lanterns for foxfire, exchanging lanterns in a formal rite on Gongen slope before arriving at Oji Inari to open the year. The procession is barely thirty years old; the story it walks through is centuries deep. As acts of urban memory go, it is hard to think of a lovelier one.

Oji is fifteen minutes from Tokyo Station on the Keihin-Tohoku Line, and the crowds now come from everywhere, many in fox makeup themselves (face-painting stalls oblige). If temple bells are one way to cross into the new year, following a river of fox lanterns through the streets of north Tokyo is another.