For one night in February, the mountain becomes a river of fire. On the 6th, in Shingu, some two thousand men in white, death robes cinched with rough rope, climb Kamikura-jinja, a shrine built against the colossal boulder where the gods of Kumano are said to have first touched earth. Each carries a lit torch. Women wait below; the mountain, that night, belongs to the noboriko, the climbing men, packed shoulder to shoulder on 538 vertiginous stone steps that were old when the samurai were new. Then the gate opens. What follows is less a procession than a controlled fall: the men race down the steps together and the fire pours off the mountainside in a single molten line. An old song calls it a waterfall of flame, a descending dragon, and from the town below that is exactly what you see. The festival is said to be fourteen centuries old, a rite that calls spring into Kumano by burning a path for it. White for death, fire for rebirth: a man climbs a dark mountain and comes down luminous, which is as compact a theology as Japan has produced. When the last torch gutters out, the winter in Shingu begins, perceptibly, to loosen.