The flowers arrive by train. On the morning of June 16, some five hundred sasayuri — the small pink wild lilies of Mt. Miwa — are cut at the sacred mountain's foot, placed in a palanquin, and carried by JR local train from Miwa Station to Nara, where they transfer to a flower cart and process down Sanjo-dori to Isagawa Shrine, accompanied by dancers in lily-print yukata. The next day is the Saikusa Matsuri proper — saikusa being the ancient word for lily — the annual festival of Nara city's oldest shrine, founded in 593, and one of the oldest continuously observed rites in Japan: the Taiho Code of 701 already lists it as a state ceremony for quelling epidemics.

The lilies are for the goddess. Isagawa enshrines Himetataraisuzuhime, consort of the legendary first emperor, who is said to have lived where the sasayuri bloom beneath Mt. Miwa. To please her, casks of ceremonial white and black sake are dressed in lilies, and four shrine maidens perform the "Fine Sake of Miwa" dance, lily stems in hand, at 10:30 on the 17th. In the afternoon, seven maidens in ancient dress, a "lily princess," and children in court costume process through Nara's shopping arcades — the mythic and the mercantile sharing one street, as they have here for thirteen centuries.

The shrine stands five minutes' walk from Kintetsu Nara Station, and the festival falls in early rainy season, when Nara is soft-lit and undervisited. An epidemic-quelling rite that takes the form of flowers, sake, and dance: pandemic policy has rarely been lovelier.