This is the eve of the festival of paper wishes. The Sendai Tanabata—one of the three great festivals of the Tohoku north—drowns the city in streamers of colored paper, vast cascading decorations hung the length of every shopping arcade. And the night before it all begins, the sky fills with fire. Sixteen thousand shells announce the summer over the City of Trees, as Sendai is known for its green avenues. People gather along the banks of the Hirose River, waiting for the morning when the streamers will go up and the celebration proper will start. The fireworks are the threshold, the signal that the long-awaited days have come. Tanabata is, at its root, a star festival—the one night a year when two separated lovers, divided by the Milky Way, are said to meet. People write their wishes on strips of colored paper and hang them out for the stars to read. Perhaps that is why the fireworks here feel like something more than spectacle: both the paper wishes and the rising fire are messages aimed at the heavens, small bright hopes thrown upward toward the very stars the festival was made to honor.