The floats become stories. At the Shinjo Festival in late August, twenty floats called yatai move through the town, each one staging a famous scene from kabuki or legend, recreated in figures. The festival was born of catastrophe. Two hundred and seventy years ago a famine struck and many died, and that autumn the lord began the festival to console the hearts of his people—a deliberate liveliness placed deliberately after grief. The floats are built anew each year and broken down again afterward; the same one never appears twice, so that every summer brings new stories through the streets, made over the whole season by craftsmen and townsfolk together. The festival music carries a strange sadness. For all the spectacle, something plaintive runs beneath it, and you wonder whether the memory of the famine still lives in the melody. UNESCO lists it as intangible heritage—a reserved, deep-grained festival of the north.