A town of paper sends up fire. Ichikawamisato has made washi—traditional Japanese paper—for centuries, along with the carved seals every Japanese citizen still uses and the fireworks that are its summer pride. The Shinmei display, twenty thousand shells, is one of the defining events of the Yamanashi summer. The setting does something to the sound. The Kofu Basin is ringed on every side by mountains, and the walls of the valley catch each explosion and pass it around, so the concussion lingers and layers. The great two-shaku shells fill the whole bowl of the sky, and the echo seems to come from everywhere at once, the mountains themselves answering the fire. The date never moves: the seventh of August, year after year, a fixed point in the calendar. People plan around it, return for it, the way you return for a birthday or a memorial. There is a quiet rightness to a festival that refuses to drift, that asks you to come to it rather than the other way around. Paper and fireworks—both born, in the end, from fire and water. This town has always understood the kinship.