The river remembers. Long before the towers rose along its banks, before the trains and the neon, the Sumida carried boats lit with paper lanterns, and the people of Edo gathered to watch fire bloom against a summer sky. That was three centuries ago. The fire still blooms. There is a particular quality to a Tokyo crowd on this night. Twenty million people live in this city, and a fraction of them—still an enormous number—press toward the riverbank, fanning themselves, balancing on tiptoe, holding children on shoulders. The competition begins at the first venue, where pyrotechnicians launch their finest shells in a contest older than most nations. Above the water, the light unfolds and falls, unfolds and falls, and twenty thousand times the crowd exhales together. What stays with you is not any single burst. It is the way the modern city, so relentless and vertical, softens for ninety minutes into something almost tender. The salarymen in yukata. The light caught on the dark river. A festival that has outlived shoguns, wars, and the changing of the world, asking nothing of you but that you look up.