In Osaka, the summer has a beginning and an end, and both are marked by festivals. If the Tenjin Matsuri opens the season in raucous fire and water, the Sumiyoshi Matsuri closes it. Held over three days that bridge the end of July and the first of August, it is one of the city's three great summer festivals, and also its quietest — a festival of purification rather than display.

At its heart is the nagoshi-no-harae, the summer purification rite. Worshippers pass through a great ring woven of chigaya reeds, leaving on the far side of the loop the accumulated impurity of the year's first half. Against the vermilion of Sumiyoshi Taisha's famous arched bridge, the green of the reed ring has a particular clarity. People come simply to walk through, to set something down.

The last day brings the only real spectacle: the mikoshi procession. A portable shrine is carried from Sumiyoshi Taisha some three kilometers to the Shukuin Tongu in the city of Sakai, and the moment it crosses the Yamato River recalls, briefly, the older shape of the rite, when such crossings were the whole event.

It is not a flashy festival. Its formality, though, is the deepest in Osaka. To attend is to be reminded that a festival can also be a way of quietly seeing the summer out, of ending a season by washing it clean.