The sea at Toba is close enough that the men go down to it first.

They wade in — February, Mikawa Bay, late afternoon — and wash. That is the beginning. Everything after it happens on land, after dark, and involves fire.

In the shrine grounds two enormous torches have stood all week, built from green bamboo and thatch bound with wisteria vine, each one taller than a house and heavy enough to need a village to raise it. Inside each is a length of sacred wood and a coil of rope, wound once for every month of the year to come.

At night they are lit — not with a match, but with flint, by a man chosen for the task and purified for it.

The fire takes quickly. Within minutes the two towers are burning columns, and this is when the men go in: up the ladders, into the flame, in clothes sewn from old shrine banners, to pull out the wood and the rope and carry them to the altar. Two neighbourhoods compete, the east against the west.

From the crowd it looks like a mistake in progress. There are people inside the fire. They come out black and steaming and go back in.

How the towers burned, and which side finished first, is read afterward as a forecast — of the weather ahead, of whether the harvest will come good.

A year's worth of answer, taken out of a fire, on a Sunday night in February.