Tono is a town in the mountains of Iwate Prefecture that seems to remember things other places have forgotten. It was here that folklorist Kunio Yanagita gathered the stories that became Tono Monogatari — 119 accounts of kappa, ancestral spirits, disappearances, and the permeable boundary between the living world and whatever lies beyond it. The book, published in 1910, is still in print. The stories still feel close. Each September, the town holds its annual festival across the city center and the grounds of Tono-go Hachimangu Shrine. More than sixty folk performing arts groups take part — deer dances, Nanbu kagura, rice-planting dances, sword dances. These are not reconstructions. They are the actual forms that farming communities developed over centuries to communicate with their gods, performed by people who learned them from the generation before. Some groups welcome visitors to join in. The line between audience and participant, like so much in Tono, is softer than you'd expect.