The stone paving was not laid for dancing. Suwamachi in Yatsuo is a sloping lane of latticed townhouses, a rural market town that grew onto a hillside and kept that shape. This is the lane the dancers move along at the Owara festival in autumn; on every other day of the year it is simply the way home, and you pass people pushing bicycles up the gradient. Because of the slope, the houses sit on stacked stone footings that make up the difference in level, so looking up the street the eaves rise in steps rather than in a line.

Toyama city is about thirty minutes away by car, near enough that a good many households here have someone commuting into it. Snow settles here, and the combination of a stone surface and a gradient is at its least forgiving in that season — a fact residents mention before they mention the festival. Practice for the dance starts in the lanes at the end of summer, and the sound of it coming out of second-floor windows is what tells people locally that the year has turned, more reliably than any date on a calendar does. Nobody organises this part of it; the practice simply starts, in the street, at the hour when the working day has finished.

Towns known for a festival are usually a disappointment on an ordinary day, because the thing they are known for is the crowd. Yatsuo escapes that because what makes the festival work is the stage rather than the event: the slope, the stone, the lattice, all of it present in exactly the same form on a wet Tuesday in February. With nobody on it, you notice the tilt of the road itself, which on the night is the one thing nobody is looking at.