Walk through a ring of grass, and leave half a year behind

Beneath the shrine's torii stands a great ring woven of grass, taller than a person, bound from freshly cut kaya reeds. The person ahead reaches it, stops, gives a slight bow, then passes through in a very particular way — left, right, left again, tracing a figure-eight laid on its side. No one is loud. In the late-June dusk, with the heat just risen, the air holds summer's first dampness and the faint bitter freshness of grass newly snapped.

This is Nagoshi no Harae, held every June 30th — exactly half the year gone. The Japanese believe that the weariness, ill luck and small trespasses gathered without notice over these six months can all be purified away on this day. To pass through the grass ring, the chinowa, is to leave the year's first half behind and walk, clean, into its second — a small rite of beginning again, needing no reason at all.

Some shrines hand over a thin paper figure. Write a name on it, breathe onto it, then brush it lightly over the body, moving what is unclean onto the paper, and give it back to the shrine to be floated down a river or committed to fire. The gesture is so light it invites doubt that it does anything; yet afterwards the chest does loosen, just a little — perhaps the point was never the paper, but the willingness to stop and admit to being tired too.

In the line ahead waits a woman who looks like an office worker, suit jacket over one arm, just off work. She writes on the paper figure for a long time, longer than anyone, then breathes one long breath onto it, her shoulders visibly dropping before squaring again. She, too, has carried some whole half-year of a thing, come out of her way to set it gently down here.

Around the ring it is very quiet, only the rustle of reeds stirred by the wind, a clear faint note or two of a kagura bell far off. In the instant of passing through, the reeds graze the arm, dry and faintly itching, and a stronger grass scent crosses the tip of the nose. No gongs, no clamour of a crowd — the whole thing as quiet as a low word spoken to someone, the half-year drawn gently to a close by a single ring of grass.

Out of the shrine, the sweet-shop at the lane's mouth has minazuki — a white uiro cake under a layer of red beans, cut into triangles: the triangle, they say, mimics a block of ice, the beans there to ward off evil. Buy a piece and eat it slowly on the bench by the door, the sweetness faint, cool, dissolving on the tip of the tongue. Half the year has simply passed. The grass ring cannot be taken away; but the moment of passing through it — I think you will understand — feels as though something has truly been left behind.