The wooden thing outlives the hands that carved it

The yatai stands in a narrow lane, three storeys tall, black lacquer traced with gold, its carving and metalwork so fine one must step close to see them — dragons, phoenixes, scrolling vines, something growing on every inch. It is a yatai, the float drawn through the streets at the Takayama Festival, brought to this state by Hida craftsmen across many generations. April in Takayama still holds a little spring chill, the air cold and clear, faintly sharp to breathe in, the smell of wood and raw lacquer clean to the point of transparency.

The Takayama Festival is really two festivals' shared name: spring's Sanno Matsuri in April, the rite of Hie Shrine; autumn's Hachiman Matsuri in October, belonging to Sakurayama Hachimangu. Together, with Kyoto's Gion and Chichibu's night festival, they are called Japan's three most beautiful festivals. Hida is a land of mountains and little farmland, long famed for its craftsmen — even the great temples of Kyoto and Nara sent for Hida carpenters — and these yatai are what that skill became, poured out in full, when there was no temple to build: travelling works of art, one after another.

The most breath-holding part is the karakuri — the mechanical puppets on the float. A handler hidden within works dozens of fine strings, making a wooden figure flip in midair, take up a brush and write, then toss itself to another puppet to be caught; no electricity, no motor through it all, only string, wood, and a pair of hands trained over a lifetime. The instant the puppet succeeds, the whole crowd lets out one "ohh," a sound likely no different from two hundred years ago.

That day's companions were a band thrown together in the inn's lobby — a few travellers who had never met, drawn by the same yatai to the same corner. Nearby a puppet-master, his performance done, coiled the strings loop by loop, his movements slow to the point of reverence; coiling finished, he looked up at his own float, the look not one of regarding a prop but of regarding something that had outlived him and would, in the end, outlive him still.

After dark comes the yoi-matsuri. The yatai hangs a hundred lanterns and the whole float floats up out of the dark, gold lacquer catching candlelight, dimming and brightening, drifting slowly from one end of the lane to the other. The warm scent of lamp oil, the smell of the mountain town's timber houses at night, the thin far flute of the bayashi all hang together in the cool spring-night air. A few strangers stand shoulder to shoulder, hardly speaking, only looking up at that orb of gold light passing, inch by inch.

The craftsmen who carved it are long gone, yet the float still moves. It cannot be taken away — and likely none of those strangers could either — but the night it lit up out of the dark and passed slowly before the eyes, each of them tucked into their own pack. I think that, years from now, if you too meet such a walking lantern in some small town, you will be as we were that night, standing a while longer where you are, loath to see it turn the next corner too soon.