Tokushima Comes Together Only After Dark

I came to Tokushima in the daytime, and for a while I thought I had come to the wrong place. The town the guidebooks promise arrives only after dark; by day the water has taken it apart. Rivers run through it and cut it into pieces, and the bridges carry you from one piece to the next. It is a Shikoku river town in the plainest sense — a place laid along its channels, unhurried, keeping its balance on the current, waiting.

What it is waiting for is the drum. The Awa Odori does not build; it lands. First one beat, then the wooden clogs coming down on the stone together, then the three-stringed shamisen and the small bells filling in behind, and in that instant the street changes its frame. The arms go up, the feet come down, and a town that had seemed only to drift is suddenly held, all of it, by a rhythm you cannot see. It does not feel like an entertainment got up for the season. It feels like something that has always lived in the daily life of the place and is only now, these few August nights, being woken.

That is the thing about Tokushima's old dance: its age is not the point. Plenty of things are old. This one is still alive — the dancers and the watchers and the streets and the summer night all seem to know, without being told, where the beat is going next. The water keeps the town open to the outside; the port road ties it to what lies beyond; and by daylight you walk it the way you would walk any working place, past the slow canals and the quiet breadth of the harbour, none of it announcing anything. The dance does not sit on top of the town. It comes up out of it.

The food pulls the evening back down to the ground — the hot dishes, the smell of drink, the small local things eaten standing at the roadside, the loose voices under the bridges where the river gives off its damp. It keeps the night from being only a thing to look at.

Near midnight, when the drums had stopped and the crowd was thinning, an old man folding away his stall near the bridge caught me still standing there and said, without looking up from his hands, that the beat stays in the feet a while after it ends — you'll see — and went on tying his bundle; and he was right.