What the River Keeps

Three hundred lanterns on the Yamato, and the one thing the current cannot carry away.

Last August, on the fifteenth night of Obon, I watched the first lantern touch the Yamato River. Washi paper, a candle stub, no larger than my two hands — but when the flame doubled itself on the black water, I saw it: the living and the remembered, drifting together toward the sea.

The weight of light

By midnight the river held three hundred amber points stretching half a kilometer downstream. An old woman placed her lantern in the water and turned away before it had drifted ten meters. “The farewell is not for us,” my translator said. “She has already said it.”

A lantern on the river is a farewell repeated each year — a promise the living keep only for themselves.