On the same night Kyoto's grand costume procession ends, thirty minutes north by mountain railway, a very different ceremony begins. Kurama is a single street of old houses climbing toward a temple, and on October 22nd that street fills with torches—small ones carried by children at dusk, then pine torches weighing over a hundred kilograms, shouldered by men in ceremonial dress, moving through the dark to cries of "Sairei ya, sairyo." The heat reaches the spectators. So does the smoke. The festival belongs to Yuki Shrine, and its story reaches back more than a thousand years, to when the deity Yuki Myojin was carried from the imperial palace to Kurama to calm a capital shaken by earthquakes and unrest. Villagers lit bonfires along the road to receive the god. The procession of flame has been repeated ever since—less a spectacle than a welcome, renewed each year. By late evening the torches converge below the shrine's stone steps, and the street becomes a corridor of fire. A word of practical honesty: Kurama is small, and the crowds are not. The Eizan Railway from Demachiyanagi is the only realistic way in, trains run packed, and entry to the village is controlled once it fills. Arrive by late afternoon, expect to stand for hours, and know that leaving takes patience too. Those who stay say the waiting becomes part of it—the cold mountain air, and then the fire.