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"Hurry up, we're missing the fireworks." Masayoshi tugged on Gotou's arm to make him walk faster in the direction the general crowd was going. The whine of rising fireworks and the boom as they exploded were audible, echoing off the buildings that blocked their view.
"Don't rush, we have all evening." Gotou refused to increase his pace. After passing streetside vendors and booths outside local restaurants set up to take advantage of the festival crowd, they came to the riverside.
"Look!" Masayoshi pointed (unnecessarily) to a long boat bedecked with rows of lanterns. Rows of people wearing matching haori were aboard. Looking closer, Gotou saw that it was not really a boat so much as a barge being tugged by a smaller boat. People were standing and sitting all along the river, but at this point it wasn't so crowded that they couldn't make their way to the railing that blocked off the water for a closer view. From this vantage point they could see a similar boat coming down the river from the opposite direction.
"Let's keep going," Gotou said. They picked their way through the crowd.
A scattering of police officers were directing pedestrian traffic, and so far they were successful at keeping a path open near the river. "Don't stand still in the path," they called periodically on loudspeakers. "Please follow police instructions."
The first boat they had seen outpaced them as they made their way upstream, but other boats followed it. "That boat has a fire," Masayoshi pointed out.
"Maybe that's where they shoot up the fireworks," Gotou speculated.
The sky was still not completely dark when they heard the signature boom of fireworks. Luckily, there was a gap between a tree and some kind of booth where they were able to get an unobstructed view. A few bursts of reddish sparks were followed by multicolored explosions and a couple fireworks whose fragments burst into golden mini-explosions after the initial blast. After only a minute or so, the display fell silent.
"Is it over?" Masayoshi said.
"There will be more," Gotou assured him. "Let's keep walking."
Gotou was right, although they weren't lucky enough to find a place to watch by the river that wasn't blocked by trees. Still, the silhouettes of the branches with the flashes of colored light showing through from behind were not aesthetically unpleasing either.
There were a lot more of the lantern-adorned boats, too, and some of them had music or people waving flags or clapping and encouraging the audience on land to clap along. Some other spectacles were being held along the riverside as well. Dancers performed in a boat decorated as a dragon. Gotou wondered if the customers in the floating restaurant really had a good view of the festival. The sky quickly grew dark except for the trails of the fireworks and the glow of the lanterns.
Finally they came to a point where a police officer stood under a banner directing the festival patrons away from the river. Gotou took the lead as Masayoshi's gaze lingered on the festively lit river. As they followed the crowd away, another series of fireworks resounded. Catching sight of the flecks of light reflected in the windows of a tall hotel, they hurried along to join the crowd that clearly defined the area from which the fireworks were partially visible between buildings. It still wasn't really a good view, though; parts of the spheres were still blocked by roofs and walls.
Moving on, they passed by several snow cone stands and a few more points with limited views of the fireworks before they found the crowd converging at a wide bridge. Vehicular traffic was blocked off, and here the police were out in numbers. "Keep to the left," directed one over his loudspeaker. Gotou took hold of Masayoshi's hand so that they wouldn't be separated.
"The bridge is extremely crowded. Don't stop on the bridge. Don't go against the flow of traffic."
They tried to follow the police instructions, but the crowd was full of slowly shifting currents of people. Sometimes the flow stopped and they had no choice but to stop, too, or the current that was heading in the right direction was on the wrong side of the road. Still, it was usually possible to make consistent progress if you just kept looking for a gap or a person who was moving forward. Gotou tried not to imagine headlines announcing that someone had been crushed to death in the throng at this event.
"Why are people stopping on the bridge?" Judging by his expression, Masayoshi's sense of justice was offended by this petty rule-breaking.
"They're probably stopping to watch the fireworks. It can't be helped." Gotou was off duty, and he didn't envy the local officers their task of keeping foot traffic moving. Besides, what could they do about it that the officers in charge weren't already?
As they got onto the bridge proper, Gotou was proved correct. The view of the fireworks was unobstructed except for the sides of the bridge itself, and as the display started up again, people stopped to form an attentive blob, sprouting several cell phones held up above the heads of the crowd. Masayoshi looked like he might do something, so Gotou placed a restraining hand on his upper arm.
"Look over there." As the multicolored fireworks on the right side of the bridge wound down, another display on the opposite side provided a well-timed distraction. "Don't forget to keep walking," Gotou chided.
The crowd was thick, and the weather was hot. Gotou's arms brushed against a lot of sweaty strangers' arms. But the plus side was that he got to lead Masayoshi through the crowd, sometimes taking his shoulders to guide him out of the path of another festival patron. For a while he was lucky enough to follow behind a pair of teenage boys that carved an easy route through the crowd. Then when they were perhaps halfway across, they were able to join a large stream of people that was actually walking. It made sense that the near side of the bridge was more choked with standers because the standers weren't walking all the way over here.
The down side of this was that as the crowd thinned out, a few people were in a hurry. Another pair of teenage boys rushed by, and one inadvertently slammed his shoulder into Masayoshi. Gotou reached out to steady him as Masayoshi yelped and fell backward into his arms. Masayoshi looked up and Gotou looked back down at him.
Suddenly his face felt hot; it must be walking this distance in this sweltering weather. "I think the train station is that way," Gotou said, setting Masayoshi back on his feet and taking off following the main road away from the bridge.
(But is that really an appropriate yukata??)