You don't question why you're running through a forest of bamboo. You don't ask how you went through being in the centre of the city to an unending course of green. You don't give yourself time to think. You run. You curse your friend for convincing you to wear a stiff yukata. You rip at the flowing cotton sleeves as they snag on passing branches. You scream. You cry. You run, and run, and run.

            And you hope the man chasing you with a bow and arrow doesn't kill you.

            Tanabata was the festival of the stars. It was celebrated in Japan in a manner similar to Christmas. Decorations were hung on streets. Bamboo trees instead of pines were covered in paper ornaments. Families would come together and remember their ancestors. It was celebrated in July, except for in the north-eastern city of Sendai, where it was observed during the sweltering humidity of August.

            Every year for three days in August the arcade, a long shopping street covered in a glass-domed ceiling, was covered in three-metre long paper streamers called fukinagashi. They were cylindrical, topped with a large ball made of crushed paper. They looked like paper comets. They hung in colourful rows, and were so long and so close together that often you couldn't see the other side. You would have to part them like a curtain, only to be greeted by another wall of fukinagashi, and another and another. Each one was unique, a real artistic creation, and were hung for the entire three-day celebration.

            The arcade was crowded that morning, mostly by visiting foreigners and people from different parts of Japan who had travelled to Sendai for the famous event. They were taking pictures and fanning themselves in a vain attempt to cool off in the exhausting heat. Many young girls wore flowery cotton yukatas, the traditional Japanese summer wear. It was an excuse to get dolled up, and while they were mostly just worn by women, every so often a young couple would walk by with a sheepish looking man wearing the darker and looser fitting male version.

            Leda's Japanese friends had convinced her to wear one the week before.

            One of the first things she'd noticed after moving to Japan from Canada was how much Japanese women loved dressing up foreigners in yukatas. She attended a bilingual university in Sendai, Miyagi, teaching English part-time to subsidize the scholarship she was living off of. She met most of her friends from her tutoring gig, so they were always eager to hang out and practice English for free.

            In the weeks leading up to tanabata she had received more than one invitation from her friends to go shopping for yukatas. When she had relented and gone with them to try one on they had fawned over her with compliments and even – much to her embarrassed horror – applauded and told her how beautiful she looked. She felt like a doll at the mercy of overly imaginative girls.

            She didn't think she looked particularly nice in one. Yukatas were not designed with her body-type in mind. Leda was all curves. The stiff obi that tied around her waist bunched the fabric around her bust, and her hips were too wide, so the yukata was more prone to opening when she walked, making her feel like she'd suddenly gained fifty pounds.

            The first time her friends had taken her to look at yukatas she had managed to avoid buying one, but the week before tanabata she had finally broken. Part of it was her friends talking about how excited they were to wear their own yukatas, and another part was that after looking through half a dozen stores they had finally found a yukata she liked. She had tried it on, looked in the mirror and finally didn't see a frumpy gaijin trying to squeeze into a yukata.

            It was red, with a pattern of large dark pink chrysanthemum flowers. The obi was gold with suns stitched on it, the other side dark blue dotted with stars and the moon. Instead of pushing all her bits out awkwardly, the obi gave her that cylindrical shape yukatas were supposed to have, with just a hint of her curves underneath. They braided her long sandy hair into a bun and pinned it together with a red flower ornament with dangling bells. The bells rang softly every time she moved her head, and she finally gave in.

            She bought geta as well, raised wooden sandals with soft red thongs to slip her foot through. To complete the look her friends insisted she buy a bamboo bag to carry her wallet and other things in. It looked like a basket, with a cloth inset that had a flower pattern on it. None of these things were cheap, and she wasn't used to spending so much money on clothing, but she felt like she could afford to own one nice thing, and she knew she could wear to it to all the festivals she would go to in the future.

            Tanabata began on the seventh, and her friends had come over early that morning to help her put it on. While not as difficult to put on as a kimono, yukatas were still notoriously hard to put on by yourself if you had no idea what you were doing. They went out into the heat together, giggling and taking selfies every few steps.

            The obi was tight and she had to take small steps to keep the yukata from opening in the front and exposing her legs. She felt incredibly self-conscious. She could feel the stares towards her like angry accusations that she was doing it wrong. The tanabata decorations should have been enough to take anyone's mind off of something so trivial, but she couldn’t help but concentrate on the sweat running down her back.

            Along the walls of the arcade were all kinds of booths selling souvenirs, like paper fans and mini tanabata decorations. There were also kiddie pools filled with toys for children to fish out. Leda's favourite proved to be the kaki-gouri, crushed ice. They had ‘sno-cones’ back in Canada with two or three different flavours, but here there were so many at each booth that she had a hard time deciding which one to pick (she finally settled on matcha with milk). At the end of the arcade the decorations branched north and south. They headed north. Now out on the open, the paper streamers blew in the wind as though they were dancing.