It is evening, and this district has just changed shape. The shops are closing, the lanterns are coming on, and the people around you are no longer visitors — they are locals going out. This walk takes about an hour and finishes by the river. Nothing on it requires you to buy anything, but several stops are more fun if you do. Keep one ear free, watch for bicycles without lights, and let us start at the gate.

Start at the gate, and before anything else, stand still and notice how much room you have. During the day this exact spot holds a permanent crowd forty people deep, everybody photographing the same object from the same angle, and you cannot stop moving without being in somebody's frame. After about eight in the evening it thins to almost nothing. You can stand in the middle of the approach. You can stand under the lantern for as long as you like. That is the first thing this walk is buying you, and it is worth more than any single fact I can give you tonight. Now look up at the lantern itself. It is lit from the inside now, not from the sky behind it, and that changes it completely. In daylight it is a red shape against brightness. At night the paper glows and the bamboo ribs of the frame show through from within, so you are seeing how it is built at the same time as you see what it looks like. The gate is illuminated until around eleven. That number matters more than it sounds, because it is the deadline for tonight's route. But here is the thing almost nobody realises about this place. The temple grounds themselves never close. There is no gate you cannot walk through, no closing time on the space. Only the buildings shut. You can be standing in the middle of the most visited religious site in Japan at two in the morning, entirely legally, entirely alone. Very few of the world's great tourist sites will let you do that. Now the detail you would miss. Look at the wind and thunder gods in the alcoves on either side. In daylight they sit in shadow with a bright sky behind them and read as dark silhouettes — most people never actually see their faces. At night the light is inside the gate rather than behind it, so the faces come forward. Go and look at both of them properly. The expressions the carver cut are visible for the first time, and they are not solemn. One more thing to notice before we move, and it applies to the whole evening. Look at where the light is coming from now compared with earlier. In the daytime the shops are the bright things and the temple is the background they are standing in front of — the merchandise is lit, the signage is lit, the temple is just there. After the shops shut, that inverts completely. The commercial layer goes dark and the religious buildings are the only illuminated things left standing. For a few hours every night, this stops being a shopping district with a temple in it and becomes a temple with a shopping district switched off around it. One practical note before we walk, because this is a walk through a district that is closing. If you have not eaten, either do it now or plan for after. The shops on Nakamise close around six. A lot of the restaurants near the temple close by nine. Asakusa is an early district inside a late city, and that is exactly why it is worth walking after dark. Turn and face the temple. The next stop is the reason to be here tonight.

This is the reason to come at night, and I want you to walk it slowly. During the day, Nakamise is roughly ninety shopfronts selling sweets and souvenirs, and the crowd moves at the speed of the slowest person in it. You do not look at this street in daylight. You queue through it. After closing, every one of those shopfronts pulls down a metal shutter. And the shutters are painted. Look at the one nearest you first, so you know what you are dealing with. Then step back and look along the street, because the trick is that they do not stop at the edges. The painting runs from one shutter to the next, straight through where the shop divisions were, so the moment the street closes, ninety separate businesses turn into one continuous surface about two hundred and fifty metres long. Walk it as a sequence rather than shop by shop. What is on it are scenes of old Edo: seasonal festivals, the annual events of the temple, figures in period dress going about the year. Read it as you walk and it behaves like a scroll unrolling beside you at walking pace, which is almost certainly the intention — this is a painted format designed to be taken in while moving, and it has simply been mounted on shutters. Now the fact that makes it worth stopping for. The number of people who see this is tiny. Not because it is hidden or restricted — it is in the open, in the middle of the busiest tourist site in the district — but because seeing it requires being here after the shops shut, and almost everybody has gone by then. You are looking at one of the largest publicly visible artworks in central Tokyo, and it is empty. A word about the street underneath it. This is one of the oldest shopping streets in Japan, dating to the late sixteen hundreds, when local people were permitted to open stalls on the approach in exchange for taking on cleaning duties at the temple. The narrow, even widths you can see now, with the shutters down, are the shape of that arrangement — every unit is one stall's worth of ground, and it never got any wider. A note on timing, because this is the one stop on tonight's walk that you can get wrong. The shutters do not all come down at once. The shops close over a spread of roughly an hour in the early evening, one at a time, at each owner's own pace. Arrive at the start of that and you get a half-painted street with gaps in it, which is the worst version — the sequence is broken and the effect does not build. Give it until the whole run is down. If you have arrived early and found gaps, go and do the next two stops inside the temple grounds and come back through here on your way west. It costs you nothing and it is a completely different street by then. Take your time. It is quiet, it is about a four-minute walk end to end if you do not stop, and it will not be here in the morning.