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. At a few stops there is a longer second track, Go Deeper. Leave it alone tonight: what is worth watching is out in the street. It will keep until the last train home. Keep one ear free, watch for bicycles without lights, and let us start at the gate.

Stand facing the gate from across the approach, and before anything else, stand still and notice how much room you have around you. During the day this exact spot holds a dense, permanent crowd, everyone photographing the same angle, and you cannot stop moving without stepping into someone's frame. After around eight in the evening it empties out almost completely. You can stand in the middle of the approach, and you can stand under the lantern for as long as you like, with no queue behind you and nobody waiting to take your place. Look up at it now, before you walk beneath it. It is lit from the inside rather than against the sky, so the paper glows and the bamboo ribs of the frame show through — you are seeing how it is built at the same time as what it looks like. By day the wind and thunder gods in the alcoves on either side disappear into shadow, and almost nobody actually sees their faces. At night the light sits inside the gate instead of behind it, so the faces come forward. Go and look at both of them properly. The expressions the carver cut are not solemn, and there is nothing tonight to hurry you past them. The gate stays lit until around eleven tonight, which sets the rough deadline for how far this route can run before the light disappears. Turn and face the temple. The next stop is the reason to be here tonight.

This is the reason to come at night. Walk it slowly. By day, Nakamise is a run of narrow shopfronts selling sweets and souvenirs, and the crowd moves at the pace of whoever is slowest. You do not really 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 shutter nearest you first, so you know what you are dealing with. Then step back and look along the whole street, because the painting does not stop at the edges. It runs straight through where the shop divisions were, so the moment the street closes, ninety separate businesses become one continuous painted surface, about two hundred and fifty metres long. Walk it as a single sequence rather than shop by shop. The scenes are old Edo — seasonal festivals, the temple's own annual events, people in period dress going about their year — and reading it while walking makes it behave like a scroll unrolling beside you, which is very likely the whole idea: a painted format made to be taken in on the move, simply mounted on shutters instead of paper. One thing can spoil this: the shutters do not all come down together, but gradually through the early evening, shop by shop, at each owner's own pace. Arrive too early and you get a half-painted street with gaps in the sequence, which is the worst version. If that happens, do the next two stops inside the temple grounds first, and come back through here heading west — it will be finished by then. Take your time. It is a short, quiet walk end to end, and it will not be here in the morning. Keep walking straight through to the gate at the far end — that is the next stop.