Norito are the liturgical addresses spoken to the kami, and their form is fixed rather than improvised. The priest holds a folded paper at a set height and reads in a slow, pitched, archaic register — the grammar is roughly tenth-century and unintelligible to a modern listener without study. The structure is consistent: praise and naming of the kami and the shrine, a statement of the occasion, the offering, and then the petition, which names the petitioner in full along with their home address. The address strikes visitors as oddly bureaucratic and is not: the request concerns a specific person located in a specific place, and the tradition's premise about words means the specification has to be exact. The twenty-seven norito preserved in the Engishiki are the oldest sustained Japanese prose in existence and are studied as literature as well as used. Modern shrines compose new ones for new occasions — the opening of a factory, the safety of an aircraft, the launch of a satellite — following the old pattern.