Thick white fog gathers at dawn over water and in the hills, especially after a night of rain. The days are still difficult, but the early morning has changed — there is a coolness in it now that was not there a fortnight ago, and the fog is the visible form of that change.
This kō is the deliberate partner of one in spring: 霞始靆, when mist first trails across the landscape in late February. Physically they are the same thing — water vapour condensed in air near the ground. Japanese keeps them apart by season. Spring gets 霞 (kasumi), autumn gets 霧 (kiri), and only 霧 counts as a seasonal word for autumn. The old distinction is that spring mist drifts sideways while autumn fog rises.
Still in season from the previous kō.
Oily and cheap through the end of summer.
Hitting their stride as the peaches finish.
The first of the season arrive around now — the beginning of the autumn fruit.
Late-summer aubergines are considered the best of the year.
Still going, and still the right thing with a cold drink.
Asagirisō — 'morning fog grass' — is a Japanese native of rocky ground, grown for its fine silver-white foliage, which from a distance looks like smoke or mist caught in the plant. It is named for exactly the phenomenon this kō describes.
Summer's fireworks displays cluster into these final weeks, when crowds peak and the sense that the season is closing gives the whole thing extra weight. The oldest and most famous, on the Sumida River, has genuinely grim roots: Tokugawa Yoshimune ordered the first display in 1733, not to celebrate anything, but to mourn thousands lost to famine and plague the year before and to ward off whatever pestilence might still be circling. What now reads as pure entertainment started as something closer to a funeral rite.
蒙霧 (mōmu) is a word in its own right: dense, rolling fog. It carries a second, figurative sense — a clouded or unsettled mind — which gives the name a weight beyond the weather. 升降 is rising and descending, the fog lifting off the ground and settling again. The usual Japanese reading is ふかききりまとう, 'deep fog wraps around'. In the Chinese original this kō sits one position earlier in Risshū, one of the small offsets between the two calendars.
One of the most reliably foggy places in Japan, though its peak is June to August — properly summer fog rather than autumn.
Both known for fog dramatic enough to be the reason people visit. Basin and lake topography traps cool air and holds the moisture.
Honestly: this one has aged. In the plains where most people now live, deep August fog is rare. The kō describes a landscape more reliably found at altitude, or near water.
River, lake or valley floor, shortly after dawn, the morning after rain. That is the combination that produces it.
Cloud and fog are the same phenomenon; the only difference is whether it touches the ground. The cloud on a mountain is fog to anyone walking through it.
Even without fog, the temperature at dawn has genuinely dropped by now. This is the most reliable evidence of autumn available.
Radiation fog forms fastest on clear, still nights and burns off within an hour or two of full sun. Early starts in hill country need the extra time.
The heat accumulated since July tends to surface as 夏バテ around the turn into 処暑. Eat properly before the tiredness sets in.
残暑見舞い are conventionally sent until the end of August. After that the seasonal formula changes again.
Fog is the one weather that removes distance. Everything more than a few metres away stops existing, and what is left is close, particular, and quiet. It seems fitting that the calendar puts this at the very end of Risshū, in the last five days before the heat is officially declared to be receding — a season that asks you to stop looking into the distance for evidence of change, and attend to what is directly in front of you. What would you actually notice this week if you stopped scanning the horizon for how things are going, and paid attention only to what's within arm's reach right now?