The exact mirror of #46, 雷乃収声 (Kaminari sunawachi koe o osamu, "thunder puts away its voice"), written at the start of autumn six months and thirty-four kō from here — the same underlying image of thunder as something that arrives and eventually departs, hung on the calendar's other equinox. Spring's thunder here comes from a different mechanism than either autumn's frontal rain or summer's afternoon convective storms: unstable air masses colliding as cold and warm fronts pass through in quick succession, producing distant, often faint thunder rather than the sudden, nearby violence of a midsummer squall.
This kō closes both Shunbun and the calendar's first quarter — the twelfth of seventy-two, one sixth of the full year, arriving at exactly the point the sekki system's own symmetry would predict.
In excellent season, its name literally meaning "spring fish."
Coming into season in Toyama Bay, famous for the bioluminescent glow of mass strandings visible on dark spring nights.
At the tail end of its season.
Building toward its full April peak, already available in warmer regions.
In good season, needing its traditional ash or lye soak.
Rengyō's bright yellow flowers open directly along bare branches in dense sprays, often blooming right alongside sakura and giving many spring streetscapes their characteristic pink-and-yellow pairing.
A spell of unsettled, showery weather that often sets in around this point in the calendar, named for its overlap with rapeseed (nanohana) flowering season — a preview, in miniature, of the far longer tsuyu (rainy season) still two months off. The instability behind it is the same kind producing this kō's thunder: fronts and low-pressure systems passing through in close succession as winter's cold air mass finally loses its grip.
"Lightning" — Literally "rice's spouse" (稲 + 妻) — an old folk belief held that lightning during the growing season fertilized rice and produced a better harvest, a connection that turns out to have a real scientific basis: electrical discharge converts atmospheric nitrogen into compounds that rain then carries into the soil as a genuine natural fertilizer.
発声 (hassei) means literally "to produce voice" or "to utter a sound" — 雷 (kaminari) paired with it treats thunder as speaking rather than simply occurring, the same personification carried through to its autumn counterpart's 収声, thunder falling silent again.
The best-known site for hotaru ika mass strandings, drawing visitors specifically for the bioluminescent display on suitable dark nights during the short season.
Local tour boats run specifically for the strandings during peak season — check current conditions before planning a trip.
Fainter, further off, and less immediately followed by rain than a midsummer squall.
Natane-zuyu showers tend to be brief but genuinely frequent for the next couple of weeks.
Increasingly stable daytime temperatures make it safer to begin acclimating indoor-started plants to outdoor conditions.
This kō and its autumn mirror were both built from the same two characters rearranged — voice raised, then voice put away — describing what's really a single continuous six-month arc rather than two separate events. A lot of what feels like an ending is really just the far side of something that started a long way back. What's something in your own life you've been treating as its own separate event, that might actually be the closing half of an arc that began months or years earlier?