Another mirror, and the third in a row. In 春分 末候, at the end of March, the calendar says 雷乃発声 — thunder puts forth its voice. Here it says 雷乃収声 — thunder puts it away. The two equinoxes are hung on the same peg six months apart, and the verb is the only thing that moves.
What is being described is a change of machinery rather than a change of weather. Summer thunder in Japan is convective: the ground heats, the air above it climbs, and by late afternoon it collapses back down as a 夕立, the evening squall that arrives roughly on time and is gone in forty minutes. By late September the ground is no longer supplying that heat. Rain from here comes off the 秋雨前線 and off typhoons — frontal rain, steady, grey, arriving without announcement and staying for a day. A good deal wetter, and much less dramatic.
The equinox itself falls inside these five days. From here the dark half of the day is the longer one, and stays so until March.
At its best, and cheapest, in the last week of September. The bitterness in the gut is the point, not a fault.
Salmon returning to the rivers they hatched in. Called 秋味 in Hokkaidō — 'autumn flavour' — which is a whole season named after one fish.
Still running, still fat.
幸水 and 豊水 give way to 二十世紀 and 新高 now. Kept cold and eaten cold; a room-temperature nashi is a waste of a nashi.
The kanji reads 'flowerless fruit'. The flowers are inside it, which is why nobody has ever seen a fig blossom.
The tail of the season.
The season opens. Domestic ones are priced like jewellery, because the red pine woods they need have been thinning for a century; most of what is sold now is imported.
The first of this year's crop reaching the shops. It needs slightly less water than old rice, which is the one thing everybody forgets.
Lifted now, and the older offering at the harvest moon.
Kinmokusei is the one flower in the Japanese year identified by nose before eye — tiny orange florets, nearly invisible against the leaf, and a scent that reaches round a corner a day or two before you find the tree. It lasts about a week. Cosmos is a nineteenth-century arrival from Mexico that took so thoroughly it was given the name 秋桜, autumn cherry, and now reads as native. Gentian is the reverse case: genuinely old here, and increasingly scarce in the wild.
The fifteenth night of the eighth lunar month — 中秋の名月, the mid-autumn moon. Susuki grass is set out because it stands in for rice ears that cannot yet be spared; dumplings are stacked in a pyramid; and in older practice the offering was taro, which is why the night is also called 芋名月, the taro moon. One caution: this is the only thing in this calendar that will not stay still. Everything else here is fixed to the Sun, but 十五夜 is lunar, so it slides across a month of possible dates and falls inside this kō only in some years.
"The autumn sun drops like a well-bucket." — A tsurube is the bucket on a rope over an open well; released, it does not descend so much as go. The saying is about rate rather than length — around the equinox the daily loss of daylight is at its steepest for the year, and the evening genuinely does arrive faster this month than it did last.
季語: 秋の暮 (aki no kure) — which does double duty for 'autumn dusk' and 'the end of autumn'. Poets have been exploiting the ambiguity for a thousand years.
雷 is 雨 over 田, but the 田 is not a rice field. The older form 靁 stacked three or four of them, and they are drums — a picture of rolling noise, not of agriculture. Japanese then takes the same idea somewhere stranger with 稲妻, the ordinary word for lightning, written 'rice's wife'. Lightning at the flowering of the rice was thought to fertilise it, so the flash was the crop's spouse. This looks like plain superstition and is not quite: a lightning channel is hot enough to break atmospheric nitrogen into compounds that come down with the rain, and rice does use them. The mechanism was wrong and the observation was right, which describes a great deal of farming folklore.
Thunder does not stop here so much as change shift. From late autumn the 鰤起こし — the 'yellowtail rouser' — brings winter thunder in off the sea, said to wake the buri and drive them inshore. Kanazawa records more days of thunder in December than in August.
Where the summer version was most reliable. Heat rising off the plain built afternoon storms over the mountains almost daily in August, and their absence by late September is the clearest local sign of the turn.
The equinox arrives without the temperature agreeing to it. Typhoon season is still open, and the drop the mainland feels in late September does not reach here until November.
Walk the same route in the evening several days running. You will smell it before you see it, and the window is about a week.
It moves. If it lands in this kō, susuki and dumplings; if not, the moon is worth the look anyway.
Shinmai is labelled plainly and is only shinmai until the end of the year. Cook it with slightly less water than usual.
"How admirable — the one who sees the lightning and draws no lesson from it."
"I gaze far out across the plain of heaven — is that the same moon that rose above Mount Mikasa at Kasuga?"
The rate of loss peaks at the equinox. If you walk or cycle anywhere in the evening, this is the fortnight to sort out lights — not the one after.
Less of the short violent kind, more of the all-day kind. An umbrella that survives wind is now worth more than one that folds small.
Formally, for schools and many offices. The mornings will have been ahead of it for a fortnight.
Bashō's compliment is a barbed one. The expected response to lightning, in his tradition and in ours, is to think about how brief everything is — the flash is the standard image for exactly that. He praises instead the person who watches and does not perform the thought. There is something in that worth carrying into an equinox, which is the most obviously symbolic day in the year and therefore the one most likely to be turned into a lesson. The light is going. That is all it is doing. What in your own life have you been turning into a lesson lately, when it might be more honest — and more restful — to just let it be what it plainly is?