靆 (tai/tanabiku) describes something drifting or trailing in layered bands — smoke, cloud, or here, haze hanging low across a distant landscape. Physically, kasumi is the same phenomenon as kiri (fog/mist): fine water droplets and dust suspended in the air, blurring what's beyond it. The two words are kept strictly separate by season rather than by any real physical difference — kasumi is spring's word for it, kiri is autumn's, a distinction of vocabulary rather than of weather.
The haze itself has a simple mechanical cause: spring air carries more moisture and airborne dust than winter's drier air did, scattering light across greater distances and softening the edges of anything far off. A hillside or mountain that stood sharp and clear all winter starts, around now, to look slightly unfocused — read for centuries as one of the gentlest, least dramatic signs that the season has genuinely turned.
Still in good season, mild and flaky.
Coming into its best season ahead of Hinamatsuri, where it's the customary shellfish.
Still good, tart and thick-skinned.
A mild, slightly crunchy foraged green, good simply blanched with a vinegar-miso dressing.
Continuing in season, gathered while still young and tightly closed.
Ashibi's small white bell-shaped flowers hang in dense clusters, and its name — literally "horse intoxication tree" — comes from the plant's genuine toxicity to grazing animals, said to make a horse that eats it stagger as though drunk.
A moon softened by the same rising humidity and airborne dust this kō describes, its edge blurred rather than sharp — the spring counterpart to the crisp, deliberately clear moon prized in autumn tsukimi viewing. Where autumn's moon is appreciated for its precision, oborozukiyo is appreciated for the opposite quality, an indistinctness treated as its own kind of beauty rather than a flaw in visibility. Ōe no Chisato's Heian-era waka is generally credited as the earliest surviving poem to name the hazy moon this way.
"Spring haze" — Physically identical to kiri (霧, fog/mist) — the same suspended water droplets and dust — but reserved by poetic convention for spring specifically, with kiri kept for autumn. The distinction belongs entirely to the classical seasonal-word system (季語) rather than to meteorology.
靆 is a rare character whose only real function in ordinary Japanese is this compound, 棚引く (tanabiku) written with a different character — describing something trailing in layered bands across the sky, used for cloud, smoke, and haze alike.
Compare it to how sharp the same view looked in deep winter — the softened edge is kasumi doing exactly what this kō describes.
A short two-minute blanch and a light vinegar-miso dressing is enough; it doesn't need much done to it.
"Like cherry blossoms on a mountain trailing spring haze — however long I look at you, I never tire of it."
It's worth taking a moment to actually place what's softening a distant view, rather than writing it off as haze from traffic or dust.
Its toxicity is real enough that the name itself is a warning, not just a poetic flourish.
Tomonori's poem is filed among the Kokinshū's love poems, not its spring ones, even though every image in it is drawn straight from the season — the haze and the blossoms are doing service for a feeling that has nothing to do with weather. Borrowing the natural world to describe a person you can't stop looking at is one of poetry's oldest moves, precisely because the borrowed image never quite runs out the way a direct compliment does. Is there something in the world around you right now that would actually describe, better than you could say it directly, how you feel about someone?