The fourth mirror in four entries, and by now the pattern is the point. In 啓蟄 初候, in early March, the calendar says 蟄虫啓戸 — the hidden insects open their doors. Here, six months later, they close them. Spring's whole first solar term is named for that opening: 啓蟄, the waking of the hidden.
The image is a door and a threshold, and it is doing more work than it looks. 坏 is not a common character. It means a clod of earth, and used as a verb it means to stop something up with earth — not to shut a door but to seal it, from the outside, with the ground itself. The insect is not going indoors for the evening. It is being closed in for the duration.
What is actually observable is the sound going. 秋の虫 — the autumn singers, suzumushi and matsumushi and the crickets — have been the background of every evening since August. Through these five days the chorus thins to a few voices and then to individuals, until you notice one and realise you can count them.
秋鯖 — autumn mackerel, at its fattest before winter. There is a proverb that says not to feed it to your daughter-in-law either, for the same suspicious reasons as the aubergine.
Named for the sword it looks like — a metre of polished silver with no scales at all.
The runs are at their peak. Roe taken now becomes いくら.
Full season. Worth buying whole and boiling rather than buying peeled — the difference is not small.
The sweet varieties eaten straight; the astringent ones peeled and hung now for 干し柿, which takes about a month.
The early varieties arrive from Aomori and Nagano.
秋茄子 — autumn aubergine. Smaller than the summer crop, thinner-skinned, and generally reckoned the better of the two.
香り松茸味しめじ — 'matsutake for scent, shimeji for flavour'. The consolation prize is arguably the better one.
Underfoot, and detectable at a distance. Worth the trouble; not worth eating many at once.
Shūmeigiku is called a chrysanthemum and is an anemone, which nobody has ever got round to correcting. Waremokō is the odd one — small dark red heads on wire stems, no scent, no display, and its name reads as 'I too am crimson', a quiet piece of insistence from a plant that is easy to walk past. It is a favourite in autumn flower arrangement for exactly that reason.
An Edo-period outing built entirely around sound: you went to a known spot in the evening, at the right week of the year, and listened. 道灌山 in what is now Nishi-Nippori was among the famous ones, along with 真崎 and the banks of the Sumida. It functioned exactly as 花見 does — a named place, a season, food brought along, people making a night of it — with the difference that the object could not be seen and the whole thing depended on everybody being reasonably quiet. Insects were also caught and sold in cages to be kept indoors, a trade that survived into the twentieth century.
"Don't feed autumn aubergines to your daughter-in-law." — Probably the most argued-over proverb in Japanese, because nobody agrees what it means. The mean reading is the obvious one: autumn aubergine is the best of the year and the mother-in-law wants it. The kind readings are that aubergine cools the body and a young wife should not be chilled, and that it has few seeds, which was thought to bode badly for children. All three have been in circulation for centuries, which suggests the ambiguity was always part of the appeal.
季語: 秋茄子 (aki nasu) — an autumn word in its own right, distinct from plain 茄子, which is summer.
蟄 is the character at the heart of 啓蟄, the spring term, and means to hide away and stay still — dormancy rather than sleep. 坏 is the interesting one. It is a clod of earth, and in this construction it is a verb: to seal up with earth. The Japanese reading, 坏ぐ (fusagu), is the ordinary word for blocking or stopping something. There is a real question about whether any of this describes insects, which mostly do not build doors — though solitary bees and some spiders do plug their burrows with mud before winter, so the picture is not invented. The likelier reading is that the phrase came from the Chinese 月令 tradition, where the year is described as a series of gates opening and closing, and Japan kept the image because it was good, not because it was zoology.
The singing insects were never much of a feature this far north, and the first frost is already a live possibility inland. What closes here closes early and for longer.
Where insect-listening was a court pastime long before Edo made it popular — 鈴虫 kept in cages appear in Heian writing, and 鈴虫寺 in Kyoto still keeps them singing year-round by controlling the temperature, which is either devotion or cheating depending on your view.
Thinner every year, and for prosaic reasons: bare earth is where these insects overwinter, and there is less of it. What survives does so in verges, riverbanks and the gaps around graveyards.
Not as background. Sit still somewhere with unmown grass after dark and separate out the voices — the ringing bell of suzumushi, the low continuous churr of the crickets. It is harder than it sounds and much better than it sounds.
Astringent kaki, peeled, strung, and hung somewhere airy and out of the rain. Ready in about four weeks and unrecognisable from what went up.
Grilled whole until the skin blisters, peeled hot, eaten with ginger and soy. It does not need anything else, whatever the proverb says.
"How pitiless — beneath the helmet, a cricket."
"This road — no one walking it, and autumn dusk."
Not on the coasts, but mountain basins in Hokkaidō and Nagano can see 初霜 from around now. Anything tender on a balcony wants moving.
Autumn air is dry and the sun is still strong enough to do the job. This is a much better fortnight for it than October will be.
読書の秋 is not only a slogan — this is the point in the year when the dark arrives early enough to be useful and it is not yet cold enough to be miserable.
The helmet poem is doing something exact. Sanemori dyed his white hair black so he would not be dismissed as an old man, and rode out, and was killed, and the helmet was kept for five hundred years; Bashō stands in front of it and hears a cricket underneath. The insect has no idea what it is inside. That is the whole poem — the smallest possible living thing sitting in the middle of the largest possible piece of borrowed grandeur, singing, at the exact season when the singing stops. This kō is the week that cricket goes quiet. What's the equivalent small, oblivious thing going on in your own life right now, entirely unbothered by whatever larger meaning is being built up around it?