A small, long-tailed bird on a river stone or a car park, walking rather than hopping, with its tail pumping up and down the whole time as though keeping a beat nobody asked for. The call is a sharp chichi, chichi thrown out in flight. Three species share the name in Japan — the grey wagtail of mountain streams, the white wagtail of towns and riverbanks, and the Japanese wagtail, which lives nowhere else in the world.
The honest complication is that wagtails do not start calling now. They are resident across most of Japan and they call all year. What changes is the room they are calling into: the cicadas have finished, the swallows are packing up, and the summer wall of sound has come down. The bird has not started. You have started being able to hear it.
Still the fish of the moment, and the one whose price everyone comments on.
The young grades — inada, warasa — are running now. The famous winter fish is not there yet, but this is the beginning of it.
The tail of the season. The last ones are the sweetest and the least willing to travel.
Falling steadily now. They dry out fast, so refrigerate them the day you get them.
Still going, and now overlapping with the first persimmons.
Simmered in dashi and soy, this is the dish that tastes most like the start of autumn.
New-season roots are pale and crisp rather than starchy. Good raw in vinegar.
In season alongside shiitake and shimeji. The mushroom weeks are properly under way.
Higanbana keeps better time than any other flower in Japan — it comes up within a few days of the equinox almost regardless of the summer, which is how it got its name. The stalk arrives bare, flowers, dies back, and only then puts out leaves, so you never see flower and leaf together. It lines the banks of paddy fields because the bulb is poisonous and discourages rodents; it was planted deliberately, and what looks like wildness is agricultural.
One variant account in the Nihon Shoki has Izanagi and Izanami, having been given the task of making the world, unable to work out how. A wagtail arrives, bobs its tail in the way wagtails do, and the two gods take the hint. The bird has carried the names 教え鳥 and 恋教え鳥 — teaching bird, love-teaching bird — ever since, and traditional wedding furnishings included a 鶺鴒台, a stand bearing a pair of wagtails, set out among the room decorations. It is a rare thing in mythology: a story in which the gods are the ones being instructed, by a bird, about something they were expected to already know.
鶺鴒 is read せきれい, both characters carrying the bird radical and appearing essentially nowhere else in ordinary Japanese. The folk names are better: 石叩き (ishitataki, stone-tapper) and 庭叩き (niwatataki, garden-tapper), both from the tail, which never stops. Alongside those sit 教え鳥, 恋教え鳥 and 嫁教え鳥 from the Nihon Shoki story. As a kigo the wagtail belongs to autumn, for the same reason this kō does — not because the bird is seasonal, but because autumn is when it becomes audible.
The Japanese wagtail (セグロセキレイ, seguro sekirei) is endemic — found essentially nowhere outside the Japanese archipelago, which makes this one of the few kō naming a creature specific to the country.
The white wagtail (ハクセキレイ, haku sekirei) has moved south and into urban Japan over recent decades and is now a station-forecourt bird, gathering in noisy communal roosts in street trees at dusk.
The grey wagtail (キセキレイ, ki sekirei) stays with fast water and moves down to lower rivers only in winter. If the bird you are watching is yellow underneath, you are somewhere upstream.
It is the fastest way to identify one at a distance, and nobody has ever settled what it is for — territory, balance, and flushing insects have all been argued.
In town, look up at the street trees outside a station around sunset. The noise is considerable and most people walk under it without noticing.
Yellow underneath is kisekirei; black back and white face is segurosekirei; grey back and black bib is hakusekirei. Fifteen minutes by a river settles it.
The swing between warm days and cold nights, plus the damp of the autumn rain front, is what makes mid-September the year's first real wave of colds. Layers, and sleep.
Statistically the worst month for landfall in Japan. The season is not winding down; this is its centre.
The third Monday of September, so it moves — anywhere from the 15th to the 21st. It often makes a long weekend, which matters if you plan to travel anywhere at all.
The wagtail story is doing something unusual. Most creation myths run downward: the gods know, and then people are taught. Here the direction reverses at the very first step. Two deities are handed the entire job of making a world and immediately get stuck on the most basic part of it, and what rescues them is a small bird that happens to be standing nearby, doing what it does anyway, with no intention of teaching anyone anything. The knowledge was not handed down. It was lying around outside, in a bird, and somebody had the sense to watch. What's a piece of ordinary knowledge that's been lying around in your own life, unnoticed, that you've never actually stopped and watched closely enough to learn from?