This kō is the exact mirror of one in spring. In 清明, in early April, the calendar says 玄鳥至 — the dark bird arrives. Here it says 玄鳥去 — the dark bird departs. Same two characters for the swallow, one verb changed, and between them roughly five and a half months of a bird's life spent in Japan.
They gather on wires first, in numbers that were not there a week earlier, and then one morning the wires are empty and the mud nest under the eaves has nothing in it. The journey ahead runs to Southeast Asia and, for some, as far as Australia — thousands of kilometres, covered at up to three hundred a day by a bird that weighs less than a bar of soap.
The same fish as the lean spring katsuo, caught on its way back south after a summer of feeding. Two or three times the fat, and a completely different thing to eat.
Holding through the end of September.
The early varieties arrive now. The astringent kinds need treating or drying; the sweet ones are eaten straight.
The last good weeks of the season.
Peak fall. Also the season for 栗きんとん in Gifu, which is chestnut and sugar and nothing else.
The harvest-moon offering — the mid-autumn moon is also called 芋名月, the taro moon, and predates the more familiar dumplings.
Falling now, and unmistakable from some distance. Worth the trouble; not worth eating many at a time.
Properly cured by now and at its best.
Hagi is the reason autumn's equinox sweet is called おはぎ and spring's is called ぼたもち — the same rice-and-bean cake named twice, once for the bush clover of September and once for the peony of March. Susuki is now silver and is cut for the harvest-moon display, where it stands in for rice ears that cannot be spared.
Higan runs for seven days, centred on the equinox and starting three days before it — so it opens around September 19 or 20, inside this kō. The name means 'the far shore', the Buddhist term for the state beyond this one, and the reasoning is that at the equinox the sun sets due west, in the direction of the Pure Land, making the boundary thinnest. In practice it is the busiest grave-visiting week of the Japanese year: stones washed, flowers changed, おはぎ offered and eaten. Unlike Obon, nobody is thought to be returning. You go to them.
"Both the heat and the cold last only as far as the equinox." — Said of both equinoxes: the summer heat breaks at the autumn one, the winter cold at the spring one. It is one of the few pieces of Japanese weather folklore that still holds up reasonably well, though warming autumns have been testing it.
季語: 彼岸 (higan) — on its own it means the spring equinox; the autumn one has to be specified as 秋彼岸.
玄 means black, and specifically a black with depth in it — the same character as in 玄人 (kurōto, an expert, someone past the surface) and 玄関 (genkan, the entrance hall). 玄鳥 is the swallow's classical name, the dark bird. The Japanese reading here drops the Chinese entirely and simply says つばめさる. In haiku the plain 燕 is a spring word; the departing bird needs its own vocabulary — 帰燕 (kien, returning swallow) and 秋燕 (shūen) — which is a fair indication of how differently the two ends of the visit were felt.
The swallows have already gone. Departure there runs through August, so by this kō the nests have been empty for weeks.
The last to leave, and not all of them do. Small numbers of 越冬ツバメ — overwintering swallows — stay in southern Japan through the cold months rather than making the crossing.
Fewer nests every year. Swallows need open eaves, mud, and insects over water, and modern buildings supply none of the three. In many high streets the nest above the shop door is now the last one left.
If there is a swallow nest near you — a shop doorway, a station canopy, a car park roof — this is the week to look at it while it is still occupied.
Pre-migration gatherings are the visible sign. The numbers build for several evenings and then simply are not there.
Sticky rice, sweet bean paste, and either the paste on the outside or the rice — both are correct and people are surprisingly firm about which.
Cemeteries, flower shops and the roads to them are all at their busiest. If you are visiting a grave, early in the week is calmer than the equinox itself.
After the equinox the dark half of the day is the longer one, and stays that way until March. It is the single clearest turning point in the year.
衣替え is formally October 1, but the mornings have already gone ahead of it. Bring one layer forward rather than swapping everything at once.
The calendar gives the swallows exactly two entries out of seventy-two: the day they arrive and the day they go. Nothing about the nest-building, the second brood, the four months of them stitching back and forth over the same stretch of river. Same two characters both times, one verb changed. It is a fairly ruthless piece of editing, and probably the right one — the middle of anything is hard to notice while you are inside it, and the edges are where you look up. The difficulty is that the second edge only becomes visible slightly too late, on the morning the wire is empty. What middle are you inside right now that you won't recognise as significant until you look up one day and find the wire empty — and is there anything worth doing today, while you're still inside it, rather than waiting for that morning?