To accompany this essay, the Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi created an original series, “Kaze Hikaru” (Glittering, 2025), based on things growing for six weeks between February and March near where she lives in Futtsu, in Chiba Prefecture. “The changing of the seasons is a theme that’s connected to my personal work, so it came naturally to me,” she says. “In particular, the transition from winter to spring evokes special emotions: In Japan, spring is the beginning of a new year [with] graduations [and] school admissions. It’s like the budding of new buds that people are moving into new stages of their lives.”
WE WALK IN the cool dark along the flank of Mount Wakakusa. It’s early November and the grocery stores are stocked with the foods of a Japanese autumn: sujiko, raw salmon roe, the eggs sweet and red, still clinging together inside the skein; skinny silver sanma, Pacific saury, whose telltale sign of freshness is a yellowing at the lip, like a buttery kiss; peeled, wrinkly chestnuts; grapes as taut as balloons; pears, apples and persimmons bigger than fists, cradled individually in white netting; preroasted sweet potatoes with cracks and oozy seams, testimony to caramelization; matsutake mushrooms with fat kinked stalks, bundled two for 5,000 yen (around $33) with edible chrysanthemums and a single kabosu, a citrus that is kin to yuzu, a squeeze of its juice enough to highlight the mushrooms’ flavor without overpowering their scent.
Although the Japanese government officially adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1873, the spirit of the traditional Japanese calendar persists. Modeled after the lunisolar Chinese calendar introduced in the early seventh century by a Buddhist priest from the Korean Peninsula, it divides the year into 72 ko, or microseasons, each no more than a handful of days long, with evocations like “fish emerge from the ice” (mid-February), “rotten grass becomes fireflies” (mid-June) and “rainbows hide” (late November). According to this trajectory, winter has already begun. Nov. 7 through 11 is designated as the time when camellias thrust forth their showy, swaddled heads; next week, according to this system, a freeze should settle across the land. And yet this afternoon in Nara the temperature peaked at 71 degrees, and I had to shuck my coat and sweater as I dragged my suitcase uphill from the train station.
The buds flowering.Credit…Rinko Kawauchi
By day, the streets of this former eighth-century capital are thronged with tourists, here to pay homage to (or simply Instagram) the 1,300 wild sika deer, who, sanctified as messengers of the gods, roam the city at will or, more often, just stand still, blocking sidewalks, lifting damp eyes filled with — is it world-weariness? indifference? — as the phones click. They are holy troublemakers: Signs warn that the males, in particular, are prone to kicking, biting and butting. Thus far one has tried to eat my sleeve. (The deer’s onetime predator, the Honshu wolf, itself historically revered at dedicated shrines, is believed to have been hunted to extinction by the early 20th century after a rabies epidemic turned many into aggressive, froth-mouthed killers; a statue in the logging village of Higashi-Yoshino, some 30 miles away in the northern Kii Mountains, honors the last of its kind, shot in January 1905, its pelt and skull preserved at London’s Natural History Museum.)
