Conspiring With Him How to Load and Bless

November in Japan is a lonely, depressing month.  The bright colors of fall have peaked and gradually turn to brown.  It is still too early to ski, and Christmas vacation remains over a month away.  The weather is too cold to play outside, but not cold enough to play outside in the snow.  Days end at 4:30.  And there is no football.  Or Thanksgiving.   

To alleviate periodic episodes of anomie, I turn to the rustic luxuries of onsening and the harvest.  

An onsen is a Japanese hot spring resort.  Unlike western hot springs, onsens are not simply muddy holes in the ground, but carefully decorated and managed pools of varying size, shape, and material.  They are often deep in the mountains, or at least on the outskirts of civilization.  Fukushima being a rural urban center, I live at the confluence of several onsen resorts and often visit one if I have a free half-day.

A few weeks ago, my family and I went to a modern hotel which sported a swimming pool, a jacuzzi, a traditional indoor bath, an outdoor bath called a rotenburo, and a sauna.  No one else was swimming in the pool, and the afternoon sun reflecting off the peak fall foliage on the other side of the river behind the resort shone through floor-to-ceiling windows and turned the slightly broken surface of the water a flickering golden, orange, and red hue.  Freshly fallen fall leaves floated on the surface of the rotenburo.  The dry heat of the sauna provided a comforting respite from the crisp fall air and the pervasive water vapor of the indoor bath.  After soaking in a welcome and rare aether free of infants screaming, I bought a glass bottle of 5% milk from the vending machine and floated aimlessly back to my home with my family in our four-door Nissan

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Close Bosom-Friend of the Maturing Sun

We slept late.  Rosalind was angry, and Kanako was sick.  For brunch we ate ramen.  I took a shower.  The weather was hot, sunny, and windy - that rare combination.  Kanako decided to go.  We sangalong in the car: Old MacDonald, I've Been Workin' on a Railroad, The More We Get Together, etc. - Raffi songs; it was not such a memorable ride there.  It was pleasant, like a Norman Rockwell painting.

There were matsutake stands on the side of the road - traffic in the middle of the mountains for mushroom stands.  No one was west of Azuma.  We eventually got to Inawashiro uneventfully with no directions or planning.  We entered "herb garden"; there was a documentary of a Canadian chainsaw sculptor playing on a 1990s cathode ray tube television set in the corner of one of the indoor rooms before the gardens.

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Season of Mist and Mellow Fruitfulness

Fukushima peachesFood-wise, Fall is the best season in farm country Japan.  The last several weeks saw an epic grape harvest.  Typhoon 11 spooked many Fukushima and Yamagata vinyards into sending all their grapes to market early, allowing the laws of economics to do their thing.  Small red grapes with no seeds, big red grapes with seeds, medium-sized green grapes with seeds, big green grapes with no seeds, medium-sized purple grapes with seeds, big purple grapes with seeds, and even big purple grapes with no seeds - the best kind - were available en masse at a fraction of the price of last year, all locally grown and locally sold.  

My Mother-in-law recently purchased ten big bags of the best kind of big purple grapes with no seeds for about eighty-five U.S. dollars, and we've had the best kind of big purple grapes with no seeds for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the last week or so.  I can say without a doubt that they have been by far the best grapes I have ever eaten.  For the last three days, I've been making smoothies from four different types of grapes: small red grapes with no seeds, medium-sized green grapes with seeds, big red grapes with seeds, and big purple grapes with no seeds - the best kind.  First, I put grapes into the blender, then ice, then blend, and even the seeds are reduced to pulp.  And I don't even have to add relatively inexpensive, locally-produced honey, because grapes, like bananas, are sweet enough.  Before blending, the mise-en-scene is so beautiful that I almost feel guilty blending it.

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