January
As we greet the New Year, I am making a fresh start by resolving to make this a good year in keeping with the saying, “New Year’s Day is a foretaste of the entire year.”
It’s been a warm winter. As the year drew to a close, horsetail together with butterbur sprouts, a harbinger of spring, began to show their faces, upsetting the balance of nature. But nights brought forth a chilly moon and sky, and the leaves, ears and stalks of plants in the mountain fields turned a telltale brown, creating a wintry scene.
Punctuating this absence of color was the striking beauty of rusty red camellia blossoms.
One of the events of January is “Nana-kusa-gayu [seven herbs rice gruel],”
In accordance with an old wives custom inherited from China and practiced at the palace during the early Heian Period, from withered fields we gather Japanese parsley, shepherd’s-purse, cotton weed, chickweed, henbit, turnip and radish leaves* and boil them in rice gruel which we eat on January 7 to ward off sickness through the coming year.
The custom calls to mind a tanka from the Hyakunin Isshu, attributed to the Emperor Koko.
Kimi ga tame |
Thinking to please you |
Haru no no ni idete |
I scoured the fields in early spring |
Wakana tsumu |
In search of fresh herbs |
Waga koromode ni |
To find at the end of my search |
Yuki wa furitsutsu |
My sleeves wet from the falling snow. |
* The Japanese names of these herbs are arranged to form a perfect tanka
(five-line poem of sequence 5-7-5-7-7 syllables):
Seri, nazuna, |
gogyou, hakobera |
hotokenoza, |
suzuna, suzushiro |
haru no nanakusa |
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