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