Beginning of Spring

Start of Spring 立春

The ancient Chinese calendar had it right. Insisting that spring begins in February is to begin a season at the beginning, when the season is only just awakening, a quiet stirring.

Spring begins as the east wind melts the ice, when insects begin trembling, quivering, shivering. In Tokyo, it begins when the nightingales sing:

––ho-hokekyo––ho-hokekyo

The beginning of spring is cold. Plum blossoms covered in snow shimmer by moonlight.

In Pasadena, it is the bulbuls that sing the beginning of spring, sweetly on cold mornings. Sometimes mornings in February bring the parrots, squawking maniacally in the trees —or as they move across the sky in gigantic flocks. At night, peacocks shrieking in the palm trees can be heard for miles:

"Spring is here, Spring is here!"

And, “Oh how charming it is when the dandelions appear in the second month,” Lady Sei Shonagon might say. Dandelions blanketing my neighbor's lawn, I think, "Isn't it charming?" Then with the third, fourth, fifth flush of oranges, comes the goldfinches. Like fluttering golden chunks of sunshine, little piggies flying, I watch them feasting at the bird-feeder out my kitchen window.

This is the world awakening:

Spring is here, spring is here.

This post first appeared in River Teeth Journal's Beautiful Things, on March 30, 2020

I usually put my hina dolls 雛人形 (hina-ningyō) out on the first day of spring and keep them out through Girl’s Day on March 3rd…. but now that I am back in the States I actually keep them out till Easter!! (In Tochigi, there was a custom that if you keep your dolls out past Girl’s day your daughters would have a hard time getting married. Luckily I have a son—and so the dolls are mine!!)

Starting this week, I am going to do an occasional post on re-reading the Tale of Genji. I have not yet read the Royall Tyler translation. It was coming out in my last year of grad school and I remember seeing a manuscript version of a section of the translation in my classical Japanese class. I loved it. And so at last am checking it out. My musings, which won’t happen all that much, will be about cultural or seasonal things in the novel that move me or somehow catch my attention. The first post will be about Yang Guifei in Japan 日本に渡った楊貴妃