Summer's Promise

Shōman (小満): May 21-June 5th

According to the old calendar in Japan, shōman (小満) is a season of promises. The “small flourishing” arrives when the weather becomes fine and everything starts to go well.

Or so they say.

Promises of warm days and nourishing rains, of summer fruit, and hope for a bountiful rice harvest in the fall.

In Pasadena, May is marked by the flowering of the jacaranda trees. It is a purple dreamscape. May in Japan, is also a purple dream. I used to love imagining that that at the precise moment the jacaranda burst into bloom back home, that the wisteria would flower in Tochigi.

Wisteria 藤 (fuji).  

Not far from our house in Tochigi was a wisteria tree that was 160-years old. Every May, we’d be sure to go and visit this venerable tree—sitting beneath it felt like waking up in fairy land.

In one of my favorite essays in Nakanishi Susumu’s The Japanese Linguistic Landscape, wonderfully translated by Ryan Shaldjian Morrison, I learn that the poetic trope 藤波 Fujinami means “wisteria waves” is older than those tropes celebrating the cherry blossoms. In the Manyoshu, compiled sometime in the mid-8th century, there is a poem describing these “waves of wisteria.” Like long kimono sleeves, the flowery branches sway in the breeze like waves on the ocean. Oh, how wonderful it would be to drift away on an ocean of purple blossoms…

I love it that there is a season of promise and hope for future fullness.

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Nakanishi Susumu’s The Japanese Linguistic Landscape (Translated by Ryan Shaldjian Morrison.) I own the Japanese version as well and so far have not once sought to check on something—that is how great this translation is.

The wisteria was so beautiful in Berkeley, where I went to school. Liza Dalby in her East Wind Melts Ice, talks about the wisteria “attaining full wave” and “dripping purple clusters along the trellis…” She writes of reading that while Japanese wisteria twines clockwise, Chinese wisteria twines in the opposite direction…