Japan's 72 Microseasons - #4
"Falling Rain Awakens The Soil"
February 19 - 23
土脉潤起
つちの しょう うるおい おこる
Tsuchi no shō uruoi okoru
"Falling rain awakens the soil"
As the birds and fish begin to stir from their slumbering states, so too does the soil. The invisible, microscopic world within the dark earth is just as full of life as the trees and lakes, and similarly spends its winter waiting.
As mentioned last time, this kō is also the beginning of a new sekki: Usui (雨水). It is in this sekki that snow and frost turns to rain and mud, and the three kō here track this washing away of winter. We won’t see another mention of snow or ice until Kō #58! Of course, these things will certainly still linger for a while yet (Japan’s ski season usually runs through March), but what’s more noticeable and distinct going forward are the different ways in which the cold and frost are retreating.
As they do, the warmer rain can finally reach the soil beneath the snow, and begins to provide it with the fresh water needed for new growth. At the same time, snow and ice are turning back to water in their natural cycle. That’s what Kō #4 is calling to mind. Let’s have a look at the kanji characters.
Our first, 土, is read tsuchi and refers to the ground beneath our feet: earth, soil, dirt, etc… while 脉 is an alternative, nonstandard form of the more commonly recognized character 脈, closer to the original Chinese and kept around for context-specific purposes like this (a grammatical phenomenon called zokuji 俗字 in Japanese). Both of them mean something like “pulse” or “vein” in both the sense of a passage that carries lifeblood within the body as well as the channels and connections that naturally form within the earth. A 脈 (usually read myaku) represents a connection, often vital, and is found not only in words like sanmyaku (山脈, a mountain range), kōmyaku (鉱脈, a vein of ore), and suimyaku (水脈, a channel of water), but also bunmyaku (文脈, literary context) and jinmyaku (人脈, personal connections).
So then it becomes easy to envision 土脈 (or 土脉, in this case) as the innumerable pathways under the surface of the ground that connect the hidden life there. These earth-channels are filled anew with fresh moisture (潤) which causes them to awaken (起). Those familiar with Japanese may know that “to wake up” is written okiru (起きる) rather than okoru (起こる), which instead means to happen/occur/transpire, but the initial character used is the same, and for this kō I chose to go with “falling rain awakens” rather than the less-poetic “moisture happens.”
This moistened ground, newly revealed by melting snow, has a number of names: haru no tsuchi (春の土, the soil of spring), tsuchi-koishi (土恋し, longed-for earth), tsuchi-niou (土匂う, what we in English might call petrichor), and shundei (春泥, spring mud). The last of which lends its name to a brand of rice from the Aizu region of Fukushima, drawing on the imagery of beautiful green buds shooting up from the mud left behind after a long, hard winter has finally receded.
All of the above are kigo (季語), those seasonal-words that inspire haiku and other artforms. And since we’ve mentioned haiku a few times, why don’t we have one to close us out?
春近し
雪にて拭ふ
靴の泥Haru-chikashi
Yuki ni te nugū
Kutsu no doroIt must be spring soon
I clean off my muddy shoes
In the melting snow- Kin'ichi Sawaki, 1943
See you next kō~
[Images & info by kurashikata.com, kurashi-no-hotorisya.jp, and Wikipedia except where otherwise noted]