![]() Met my old friend Ono-san in our local ‘shop of ten thousand services’ (yorozuya) the other day. We had stepped into the store from a downpour without seeing each other and met over the tofu tub. “Wet season’s here,” she said, fishing out a brick of bean curd. “Good for the hydrangeas.” “Good for the slugs." “You got ナメクジ problems?" “My bathroom’s a mold palace, the rice paper doors have more ripples than a Seto low tide and my tatami mats are so damp the slugs think they’re water beds.” “You’ve got a way with words.” “If I could sell some I wouldn't have to eat tofu everyday.” The cashier clickety-clacked her abacus beads, devised a sum (how the hell did she do that?) and took my damp yen with a weak smile. Out in the street, rain drops big enough to fill a sake cup smashed on the bald heads of old men too slow or senile to have remembered an umbrella. Wet season, or tsuyu, has arrived. From now until early July it will wrap the Good Hood in a hot, damp blanket. There'll be days of steamy downpours and long, warm drizzle. Moisture and grey sunlight will conspire to turn my old townhouse into a Welcome Inn for terrestrial gastropods. I want to know my enemy, I did some reading: “Like most gastropods, a slug moves by rhythmic waves of muscular contraction on the underside of its foot. It simultaneously secretes a layer of mucus that it travels on, which helps prevent damage to the foot tissues.” (Denny, M. W., Gosline, J. M. (1980). “The physical properties of the pedal mucus of the terrestrial slug, Ariolimax columbianus"). At first, I thought these were instructions on how to Moonwalk. Then I remembered - zoologists don’t dance. Soon Ono-san’s hydrangeas will burst into giant volleyballs of pastel hues and nod their big dripping heads. Neighbors will admire them. My slugs will loll about growing wise and fat on mold and tasty titbits dropped by my kids and my neighbors will laugh. I don’t blame my kids, Hell no, I blame the Shinto gods: the collision of two clumsy giants - one warm and moist, pushing in from the Philippines, the other cold and dry drifting down from Siberia - who gives us what the Japan Meteorological Agency calls with practiced dourness, a “relatively stable bad weather front over Japan which lasts several weeks.” Tsuyu sounds nicer. It means “plum rain,” with no hint of slime, and though I have no idea why the fruity innuendo, I guess it has something to do with the size of the raindrops. In the dead of night a cloudburst can sound like ten million unripe plums being machine-gunned onto the roofs of the Good Hood. On nights of such drama, I curl up beneath my bed sheet, happy to know that between me and nature’s wrath lie roof tiles made by men who knew how to make a roof tile. ![]() Alas, 100-year-old houses like mine do not chill well. They were built to ‘breathe’, with clay-mud walls and paper doors that absorbed, filtered and circulated air, light and moisture. Modern household clutter like plasma screen TeeVees and rice cookers nullifies this effect. It turns a large, breezy house into an Amazon riverboat filled with empty wine bottles and a cabin fever that can turn sane men into serial killers. Yet the people of the Good Hood, and of greater Himeji city, endure. They have done for centuries. They sling bamboo shades from their windows, hang wind chimes from their eaves, flap uchiwa and sensu hand fans against their streaming faces and flock to the rooftop beer gardens downtown, hopeful for a salty breeze off the Seto Inland Sea. “There are people who complain about the wet season,” says Ono-san. “But look at the positives. The city is cleansed, cedar pollen and Gobi sand are flushed away AND it’s good for the..." “Hydrangeas.” I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman so adept at turning lead into gold. Days later we are inundated. The Good Hood turns riverine in minutes. My courtyard floods, runoff by-passes the roof guttering causing the storm water drains to overflow. The Semba River becomes a superhighway for lost volleyballs, Coke bottles, milk cartons, baseballs and beer cans, all racing towards the Seto Inland Sea. Next day on the train to Ako, 30 klicks west of Himeji, the land looks like a broken mirror: flooded rice paddies reflect a powder blue sky filled with thunderheads, farm hamlets and green mountains lumpy as a dragon's back. Green. Lumpy. Slugs. Gotta stop by the yorozuya on my way home, pick up a sack of salt for my new house mates.
1 Comment
11/10/2019 04:09:16 pm
Japan is definitely a country that is filled with culture and history. Whenever I am in Japan, I feel like I am in an old place. It is really ironic if you think about it, of course, Japan, being the most technologically developed country in the entire world. There are parts of Japan that would make you feel like you are in a different place. I want people to go and take a trip down Japan at some point in their lives, I really do.
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