KAKISHIBU

Sogyu came by late Friday afternoon with the kakishibu we ordered-- enough intensified persimmon peel juice to treat the whole deck, two coats. Yesterday, therefore, after two cloudy but rainless days and one sunny morning had dried out the deck real well, I started kakishibuing. (Feel free to use this newly coined verb, which I hereby donate to the public domain.)

Kakishibu has an interesting fragrance-- an organic smell, sort of astringent; not like you'd want to drink it, but not that sensibly toxic volatile smell of the standard wood treatment stuff. Brushing on kakishibu is like painting with thin red wine. It's reddish and watery on the brush, but not deadly at all; no need to wear gloves to protect your skin, safety goggles to protect your eyes, mask to preserve your general existence, no hazmat suit for optimal protection from unspecified mutational possibilities.

It's safe for kids to later run around on barefoot and basically will not kill you, now or unto seven generations. There is no need for skull and crossbones on the container, or instructions on what to do if you should get it on your person, in your eyes or ingest it, god forbid, no big red letters saying BE SURE TO KEEP IT OFF YOUR SKIN KEEP IT AWAY FROM YOU AND ANY OTHER LIVING THING, DO NOT BREATHE THE FUMES OMIGOD WHAT IS THAT... Kakishibu doesn't beget horror movie thoughts or smell like a chemical weapons factory when you're finished treating the house you have to live in afterwards. Whatever sour-winish smell there is is gone quickly.

The first coat makes the wood a bit darker, the second that much darker and so on till you reach the desired shade, but it even looks organic somehow, and on lighter wood quite interesting, colorwise. It doesn't do anything unnatural and you could eat off of it if you were so minded-- had no plates, real simple living, whatever. It came in three two-liter recycled PET bottles Sogyu kindly sold us from out of his major stash of the stuff he gets from an old Kyoto kakishibu store he frequents.

I recommend kakishibu for treating any wood you need treated. It may be about double the cost of deadly poison, but it has considerable advantages, many beyond price, such as extended longevity of home, self and family. Nice to stay around, see your kids grow up normally and so on.

Kakishibu serves way beyond the small print.

Coming home down the evening mountain, tired from heavy labors, in the dim light by the roadside I see a bareleafed persimmon tree, laden with bright orange globes like a year of morning suns-- Atop the toppest moves a silhouette of black crow, long beak dipping into soft orange lusciousness-- Ah, the food that colors are...

ONE PERSIMMON

Harvests all in, fields a golden-brown stubble spiked with green as the days edge into Autumn, skies a blue only leafless trees can bear, leaves gone earliest from the persimmon trees till just the orange balloons of fruit cluster up there in the blue intensity like amber in turquoise, fruit that stays on the tree for the birds to eat throughout the winter (beautiful on country winter days, with its own blue of sky, are those stark brown trees with their arms full of persimmons in the sun when all else is white or dark on the earth).

But the old country folks still eat persimmons too. Late this afternoon as the day headed toward its close I was walking up the road and passed by an elderly man dressed in brown like the fields and the leaves, both hands full of the gold of the large persimmon he'd picked from his tree; he stood there eating it by the roadside, his mouth full of the same goldenness, savoring that juicy sweetness you lose the taste for if you're jaded by factory sweets, on his face a look of pleasure surpassing any description of happiness, and he was only halfway through! What a sight he was, beside a country road in the sunlight of an Autumn afternoon, lost in ageless joy. Who can have more than that?

NON-SEQUEL TO THE MONKEY THAT WASN'T ACTUALLY CHASING THE WOMAN WITH THE DOG STORY

From the archives, October 2002

Passing by O's house on our way to a hike up the mountain, saw the monkey who had chased the woman with the dog, the monkey's presence in the middle of the road now eliciting from O the factual finish of that story I'd heard from E about the pounding on the door one day that turned out to be Mrs. T from upmountain, who had been out walking and had asked permission to cross our land to get to the other road to help a woman walking her dog who was being chased by a monkey. I'd never heard any more of the story, until now here was the very monkey!

It turned out that the monkey liked dogs (which is why it was at that moment hanging around O's dogs) and had in fact simply been trying to be friendly with the dog the woman was walking, the monkey approaching the dog, whose owner drew away, causing the dog to also draw away and the monkey to again approach, more earnestly, a cycle that quickly escalated into what was perceived as fleeing woman with dog being chased by monkey, the fear thus eliciting its cause...

Anyway, here before us now was the very same monkey, a young female apparently not tribally minded, that as we approached at first withdrew into the roadside trees and sat in a tree crotch near the road very quietly and at home as in an easy chair, legs dangling, not feeling at all comical sitting in a tree by the side of the road-- not that it should feel comical of course, it's just that the monkey's complete lack of the comical sense was comical in that circumstance; anthropomorphism has many layers.

Later, on our way back downmountain from our hike, because we came bearing many wild persimmons we were well appreciated by the monkey, who drew close at our approach; while talking again with O we gave the monkey one ripe persimmon, which she took off to her roadside hangout to eat so that we wouldn't get any, and when she was finished rejoined us as we stood there in the road talking: two women, one man and a she-monkey, standing there in a tight-knit and mutually interested group, the monkey on her haunches part of the conversation, insofar as it might pertain to persimmons, looking from human to persimmon to human and SMILING, baring her little baby-human monkey adult dentition at us in what could only be humanly interpreted as the kind of abashed smile one uses when poorly concealing desire in a question, such as "Isn't the persimmon a wonderful fruit?"

But the monkey's eyes remained unchanged while the smile was flashing on and off like a neon sign, and I was plunged thereby to the roots of our own smiles, the monkey now and then stepping aside a moment to look down into the roadside grating just in case there might be something down there more worthwhile than a human conversation, then back to join us again, and I suppose somewhere deep in our depths we all wanted to go over and look down into that grating, see what was down there, but we didn't, we're grownup humans after all, we just talked and smiled at each other now and then, after persimmons of some kind...

THE PERSIMMONS OF HIERONYMUS BOSCH

Yesterday morning out in the waning mist clearing some more oak limbs, then out along the road stripping vines from where they riff along the tops of the tall kinmokusei in a beautiful autumn arrangement of golden hearts while working to strangle the trunk and limbs below, I hailed an upmountain neighbor, Mr. U., doing much the same thing out on his section of the road, and we got talking abut the goings on of the trees and land, life up here in general.

As we talked I gazed uproad into the demistifying scenery and saw there the wild persimmon trees I know are there but had forgotten about (the mind has its rooms and cupboards), what with all the outdoor and indoor stuff that has been filling my head as I know it.

The persimmons, conducting their own business not far from the roadside, were leafless now and in full display, hung with bright orange globes lit by the slant of morning sun like this was somewhere in the mind of Hieronymus Bosch, or even better, Le Douanier... I resolved to enter that depiction beyond price and grab a bunch of those goldies before the other monkeys got there, the red-faced yet conscienceless ones...

When I finally got up there I took my hand scythe from a cargo pocket of the skateboarder pants I use for gardening (lots of gussets, grommets, big+little pockets, superseams, fabric backup in the right places, built to last), so I could reach higher than pedestrian passersby (mainly mountain hikers and wild fooders) had been reaching; crowded as the trees were, all the low-hanging fruit was already gone. I used the scythe to hook the higher branches down to arm's reach and soon had a bag full of the large and small varieties of bright orange worlds (I also always have a big plastic shopping bag folded up in one of my cargo pockets for wildfooding).

One thing you can say about wild persimmons is that as hieronymous as they may appear from a distance, up close they can be really ugly. But don't let that fool you, it doesn't affect the flavor, seems to enhance it in fact. Wildness is like that; it brings to everything edible that certain flavor edge that is lost in the strictures of domestication. When wild persimmons ripen to softness, especially the tiny ones, there's not much there once you get the peel off, but what there is is really wild.

Flavor you just can't get in a painting.

HYPERPERSIMMONOSIS

On our walk through the woods today, after I'd picked and inadequately peeled some genuinely wild persimmons and as a result had my mouth pucker as though I'd used an alum mouthwash (those really wild persimmons are so astringent you have to peel ¼ inch off to be able to eat the little that's left, as I now know). My mouth was so astringified that it was difficult to carry on a fluid conversation, so it was something of a convenient miracle to come upon the perfect forest antidote for extreme hyperpersimmonosis: a whole stone outcropping covered in the dark green leaves and gleaming red berries of fully ripe ki-ichigo (cloudberries; lit: tree strawberries). My mouth trying vainly to water at the sight, I broke off some long sections of the thin, berry-laden vines and carried them along like a fistful of ruby necklaces as I slowly picked off and ate the rubies, thereby restoring the liquidity of my loquacity.

WILD BREAKFAST

This morning on our usual mountainside walk we came across a yellow-leafed niche of mukago, which surprised us because this seems to be a bad year for them - I guess we found the mother lode. We picked a good handful to have with lunch.

A kilometer or so later we came across a couple of very heavily bearing wild kaki (persimmon) trees of the kind whose fruit, being small and very sweet, is usually dried for winter eating; so since these were wild and there was clearly too much for the birds and the monkeys before it all spoiled, and being myself of ancient simian lineage I just stood beneath that golden cascade of heavy-bent branches and plucked and began eating the ones at the summit of ripeness, golden orbs that were almost translucent, like the kaki in that famous old painting Six Persimmons by Mu Ch’i (above), as though a light were shining from within them…

Eating those persimmons beneath their tree, surrounded by its pendant branches, was like eating the way you eat in a dream, the way you do anything wonderful in a dream, your being filled to the breath with every reach of the experience, in this case the taste and texture and sweetness and lifeglow of a wild persimmon just plucked from its tree, its orange parchment skin peeled away to reveal amber flesh like solidified honey, and as I was ecstasizing over the savor of each bite, Echo found some ripe akebi just hanging there on their vine in the forest shadows, voluptuously open, revealing their pale white fruit ready to eat and so we dined al fresco the rest of the way on handfuls of fruit, our mouths reveling, when we found the last of the blueberries, swollen to their essence... what a magical breakfast, and all on nature's tab...