A Thing That’s Hard No Matter How I Look at It

The rainy season has come around again this year.

When I was little, it was a fun season for hunting the snails hiding on hydrangea leaves, but at some point it has become, for me, a damp, disagreeable, melancholy season when thick clouds hang low. I get through it by telling myself, positively, that this is an important time when Japan’s plants grow visibly and greet the summer in good health.

To begin with, in Japan, where there are four seasons—

when winter ends,

beautiful flowers bloom all at once,

and a bright, balmy spring arrives;

with the rainy season in between,

comes a summer of a dazzling, glittering sun that begins with the cries of cicadas, and a panorama of magnificent thunderheads spreading wide.

When summer ends,

the many-colored autumn leaves turn vivid,

and an autumn arrives, refreshing under a high blue sky.

When autumn ends,

comes a winter in which, beneath a crystal-clear starry sky glimpsed through the bare, winter-withered twigs that have shed their leaves, the body draws taut in the blowing cold wind.

In other words, precisely because the four seasons change, if I don’t feel happy in this luxurious setting where I can be grateful to each season, it would be unfair to the rainy season.

And yet, the damp rainy season, in which one is so easily bitten by mosquitoes, is—think as I might—a connecting season I simply cannot bring myself to like, an unnecessary one; I know it in my head, but there it is.