Early summer, in purple and green


10th July 2009


The piece that I played on a loop while writing this.

...

April has vanished, last seen in a rain of late cherry blossoms. And when the pink and white clouds go too, you may as well report colour missing from the world.

But May is waiting to replace something else, something that disappeared when the previous autumn spotted the trees and rusted them through.

May is the season of shin ryoku – new green – and the hills and mountains around Kyoto gleam with it like moss after rain.

In the Kamo river, the reed beds shed their shaggy brown coats for grassy ones then settle down again, long-haired and wistful for there are not many hands big enough to stroke them.

Even the curry changes colour. A café I visited in April surprises me with a shin ryoku menu when I return in May. The curry in the new line-up is a pale green, achieved through the powers of spinach.

This is the time of things made fresh again, when sunlight thickens and the world takes heart, more certain with each passing hour that winter will not reach back to lay cold fingers on an unsuspecting neck.

It takes heart from the rampant green and the purple irises surging from ponds. But even before the irises rise, wisteria is already hazing the air violet.



There are many reasons to visit Byodo-in, a temple in the town of Uji that lies to the south-east of Kyoto. Apart from the many Buddhist sculptures with national treasure status, there is the elegantly weathered Phoenix Hall.

Believed to have been named for the two phoenix statues on the roof and because the building looks like a bird spreading its wings, the 11th century hall appears on the back of the 10-yen coin and one of the phoenixes on the 10,000-yen note.

If you visit in early May, the arbour nearby will have burst into wisteria. But because the summer dyes have just started seeping in, the purple falling from the trellises is pale and the green of the stalks, light.




Visitors aren’t allowed into the arbour so I stand right in front of the fence and lean forward. When I look up, I am in lilac rain.



Drenched, I stagger off to the rest of the temple. I keep looking over my shoulder but the voice prodding me on reminds me not to waste the price of admission and the train fare.

Byodo-in dates from 1052 in the middle Heian period, when the imperial court was in ascendancy. It was an era of poetry letters, incense-mixing contests and silk robes layered to adorn the wearer with rainbows.

The choice of robe had to follow rules of season and rank and though the colour hierarchy changed slightly over time, the primacy of deep purple never did.

Extracted from the roots of the gromwell plant – murasaki so, purple grass – the dye was hard to work with and so took on a tint of exclusivity. Purple was reserved for the highest ranks of the aristocracy and so fixed was the idea of privilege that this one colour practically eclipsed the others: the terms noshoku (deep colour) and tanshoku (light colour) referred to deep and pale purple respectively.

I return from my dutiful tour of the temple buildings and to the wisteria arbour. The light violet will recede in a matter of days as the darker shades of kakitsubata – the rabbit-ear iris – bloom elsewhere.




And when they do, I go north to a little shrine called Ohta Jinja, where the kakitsubata pond dates back at least to the 12th century. We know this because it figures in one of the works of Fujiwara no Toshinari, a poet born in 1114. He saw in the steadfast colour of the irises a single-minded love and praised the beauty of both.

But the frogs and insects at the pond seem little impressed by the poetic stature of their home and unlike the visitors, do not bother with hushed tones. A little brown frog in a stream outside the pond has a voice entirely out of proportion to its size. It croaks and a foghorn blasts through the shrine: bu-WOAR. Bu-WOAR.

I drop a few coins into a donation box and go through the gate. And then all I can see is green and purple, iris leaves spearing up so thickly the pond looks like a field. Bu-WOAR.

Which, I think, says it better than any amount of poetry.



May becomes June and I go from pond to pond and purple to purple. The irises I see at the Heian Jingu shrine are hana shobu, not kakitsubata, and their petals range from deep purple to a violet as pale as faded gentility.







The frogs sound different too: not bu-WOAR but weh-eh. The wide, wet sound barely stirs the air, already sopping with the rains of the month.

Not the dry suspension of winter this, but a season with juices running. The purple and green of the irises colour the air as they dissolve into it and the senses too – they diffuse into each other until to look at the flowers is to feel the touch of damp silk and each frog call bursts on the tongue like a too-ripe grape.

Summertime, saturation time. And – I check my watch at last – almost closing time.

Time to get groceries too, before the shops shut. I glump away from the iris ponds and back into routine.

But at the supermarket, the seasons are changing too. Grapes have returned after months away and across the aisle are Kamo nasu, a Kyoto speciality available at this time of the year. Round where other eggplants are long, their purple is so rich and deep that once I start looking, I tumble in.

And I am among irises again, a waist-high forest that stops just where my hands are. I gather up the early days of summer and cram them into my mouth, feasting on ripe time until my fingers are sticky with green and my lips, purple-stained.









The June display in the shop window of Sometsukasa Yoshioka, a dyer's shop in the centre of Kyoto.

N.B. To get to Ohta Jinja, first find Kamigamo shrine then walk eastwards, away from the bus-stop. Ohta shrine is about 10 minutes away.