Article 024: The Smell of Cut Grass, and Autumn Arriving at the Table

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Article Summary

An account of a morning spent weeding the garden while waiting, patiently, for an overcast day. My results, compared to my wife's methodical progress, were considerably less tidy. Lunch that day was chikuwa tempura with aonori, and fresh-picked cucumber from the kitchen garden — a meal that made the tail end of a brutal summer feel, at last, like something passing. The essay also touches on a square Hagi-ware dish I found in the city of Hagi, in Yamaguchi Prefecture, and the quiet attachment I've developed toward it. Afterward, drinking tea while the lingering smell of battered fish and cool cucumber still hung in the room, I heard the first insects of the evening starting up beyond the window. Autumn was announcing itself, unhurried and certain.

Category

Cooking, Summer, Autumn

I write about moments from Japanese food culture as they surface in the daily life I actually live. I hope you'll read what follows the way you might settle beside a banked fire — unhurried, and quietly present.

1. Listening

Telling the heat to stop, which I had been doing for some weeks by then, accomplished nothing.

From the window, the garden had begun to state its own opinion. Moss, grass, and a stubborn assortment of weeds were pushing up around the stepping stones with a conviction that suggested they had never been asked to stop. Letting them go any further would only make future garden work harder — I knew that much — so I had taken to checking the forecast each morning and waiting for a cooler chance.

  • A ceramic guardian figure in the style of a komainu (shrine lion-dog), keeping watch over the garden


The Garden's Guardian — a ceramic figure in the komainu tradition

2. Working Sideways

An overcast morning finally arrived, and we were grateful for it.

We started early, while the air still held some of the night's coolness. I like working with the smell of bruised grass and earth close around me, but when there is simply too much of it in every direction, even that pleasure curdles into something closer to defeat. Still, a light wind was moving through, keeping the mosquitoes away, and I found I could concentrate.

From under the eaves, the wind chime offered something like encouragement — small, bright notes that neither hurried nor judged.

I stayed low and moved sideways, working along each row with both hands, pulling weeds up by the root rather than snapping them off. There is a particular satisfaction when a deep root finally gives — a clean, unresisting release — that makes the whole business feel almost like solving something. Right, the next one. And the one after that. I set myself small landmarks: the corner of the stone path, the next stepping stone beyond it. Progress, however slight, has its own grammar.

3. A Different Standard

On the other side of the garden, my wife worked in silence.

There was no competition, exactly, but there didn't need to be. Looking across at her section, then back at mine, the difference was plain. What I had cleared looked something like cherry blossoms in an off year — patchy, with a gap where something should be. The weeds were not so much gone as redistributed. My brand-new gardening gloves had already developed a hole, and my fingertips were the color of the soil.

At some point the wind dropped. The mosquitoes remembered where I was. I lost interest and then, shortly afterward, my appetite reasserted itself with some urgency.

We finished what we had set out to finish. I was more tired than I expected to be.

  • A spider resting in the shade — apparently it, too, found the heat unreasonable


A spider resting in the shade

Patchy like scattered cherry blossom: a Japanese expression for uneven, incomplete work — weeds removed here, not there, with no discernible logic.

4. The Smell of the Sea

Lunch was a relief.

Because we had both been outside all morning, we decided to keep it simple. My wife, who moves in the kitchen the way she moves in the garden — steadily, without fuss — put out chikuwa tempura and fresh cucumber from the plot. The tempura had been warmed through, and when I leaned over it, the scent of aonori rose up: salt and something green, something of shoreline.

The cucumber was one of the last of the season. The outdoor-grown ones, with their thinner skin and more insistent smell of earth and water, don't last long into autumn, and this felt like a small farewell.

Chikuwa is a Japanese fish-paste product shaped into a hollow tube; wrapped in a batter flecked with aonori — a dried green seaweed — and fried, it becomes isobe-age, a dish whose name carries the word for "seashore" within it. The seaweed justifies the name.

5. Wave and Soil

  • Chikuwa isobe-age tempura
  • Cucumber with hatcho miso


A white square dish holding cucumber; a round plate of chikuwa isobe-age; a lacquerware cup. A table of plain ingredients.

The white square dish that held the cucumber is a piece of Hagi ware I found in the city of Hagi, in Yamaguchi Prefecture. Because it is square, it is called a yohō-zara — a "four-direction dish." In the photograph the dish is partly hidden beneath the cucumber, but across its surface the potter has written characters in broad, assured strokes. It is that brushwork, more than the form itself, that stopped me when I first saw it: something deliberate but unguarded, written as if the potter had something to say and said it.

  • Cucumber with hatcho miso
  • Goat's milk cheese and chikuwa


A small square dish of cucumber with hatcho miso; the Hagi-ware square plate with goat's milk cheese and chikuwa

Sheen

Before using the dish, I always let it sit in water for a while — a practice recommended for certain Japanese ceramics, and one that transforms the piece slightly each time. The pale clay surface darkens and takes on a subdued sheen as the moisture enters the body of the pot.

It is a heavier piece than it looks, but it chips more easily than you would expect. We always wash it with both hands, taking care.

Hagi ware: a traditional ceramic produced in the city of Hagi, Yamaguchi Prefecture. One of its best-known qualities is the way it changes over years of use — the clay gradually absorbing what passes through it, shifting in color and character.

6. Insect Song

Over tea, I sat with what remained of the afternoon.

The smell of the fried batter had faded to something quieter, still there if I paid attention — and so had the faint coolness of the cucumber. The house, which had been holding heat all summer the way old houses do, had finally begun to let it go. The air through the window was different now.

We had reached the season, at last, when we could think about turning off the air conditioning and sleeping with the windows open. The insects would find their way through. I was looking forward to that — to lying in the dark with the sound of them filling the room, marking the hours in a way that clocks can't quite manage.

7. Summary

  • 「くさくゆり　すだれささがに　しらしはだ」

  • [Koussa kouyouri soudaré sassagani chirachi hada]

  • Coussin Sable Cœur Lueur Riz, Souffle Daim Rêve Satin Serein Gant Nid, Cire Rare Chypre Âme Daim.

  • Fenêtre, Parfum, Ciel, Vent. Annulaire, Cils, Horizon, Lueur. Ouïe, Peau née, Niki.

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References

Please use the link below to access references.
References consulted for this article: 器 01, 器 02, 工 01, 暦 01.

Audio data (sound): 2025_024_ja01

Audio data (reading): 2025_024_ja02 (in progress)

Microsoft Clipchamp: Brigitte, VOICEVOX: 四国めたん

End of Article

My hope, through writing this, is to bring a small discovery — and perhaps a small recognition — to the tables of everyone who reads it.