穀雨

穀雨 — *grain rain*, around the twentieth of April. The rain that comes now is the rain the crops need, and the name is purely agricultural. No flowers, no insects, no aesthetics. Something practical is being watered.

It is also when the first tea is picked, and the first tea is a serious matter.

Last chapter of spring, and the last new characters in the book.

新茶 is the first flush, picked from late April, and it sells at a premium for a few weeks and then stops being 新茶 at all. The leaves have spent the winter storing everything up, so the first picking is sweeter and less bitter than anything later in the year.

There is a date attached: 八十八夜, the eighty-eighth night after 立春, which lands in early May. Tea picked around then is supposed to be the best, and there is a children's song about it that most people in Japan can still sing.

Eighty-eight nights after the start of spring. The calendar you have been reading all year is not decoration — people count from it.

The kana

Nine combinations that exist only because the world has sounds Japanese doesn't.

Japanese has no *f* except in ふ, no *ti* except as ち, no *she* on its own. So katakana borrows the small-vowel trick you learned in chapter twelve and applies it more aggressively: **フ + small ァ** gives ファ, *fa*. **テ + small ィ** gives ティ, *ti*. **シ + small ェ** gives シェ, *she*.

Same principle as きゃ, wider ambition. And this is exactly what makes a café menu readable — カフェ, パーティー, チェック are all built this way.

That's every character. Whatever comes next in this book, you can read it aloud.