立夏

Summer, on the sixth of May. The last of the four 立, and the year's final quarter. Golden Week has just finished, the rice fields are flooded and flashing, and it is briefly perfect — warm, dry, before the rains.

There are no new characters left. You have all of them: forty-six hiragana, forty-six katakana, the marks, the small ones, the combinations. Anything written in Japanese, you can now say out loud.

So this volume is about what the words are doing when they sit next to each other.

On the fifth of May, families fly carp-shaped windsocks from poles — one large black one, then smaller ones behind, filling and rippling in the wind so they look like fish swimming upstream.

The carp is the point. There is a story about one that swam up a waterfall and was turned into a dragon, so the fish stands for getting somewhere difficult by not stopping. The streamers are hung for children, and the wish attached is not for luck.

You can read the name now: こい, の — the joiner from chapter five — and のぼり, *climbing*. Carp-of-climbing.