秋分

Day and night come out even around the twenty-third of September, and then the dark starts winning. In Japan this is a public holiday — 秋分の日 — which tells you something. Not many countries stop work for an astronomical event.

The week around it is called お彼岸, and it is when families go to clean the graves. You take water, you wash the stone, you leave flowers and something the dead person liked. It isn't sombre in the way a funeral is. It's closer to visiting.

And there is a flower that turns up, uninvited and exactly on time.

彼岸花 is red, tall, and slightly alarming — all stamens and no leaves. It is named after お彼岸 because it flowers in that exact week, every year, with a reliability that feels less like botany than an appointment.

It grows along the edges of rice fields and around graveyards, which is part of why it carries a whiff of the other world. The plant is mildly poisonous, and it was planted deliberately at field margins to keep animals from digging — so the association with death is partly reputation and partly pest control.

It is beautiful and nobody puts it in a bouquet.

The kana

The *t* row, and the two characters most beginners mix up.

た, て, と are t + a, e, o. Then the same softening you met in し: ち is *chi*, not *ti*, and つ is *tsu*, not *tu*. Say them out loud and you'll hear why — the tongue can't quite get to a clean *t* before those vowels.

The mix-up isn't about sound, though. It's about shape: し and つ are the same curve pointing different ways. Look at them side by side below before you go on.