霜降

The dew went white, then cold, and now it freezes. 霜降 — frost descends. Around the twenty-third of October in the mountains, later on the coast, the water that has been beading on the grass since September finally stops being water.

This is the last of autumn's six seasons. The next one is 立冬, the start of winter, and the year turns over into a different set of colours.

You have read a whole season. Look at how much of the Japanese above you didn't need help with.

初 means *first*. Japanese attaches it to a great many things and then treats the result as an event worth marking: 初雪 first snow, 初日の出 the first sunrise of the year, 初詣 the first shrine visit of January.

The frost is announced. Local papers and weather bulletins report 初霜 when it arrives, and the date is compared against the average, the way you might note that the trains were early.

It is the same instinct behind naming twenty-four seasons instead of four. If you divide the year finely enough, and give each division a name, then nothing that happens is merely weather. It's all on the record.

The kana

The *h* row, which finishes the first thirty characters.

は, ひ, へ, ほ are h + a, i, e, o. ふ is the odd one: it's written *fu*, but the real sound is neither English *f* nor *h* — it's air pushed between the lips without the teeth touching them at all. Blowing out a candle, roughly.

One more thing about は, and it explains something you've seen since chapter one. In こんにちは and こんばんは, that final は is read **wa**, not *ha*. It isn't the syllable there — it's a grammatical particle that happens to be spelled with the same character, and it keeps an old pronunciation. You've been saying it correctly for five chapters without knowing why.