冬至

The longest night, around the twenty-second of December. From here the light comes back — slowly, and while the weather is still getting worse, which is a strange combination to live through.

You are halfway. Twelve chapters behind you, twelve ahead, and the year turning over at its darkest point.

Japan marks tonight with a bath and a vegetable.

On the solstice you put yuzu — a knobbly, intensely fragrant citrus — into a hot bath, whole or halved, and get in. Public baths do it too, sometimes with a hundred of them floating. The smell is the entire point, and it is extraordinary.

You also eat かぼちゃ, pumpkin. The stated reason is that it keeps through winter and is full of what you need when there are no vegetables — which is straightforwardly true, and was better nutritional advice than most cultures managed.

So the longest night is met with something that smells wonderful and something that keeps you well. As responses to darkness go, that is hard to improve on.

The kana

The last three, and with them every basic hiragana is yours.

わ is *wa*. ん is *n* — the only character that isn't a full syllable, which is why おんせん has three characters for four sounds.

を is the strange one. It is written where you'd expect *wo*, but it is pronounced **o**, identically to お, and it is used for exactly one thing: marking the object of a verb. It is never part of a word. If you see を, something is being done to something.

That makes two characters now whose spelling lies about their sound — は read *wa* as a particle, を read *o* as a particle. Both are the same story: the pronunciation moved, the spelling didn't.