Persimmons

Half a century ago, autumn in Japan was exciting as it drew on into December and toward winter. Slowly driving winding rural backroads through the chilled countryside with light snow scattered on the black ground, Japanese houses with sliding shoji screen doors, we couldn’t imagine how they kept the houses warm. Of course, they didn’t, the houses were not warm, people bundled up. When not busy they kept warm with both hands clutching a bowl of steaming hot tea. Those drives this time of year were my first sight of persimmons and persimmon trees. Against a background of Japanese country house with its shoji, in a scattering of snow, a persimmon tree loaded with fruit.

My love of persimmons started in Japan. When she sees them in the grocery store, Linda buys me a few each year.

We lived in the city though, in Yokohama atop a hill overlooking Tokyo Bay. The neighborhood below us was mixed, little shops and homes in ancient Japanese one and two-story architecture. Most shops were the home of the shopkeeper and family, who lived in back and upstairs. The streets were cobblestone. 

Early mornings, dark, long before dawn, three, four o’clock, from the neighborhood below, we could hear a flute, a pipe playing an eerie tune; and a clop-clop-clop sound of wooden shoes on the cobblestones. 

It was the noodle man pulling his cart through the streets, with steaming hot noodles of several types, for residents to buy their breakfast. One of our wonderful memories.


Another memory of Japan is driving through a town on a bitter cold morning and seeing a cloud of steam coming toward you. Invariably, it was an old man with nothing on except a little towel wrapped round his ... He had just come from the piping hot community bath and was heading home.

Years later I saw vendor carts on the back streets of Melbourne, Australia. Not noodles though. The pie cart. Vendors selling meat pies, steak and kidney pies, green pea soup. A “pie floater” was a bowl of green pea soup with a meat pie floating in it.  

TW