Persimmon blossoms emerge in June, petite and cream-coloured, as though clusters of buttery pursed lips have sprouted all over the tree – or so I’m told. I can’t recall the persimmon tree in this garden ever flowering. Bright green leaves one day, fruit the next – they seem to blink into being overnight as June’s rainy season subsides, oval lumps swelling over the summer months until blushing orange in autumn, like a thousand little suns festooning the tree. Visiting crows peck away at persimmons on the highest branches. Some ripen all too quickly, landing in fragrant, messy puddles in the undergrowth, a feast for wasps and songbirds alike.
It is early October now, a warm, sunny afternoon with a dreamlike cast, and we’re harvesting persimmons. The tree is still lush and green; in a few weeks it will be bare, scattering leaves in a brilliant carpet of mottled tangerine and vermillion. She shimmies up the ladder and snips away at the fruit-laden boughs with red shears. I catch them – mostly – and prise the persimmons from the branches by their calyxes. If I close my eyes I can still hear our peals of laughter, her yelps and curses as some fruit falls into the roof gutters.Oh fuck! I can feel myself shaking with laughter. I look up. Her hair glints in the sun.
When we have harvested close to three-quarters of the tree we call it a day. The persimmons spill out across the veranda by the hundreds, far more than we can reasonably eat by ourselves. We’ll pile them up in a corner, but for now we make persimmon angels: arms spread, surrounded by abundance. Autumn sunshine streams in through the glass of the sliding doors. My heart catches a little, as though there’s a glass splinter inside. I’m already weeping for the moment as it slips away. I’m happy. It hurts. I think this is where I’m supposed to be.
This is how I remember her still: luminous, laughing, haloed by sunlight and sunset-coloured fruit.
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I spent two years in Kyoto during my twenties, sharing a house with a friend I’d known from university in London. She contacted me a few months after I’d arrived in Japan to ask if I wanted to work remotely with her at her current job and also move in with her. She would be asking her housemate (whom she couldn’t stand) to leave. I didn’t know her particularly well, but I knew I enjoyed being around her, admired her relentless drive, her sardonic wit and colourful stories, her taste in ceramics, her depth of knowledge on traditional art and culture – and I would have jumped at any opportunity to leave my job in Tokyo. It made sense. I had a way out of the retail job I hated, and she would have a colleague to share her increasing workload with and a new housemate.
The job itself was mundane: customer services, consisting largely of emails to and from clients wanting to travel to Japan on guided tours. But I genuinely loved the products I sold, and for all their flaws the company management had a real knack for attracting good-hearted people with fascinating backgrounds, and creating an unusually tight-knit working culture where everyone could more or less understand the role they played and why it was essential. In other words, even though it was poorly paid and I was ultimately replaceable, I knew the work really meant something to the company, and it provided – at least initially – that sense of purpose I craved. It was the only full-time position I had actually ever wanted, so I was determined to make it work.
Adding to the novelty of the situ