Autumn is in the air at one of my local fish shops — suspended from the ancient frame of a clothes-drying rack, above the air conditioning unit and next to the old red letter box.
Drying persimmons in the sun is one of the rituals of autumn, a sight that sadly is increasingly rare in Japan, at least around the Tokyo region. But the fishmonger, a wiry man in his early 60s, is a traditionalist — as you can tell from his modest, old-style shop.
In the late spring and through the summer, he has a small tray of paddy rice growing, from first green shoots through to ready-to-harvest golden ears. And each year in October, he gets a case of persimmons sent down from the mountains — Shinshu, he said, using the old name for the Nagano area — and he peels them, wraps the plastic twine around their stems and hangs them up to dry.
These are heart-shaped shibu-gaki — astringent persimmons, too tannic and unpalatable to eat raw, but delectably sweet when bletted like this.
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