The Enchantment Season

For more than a thousand years, the cherry blossom, or sakura, has been synonymous with Japan. But how did this infatuation begin — and why has it endured?

- Hanya Yanagihara

The scene is a park in the late afternoon. It is springtime: The trees are a profound, almost bluish emerald; the first reeds are beginning to sprout in the river. The sky is a soft, worn, denimy blue, although above a smudge of cloud is a stripe of near black — it will rain soon. Yet there is no sense of doom, no portent; the rain, you sense, will be welcome when it arrives.

Down by the river, people have gathered. The adults wear kimonos in shades that match the landscape — rich greens, warm blues — and the children wear clothes the colour of carp. A little girl turns her face up to her mother; a little boy bends over to peer at something he spots in the grass — his mother reaches out her arms to him in the universal helpless gesture of a parent trying to call back her child from the brink of mischiefmaking even as she understands her attempts will be futile. In the hills above them are two pavilions connected by a wooden bridge and accessed by a steep staircase that wends through the forest; in the windows, some of whose shoji shades have been pushed back to allow the air in, you can see that the ceiling has been strung with globes of red paper lanterns.

But all of these details, all of this life, is incidental to the element that dominates this tableau: a grove of cherry trees, most of them in full flower. Behind the cluster of 16 that stands closest to the river, there is another layer, this one so profuse in its bloom that it has become a cloud of pink, the petals so thickly clumped that they obscure even the surrounding greenery — the pines and paulownias and persimmon trees, now bare of fruit — in a fog. Beneath the trees, on wide, low benches made of young bamboo, sit people, singly or in couples. Two women turn to each other in conversation, but the remainder do not; they are not there to do anything — they are only there to sit beneath the cherry trees.