Japan's Persimmon Culture

About this book

Every other fruit guide treats the persimmon as a paragraph. This book treats it as what Japan knows it to be: a whole culture of waiting, taming and transforming.

200 entries in eight parts, each in one fixed format — What It Is, Roots & Place, Taste & Texture, and How to Enjoy & Where to Find It. The named varieties, from crisp Fuyu and square-shouldered Jiro to seedless Hiratanenashi and the ancient Saijo; the persimmon country of Nara, Wakayama, Niigata and Sado; the dried-fruit jewels — Ichida-gaki, korogaki, anpo-gaki, Dojo Hachiya — and the hanging curtains of the drying yards; the arts of removing astringency, from a grandmother's shochu bag to the packing-house gas room; kakishibu, the persimmon tannin that dyed cloth, strengthened fishing nets and finished wood for a thousand years; the fruit at the table, in sushi leaves, New Year salads and the cracker named after its seed; the persimmon in haiku, folktale, proverb and persimmon-red porcelain; and a full practical kit for visiting, buying, storing and even planting.

No grower is ranked and no shop's prices or hours are asserted — shops change them; varieties, districts and customs endure. No health effects are claimed. A glossary and theme indexes close the book. Every entry runs to more than 200 words of its own — in fact more than 370 — with no sentence repeated anywhere in the book.

日本で作られた本です: Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. / Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. / Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.