The train exits Matsuyama through the curving walls of pine and bamboo which give way to the city’s rural outskirts. Here, rice fields are shaved low for the winter, mowed down to a tan stubble of hardened stalks that bend and break over each other in the last phase of their growth, or the first phase of what comes after growth. They are truly the dead of winter. All that is left for them is their immolation at the hands of their farmer, most likely a grandmother in a floral handkerchief and sunglasses. Beside and above these wrecked fields rise the maroon branches and black-green leaves of mikan trees, only just harvested, the round gaps where their fruit hung still traced by supple foliage. They are about a meter tall and stand perfectly distanced the way Japanese preschoolers do when they go out on the town for an excursion. Unlike rice, which is harvested, crushed, burned, then replanted every year, the mikan trees last around three decades. They are the favorite children of Ehime, doted on by aging farmers across the prefecture and yielding mikan juice, butter, jam, lotion, jelly, and sake.
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