The deeper I go into seasonal cooking, the less it feels like a collection of recipes and the more it feels like a conversation.

Sansho berries are the fruit of my favorite spice tree in Japan. Tiny and bright green, they look like miniature limes no bigger than a peppercorn. Their flavor sits somewhere between citrus and spice, and like their cousin, Sichuan pepper, they leave a gentle tingling numbness on the tongue.

For years, I simply froze them fresh to enjoy throughout the year. But one of the pleasures of returning to a beloved ingredient season after season is discovering that there is always more to learn.

This year, I preserved sansho four different ways: with honey and black vinegar for a bright summer tonic; with soy sauce in the traditional manner; infused with rosemary and thyme in olive oil; and infused with coriander, long pepper, and cardamom in a spiced oil that I can already imagine drizzled over summer vegetables.

A berry suggests one possibility. Curiosity reveals another. And suddenly, a familiar season becomes new again.

That is one of the gifts of living with the seasons. Not simply preserving what they offer, but allowing them to continually expand your sense of what is possible.

Some traditions offer more than knowledge—they quietly transform the way we move through everyday life.

Shitsurai is the art of arranging space so that season, mood, and nature are quietly reflected in our surroundings. As we enter June, our attention turns to ice and water, anticipating the heat of summer before it arrives.

A glass bowl filled to the brim with cold water, sweating with condensation and just shy of overflowing, becomes an expression of ice. Matcha prepared with very cold water reveals only its sweetest notes. A kettle warmed by an oil lamp. A glass mizusashi water vessel. A single dewy butterbur leaf resting gently as a lid.

Each element points toward the same simple wisdom: live with the season, and the season will care for you.

I love that these practices don't ask us to add more to our lives. They simply invite us to notice more. To find beauty in a bowl of water, comfort in a leaf, and quiet guidance in traditions refined over centuries.

That is one of the gifts of devoting yourself to an art deeply enough that it changes how you inhabit ordinary moments. Eventually, it is no longer something you do. It becomes a way of living. And once you begin to live this way, even the smallest moments of ordinary life become extraordinary.

Perhaps that is what we are really studying after all.

I’m over the moon for my dear Mai, who has just opened her own restaurant.

If you’ve joined a Mirukashi Salon gathering, you already know. Mai’s meals have a way of bringing people together, delighting the palate, and turning a meal into a memory.

Over the past few years, she helped shape so many beautiful moments for our guests while leading Tamatori, and we’re especially grateful that she chose to make her future here in Karatsu.

Places matter. But it’s the people who create a sense of belonging—the people whose warmth, care, and generosity turn a destination into a home. Mai is one of those people.

I can’t wait to share many more meals here with future salon guests and continue gathering around her table.

Along narrow mountain lanes and at the edges of the woods, dokudami grows wild and thick — heart-shaped leaves spreading low across damp ground, white bracts opening like quiet little stars beneath the canopy.

The scent rises the moment it is touched. Sharp, green. and unmistakable.

Some call it unpleasant. But dokudami does not seek to charm or please. It announces itself fully.

I have come to see it as a kind of truth-telling.

For generations, dokudami has been gathered in Japan as medicine — brewed as tea, steeped into baths, applied to the skin, valued for its ability to clear heat and restore balance during the humid months ahead.

This season, jars of tincture line the pantry shelves at Mirukashi. Leaves and unopened flower buds steep slowly in shochu and vodka, the liquid darkening day by day as the plant gives itself over to time.

Dokudami offers no sweetness. Only clarity.

The hillsides have become green upon green.

Tea leaves brighten across the slopes. Wisteria drapes itself through the canopy. The spaces between buildings, bare only weeks ago, have filled completely with the density of early summer.

And among it all, the cedars soften.

At the tip of each branch, pale blue-green fronds emerge briefly before darkening into older growth. Tender enough to pinch free between the fingertips, fragrant with citrus, resin, and cool mountain air.

I gather them slowly, basket filling one small cluster at a time. Sap clings lightly to the skin. The scent follows long after leaving the forest.

Here at Mirukashi, cedar tips move quietly through the season — steeped into tea and syrup, folded into ice cream, fermented into fragrant extracts that carry the atmosphere of the forest forward into warmer months.

The flavor of cool shade, damp earth, and green light after rain.

The large bamboo culms have begun to shed their skins.

Curled sheaths loosen and fall away from the new growth, collecting at the edge of the grove in pale layers of amber, smoke, and soft olive brown.

A soothing fur coats one side. It must be washed away, but first I stroke it like a beloved pet.

I gather the most beautiful ones by hand. 

Spread in the sun to dry, weighted by rocks, they grow lighter and more crisp with each passing hour. The surface softens to the touch, papery but still strong, carrying the subtle scent of bamboo and warm air.

For now, they sit bundled inside the salon.

I'll use them as wrapping for bento — folded carefully around rice, pickles, and seasonal dishes. Packaging shaped not from convenience, but from season and place. From the earth and to it they'll return. 

The grove offering its own container, just as it always has.

The orchard changes the view.

Not only visually, though already the land has begun to shift — thirty new trees tracing fresh lines across the lower tier of the property.

A different relationship with time begins to take root when you plant an orchard. You stop thinking only in seasons and begin thinking in years. In return cycles. In shade not yet cast. In fruit not yet tasted.

Ume for umeboshi.
Saijō persimmons for shibugaki.
Mulberry leaves for tea and sweets.
Hana-zanshō blossoms to mark a truly micro-season.

The trees need time to root and fruit.

And yet, the future already feels present within them.

The view from the salon no longer ends at the garden’s edge. It stretches outward into something becoming — a landscape shaped not only for this season, but for the seasons still to come.

Yomogi (mugwort) appears tender and bright, coloring every opening in the landscape with new green. As the weeks pass, those greens deepen. The fields grow lush. Summer begins to gather. And still, yomogi remains.

Its stalks thicken and grow woody. Insects begin to nibble at the leaves. In response, the plant turns up the volume on its oils — its fragrance sharpening, its flavor deepening. 

Its essence captured in oil, it lends its vivid hue and wild fragrance to an early summer mayonnaise.

Chicken simmered slowly in a broth of sweet new onions, carrots, and celery, becomes the base for a soothing seasonal soup. At the last moment, handfuls of yomogi leaves are added to the pot.

They wilt instantly. The broth changes with them — greener, more fragrant, gently wild.

The days lengthen, stretching toward the solstice. Cicadas begin to stir.

With yomogi beside us, we make the slow crossing into summer.

The first harvest is traditionally marked on the eighty-eighth day after the beginning of spring.

A simple count, held across generations. An agrarian rhythm, but also something more.

A way of marking time not by abstraction, but by attention. A reminder that even the smallest acts — picking a leaf, preparing a cup — are held within a larger, living pattern.

When you begin to live within the micro-seasons, meaning is not added. It is recognized. And in that recognition, a life of attunement begins to take shape.

Tea harvest. The day begins in the fields.

Morning light settling over the rows, hands moving gently through the bushes, selecting the first tender leaves of zairai trees. Slower than expected. More deliberate. Each leaf chosen, not taken.

From there, heat, movement, transformation. Learning the rhythm of kamairi — pan-firing by hand, an older method, once carried from China, now nearly gone. The leaves shifting from green to something deeper, their aroma beginning to rise.

By afternoon, the pace softens.

Inside a traditiona; tea house, the kettle hums quietly. Kimono, matcha, the familiar gestures of ceremony. Everything reduced to intention and presence.

From field to fire to bowl.

A single day, held across landscape, craft, and ritual.

This is the culture if tea.
This is the heart of the season.

This tree has stood here for 123 years.

Through seasons that came and went.
Through blossoms that opened — and fell — again and again.

It meets each season fully.
And in doing so, becomes something enduring.

Standing here, you begin to wonder
what it means to live a long life.

We spend so much of our time reaching for what is fleeting.
More time.
More moments.
More of what we are afraid to lose.

And yet, the blossoms fall.

The season passes.

Nothing is kept.
And still, nothing is lost.

The tree remains — not by holding on,
but by meeting each moment as it comes.

Bamboo autumn arrives almost unnoticed.

While the rest of the landscape leans into spring, the bamboo begins to shed. Leaves loosen and fall, carpeting the ground in soft, rustling layers.

It feels out of sync at first. A season moving in the opposite direction.

And yet, standing within the grove, it makes a different kind of sense. The old leaves release just as new shoots prepare to rise. What appears like decline is, in fact, preparation.

A quiet clearing.

The ground softens underfoot. Light filters differently through the thinning canopy. The air holds a stillness that feels both ending and beginning at once.

Not all seasons announce themselves in bloom. Some arrive through letting go. And in that release, space is made for what is to come.

Micro-seasons arrive in waves.

Not all at once, but in small, fleeting moments.

The first sweetness of peas.
The wild brightness of mitsuba, gathered just outside the door.

Nothing complicated. Nothing forced.
Just ingredients, at their exact moment.

At Mirukashi, it may look like cooking.

But it is something quieter.

A way of noticing. Of recognizing when something has arrived, and meeting it there.

When you begin to live this way, something shifts.

Food tastes different.
Time feels different.

You stop trying to recreate moments
and begin to experience them as they are.

Micro-seasons are precious because they disappear almost as soon as they arrive.

And sometimes, they can be held a little longer.

Sakura buds, preserved in umezu — the brine of salted plums — carry spring forward.
The first sanshō leaves, just opened, offer a different kind of brightness.

Two expressions of the same fleeting moment, gently set into chawanmushi.

A savory egg custard.
Perfect in its quiet simplicity.

At the sight of it, something shifts.

Not only in the dish, but in the way time is felt.

You begin to move more slowly.
To notice what would have been missed.
To follow what is here, before it passes.

This is the practice.

Mirukashi Salon is held by wild mountain cherry trees.

They bloom wide, without urgency. Petals drift. And as the light shifts, April’s full pink moon begins its slow ascent, visible just beyond the branches, steady and calm.

There is nothing to chase in a moment like this. Nothing to improve. Nothing to hold onto.

Only a gentle return to the quiet feeling that, in this moment, life is exactly as it should be.

At the salon, we gather within this rhythm, surrounded by blossoms, held by the mountains, watching the moon rise as if it has all the time in the world.

This is the kind of well-being that doesn’t come from escape, but from attunement. From allowing yourself to arrive fully, just as you are, into a moment that asks nothing of you but your attention.

Under the blossoms. Beneath the full pink moon. Balanced. Quiet.

That is the Mirukashi way.

Sakura season in the countryside unfolds differently. Here we get all of the blossoms and none of the crowds.

Here, the trees are not gathered into a single park or riverside path. They are scattered across hillsides, along narrow roads, clustered in parks within ancient castle grounds, or overlooking island-studded bays. More often than not, we have them to ourselves.

They do not arrive all at once. One grove begins, another follows days later. Inland comes first; the ocean lingers behind. The season stretches and moves.

We follow it.

From village to hillside, from early bloom to late, we return again and again — reveling in the way the landscape shifts, never quite the same twice.

The blossoms are everywhere. And there is time to meet them. 

The season reveals itself to those who move with it.

Spring salon sessions are underway. Between gatherings the salon rests in a quieter rhythm.

Doors closed. Tables cleared. Light moving slowly across the floor.

There is still work to do, but at a softer pace.

Small preparations. Objects returned to their places. A noticing of what remains, what is needed, what can be let go.

Cloth is folded. Tools are cleaned. Ingredients prepared for what is to come.

Outside, sparrows move with quiet urgency, gathering, arranging, building something that will soon hold life.

Inside, I follow the same instinct.

An idea first spoken lightly, then left to rest. Turned over, returned to, shaped slowly through conversation and cloth. A collaboration taking root, then gathering form.

For three weeks, Melissa has worked at the salon table.

Nine aprons evolving. A lengthened strap. A buckle moved, a corner softened, a seam reconsidered. Adjustments so subtle they are almost invisible, yet everything changes. Iteration as metamorphosis.

Now, at last, it holds.

The final form emerging not all at once, but through patience and attention. What began as an idea has taken on weight, proportion, purpose.

We have entered the making phase.

The first piece in the Tools of Life collection, no longer imagined. It exists, resolved, tested, and fully emerged.

First peach blossoms, they say.

But outside my door, it is magnolia.

Petals of white so pure they seem to hold their own light, each bloom suspended like a quiet lantern against the early spring sky. They open slowly, holding their form with calm certainty.

And everywhere else yellow.

Nanohana rising in soft abundance, filling dormant rice fields, tracing the edges of roads and narrow paths, appearing where the land begins to wake again, stretching, stirring, ready to rise.

White above. Yellow below.

I walk between them.

The salon has quietly become a textile atelier.

My friend Melissa sits across the table, designing and handcrafting an original apron for Mirukashi. Needles flash, fabric shifts, small decisions accumulating into something magnificent.

It began with a slightly crazy invitation: Would you come to Mirukashi for a couple of weeks and sew with me?

She said yes and booked a ticket. Now the sofa has become a bed, her clothes hang from a small rack by the window — a sewing residency of sorts, lodging and meals included.

Beside her, I work on simpler things.

Lengths of cloth cut and stitched into soft cushions, the kind used to rest between stacked pottery so their edges do not touch. Small, practical objects, made slowly by hand.

The table is scattered with thread, pins, and folded fabric. The quiet rhythm of making fills the room.

Another kind of craft entering the salon — one stitch at a time.

Branches of aomoji are dotted with tiny green buds no larger than a sanshō berry. In a few days they will open into clusters of soft yellow flowers, each one no bigger than a grain of popcorn.
For now, it is the buds that hold my attention.

Crushed lightly between the teeth, they release a flavor difficult to name — floral, certainly, but bright with citrus and something faintly peppery beneath. A small perfume of early spring contained in a sphere no larger than a pinhead.

I have become slightly obsessed.

A syrup rests in the refrigerator. A jar of aomoji salt dries beside it. Last night I churned an ice cream infused with the buds — pale, fragrant, luminous on the palate. Two people tasted it, paused, and quietly declared it the best ice cream they had ever eaten.

Perhaps they were being generous.

Or perhaps aomoji really is that magical.

The first phase of the salon orchard is in the ground.

I have been looking forward to this for years — imagining the land not just as backdrop, but as provider. Another step toward making Mirukashi inseparable from the soil beneath it.

I planted ume for umeboshi, and smaller ume for karikari ume. Natsume dates. Karin quince. A native zakuro pomegranate. Saijō astringent persimmons for shibagaki, alongside Taishō and Fuyu sweet varieties. Kuwa mulberry for both leaves and berries. Hana-zanshō for its fragrant spring blossoms.

For now, they are slender and unassuming. But roots are taking hold. In time, fruit will replace the need to source elsewhere. Preservation will begin at the edge of the salon. The seasons will move not only across the page, but through branches and harvest baskets.

The orchard has begun.

I visited the seventy-year-old weeping plum later than usual this year. Travel carried me elsewhere, and when I returned, the tree was already mid-fall. Beneath its long, bowed branches, a soft carpet of petals had gathered — pale pink against the cool earth.

I always come to this tree at this time of year. Whether pre-, mid-, or post-peak bloom, it feels almost impossibly tender. The branches cascade like silk threads; the air carries a faint sweetness.

As I do each spring, I gathered blossoms for syrup.

This time, I tried something new — suspending whole petals in kanten-thickened syrup and leaving the sheets outside to dry slowly in the open air. Over eight days, the surface firmed and turned crisp while the interior remained soft, almost jelly-like. Translucent and faintly blushed, they resemble blossoms caught in clear ice.

They will be served with matcha.

The tree blooms and sheds. I gather. The petals and I arrive at the table transformed.

A Deeper Look — Beneath the Weeping  Plum

In a roadside Sri Lankan market, I bought one raw clay pot — not for cooking, but for tea. Its size and proportion were perfect for a kensui, the vessel used to receive discarded water during tea practice. I also chose a small bowl carved from polished coconut shell, its interior smooth, its exterior still bearing the faint texture of the husk.

Back at the salon, I returned to my table — to my practice.
I poured and emptied and wiped. The raw clay absorbed the water, darkening where it was wet. The coconut bowl held light differently than porcelain — softer, warmer. It wobbled playfully in my hands as I cradled it and whisked.

I felt the subtle shift: Sri Lanka had entered the ritual, offering continuity between here and there.

The kensui now carried water drawn from my own well. The coconut bowl held tea cultivated in another landscape entirely. A quiet conversation across geographies unfolded on the table.
This is the power of travel for expansion — the way immersion in another culture can gently alter the gestures of your own.

In a village kitchen in Sri Lanka, we learned to cook curry over fire. First we roasted the spices until fragrant, then ground them by hand and seasoned dishes of chicken, pumpkin, and eggplant.

The kitchen was open to the air — clay pots balanced on clay stoves, flames fed with cinnamon wood. When more heat was needed, coconut shells were slipped beneath the grate, sending up a quick bright flare.

Both fuels carry their own oils. Over time, those oils kiss the red clay and turn it black. Not soot-black, but a matte lacquer with a subtle glow when the light strikes at an angle. The pots were not decorative. They were living vessels, darkened by cinnamon smoke and turmeric steam.

In the shops, new pots stood stacked in tidy towers — raw, terracotta, untouched. But we could not forget the used ones. The blackened ones. Surfaces that spoke of fuel and fire and curry leaves. So we asked and the family agreed.

We wrapped them carefully and carried them home, heavy in our bags. Now they sit in our kitchen, faintly scented with smoke, holding not just food, but memory — and a trace of the place that formed them.

Spring doesn’t begin with a date, it begins with a bite. A flavor so alive it startles the tongue.

Fukinoto are the young buds of the butterbur plant, the earliest of Japan’s wild spring vegetables. They mark the first stirrings of a new season. In Japanese culinary culture, a single ingredient moves through three poetic stages: hashiri, the anticipation of the first arrival; shun, the peak of flavor and abundance; and nagori, the final, fading echo of the season. Each phase is cherished.
 
Hashiri carries a thrill. It is not about peak ripeness. It is about arrival. Longing fulfilled. Possibility unveiled. Fukinoto appear just as winter begins to loosen its grip, the only bright green in a pale and sleeping landscape.

A Deeper Look — An Auspicious Day