Rain, Rain

The rainy season front is moving up the Japanese archipelago. It's leaving Okinawa behind and Tokyo's turn for misty, muggy rain has come.

The rainy season has several traditional names: "uki"--literally rain time, "tsuyu", and the more poetic pronunciation "bai-u".

"Bai-u" means plum rain. The story goes that the green plums--about the size of a quail's egg--turn yellow and fall from the trees when the rainy season swings into high gear. Plop, plop! They fall in the night, echoing the sound of big, fat rainy season raindrops.

The timing is certainly right. Although I have never heard the plop of plums falling in the garden, the markets are filled with them when the rainy season is at its height.

First come the bright green ones, hard as stones. They have only one use: you put them in a jar, add rock sugar in a quantity equal to the weight of the plums (people argue about this), and fill the jar with a potent alcohol called white liquor. When the sugar dissolves and the alcohol takes on a golden glow--usually around August, at the earliest--your plum wine is ready to drink.

Next come the softer, yellower plums. These, too, have only one use: to be pickled in salt and eaten with rice. They make the beloved staple food "ume-boshi".

Making ume-boshi is several weeks' work. First you wash and dry the plums, one by one. Then you put them in a jar with salt equal to one-third the plums' weight (people argue about this). As the juice collects in the jar, you roll the jar around, swishing the juice up and down and around each and every plum. That's the easy part. The hard part is coloring them with the leaves and stems of the red shiso plant.

You deal with the shiso by grinding it in a bowl with a serrated surface, using your hands and a lot of salt. Ouch! It stings. When you've got a quart of the maroon-colored glop (sorry, that seems to be the only word that truly describes what you've made from the shiso) you pour it in with the plums. Occasionally, you roll the jar around, swishing the juice up and down and around each and every plum.

By the time the rainy season ends, you are ready for the finishing touch. You need three days in a row of blinding, hot, dry sunshine. You also need a big, outdoor space where you can spread the plums in a single layer to dry. Put them out in the morning, roll them around from time to time during the day, put them back in the juicy jar over night, and repeat the next day and the next.

When they are wrinkled and just dry enough, voila! You have made pickled plums.