Persimmon

One of the pleasures of a Japanese autumn is the abundance of wonderfully colored and beautiful persimmons. When November has trickled by and approaches its end and December is around the next bend, turn your eyes in any direction and see the persimmons—stacked in heaps in the markets and fruit shops, hanging heavily from the branches of trees along the road, or peeking from the shopping bags of passing mothers and grandmothers. The shiny-slick orange of the fruit is so bright and eye-catching we almost have to hold one in hand to believe such color. The genus of the fruit is named by the Greek word Diospyros, meaning ‘fruit of the gods’ and who would doubt that it must be so. Buddhists have given it a symbolic connection to the idea of ‘transformation.’ For a long time I wanted an ink to match this autumn orange. Osamu Ishimaru, an ink master at Sailor Jentle Ink, finally fulfilled that wish. Visiting a pen clinic in Tokyo last autumn, I handed over a sample persimmon and asked for ink that would capture its autumn shade. Mr Ishimaru juggled several stock colors adding a dash of this, a drop of that and in thirty minutes came up with a bottle of what in the end we decided to call simply ‘persimmon.’

A sample of that ink is here, written with a Sailor Professional Gear pen with a medium nib.