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To view the moon of the fifteenth night and not the moon of the thirteenth has long been thought to bring bad luck.
It is called katamizuki, they say: the moon seen only once.
Jusanya, the thirteenth night, is autumn’s second moon-viewing.
On the night of the thirteenth day of the ninth month in the old calendar, people set out chestnuts and beans as offerings and gaze at the moon.
The fifteenth night came from across the sea, but the thirteenth, it is said, is a moon-viewing born in this country.
Its beginnings are traced to the moon banquets of the Heian court.
The moon of the thirteenth is not yet quite round.
Two more nights or so before it is full.
There were people who chose that moon, of all moons, to look at.
At the end of 1895, the twenty-eighth year of Meiji, Higuchi Ichiyō wrote a short story called “The Thirteenth Night.”
That night, Oseki leaves her small child asleep, slips out of the house, and knocks at the door of her parents’ home.
She has come to say she wants to leave her husband.
Gently counseled by her father, she decides to go back to her husband’s house once more.
The man pulling the rickshaw she takes home is Rokunosuke.
Someone she had once thought, when she was young, she might one day marry.
After Oseki married, it is said, he let his life come apart.
The two of them talk, a little.
Then, under the autumn moon, they go home in different directions.
On the Friday of the thirteenth night, I played 9-ball with a friend.
The rack is nearly over.
On the table, the 7, the 8, and the 9.
I take aim at the 7 and shoot.
The ball runs straight for the pocket and stops at the lip.
It does not drop.
I stand my cue upright and go back to my chair.
My friend’s turn now.
I stay seated and watch the table.
The 7, caught at the lip, sits there just as it was when I shot.
Close enough that a fingertip might push it in.
While the other player is shooting, you do not touch the table.
My friend sinks it with an easy stroke.
Then the 8, then the 9, and the rack is over.
When we step outside, the moon has come out between the buildings.
Its left edge falls just a little short.
My friend says nothing about the 7.
We walk side by side toward the station.
Now and then, we both look up.
At the ticket gates of Sakuragicho, we wave and part.
Up on the platform, the moon is a little higher than before.
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