Maple leaves

Every fall for a couple of weeks, Tokyo's maple trees explode in red. This fiery autumnal answer to the spring's cherry blossoms is less brash, less impetuous perhaps, but just as spectacular. Maple leaves will probably never be loved as much as cherry blossoms, perhaps because the daylight ends at 4:30 and we hurry past in coats rather than loll around in fresh springy splendor.

But, to stop and gaze up at the vibrant potency of the color before shuffling off to another overheated, indoor bonnenkai, or to a train home is to enter a moment of surreal beauty.

Individually, the maples are never too tall to require distance to take in -- they lean comfortably over bushes with all the gangly beauty of an adolescent growth spurt. Scarcely distinguishable the rest of the year, the maples take over after waiting patiently for the other trees, the blandly predictable locust and even the striking yellow gingko, to drop their leaves. Then, as if to prove youthful stamina, and with a keen sense of timing, the maples erupt everywhere.

Each tree's branches combine unique shapes, patterns, cuts and angles -- here in falling layers of parallel curves; there in bouncy, upward circles; and measured, precisely-placed irregularities in between. But always red.

Never a pure red, though, since each tree has its own individual, exact-description-defying color. The base red is always mixed with a little green at the edges, a layer of purple, a stroke of orange in the middle that makes the hue sharper, almost electric. Though, of course, the best that electricity can give us is a flatly consistent, garish, neon red. The maple leaf red has a powerful, natural glow that comes from the eye moving between the green-orange-purple-red and finally a little gray, to pull in a shimmering constellation, an unmitigated spectrum, of redness.

In close-planted groups of two or three, the concise size of the myriad leaves forms a tightly stitched net that seems to pull in the faint autumn light, toss it around until it reaches a ripe, tipsy blush, then lets it tumble out over the ground to create an expanded reddishness that wafts about and around like a brief warm wind.

Few Tokyoites would buy a coat, a car, or a sofa with the intensity of maple red. Yet, it is the understated, subtle appeal of maple leaves that give them the character of a desolate Shinto shrine, rather than the splashy, crowded pulse of cherry blossoms, Buddhist temple grounds and rollicking, partying parks.

We look at cherry trees in groups, at maples alone.

Maple leaves have their brevity as well, of course, but somehow it feels less heartbreaking than with cherry blossoms -- more mature, more expected. Or maybe just overlooked.

After the leaves have all turned to a soft, ashen gray. We've already carefully wrapped our necks in scarves and turned inward for the winter, away from the enigmatic meaning of colors until the spring.

--Michael Pronko