Muku Tree

Its leaves dry rough enough that woodworkers once used them to sand wood, horn and lacquer, and in autumn it drops small dark fruit that birds strip and people once ate straight off the ground. It seeds easily and grows fast on undisturbed soil, which is why it turns up old on shrine land: nobody there had a reason to cut it. Two stand on hamlet shrine ground north of Hiroshima, at Kirihata and Furosaki, each measured once by a government survey and never written about since. The third, at Kyoto's Omiya Gate in Kyoto Gyoen, has not even been formally identified: its bark and leaves suggest muku, but nobody has taped its girth or entered it on a register.