It began with one monk and a handful of maple seedlings. In the early Edo period, the abbot of Korankei's temple planted maples along the approach to the hall—a small act, the kind that usually vanishes. But his successors kept planting, and the planting kept going, and now some four thousand trees of eleven different maple species fill the gorge along the Tomoe River. The variety is the point. Because no two species turn at quite the same moment or to quite the same shade, the autumn here is never uniform: scarlet beside vermilion beside orange beside a stubborn lingering green, the reds layered rather than flat. In the evening the trees are lit, and the leaves reflected in the river show a color the daylight never gave them, doubled and slightly wrong, the way reflections always are. What moves you, if anything does, is the arithmetic of patience. A single planted tree, and then three hundred years, and at the end of it an entire valley gone red. It is the kind of project no one alive ever sees finished, which may be why it was worth starting at all.