Kabuki Apples are a kind of boulder-sized fruit, famous for their huge volume and the strange faces that grow on them.
Kabuki apples begin on trees, but are carefully treated, tended, and shaped using a series of secret, mystical techniques.
Grown by rare, specialist farmers for food or cider, some families have tended some orchards for centuries.
The rarest of the rare specimens of kabuki apple are grown by true masters into specimens of unusual size, colour, and character.
Kabuki Apples were originally grown by ginger monks during the warring states period as a sort of meditative art form. It’s said that they were taught the way in secret by the Tengu of the mountains.
Legend holds that a famous swordsman returning from battle wanted to drink his reserve of sake dry in celebration of a great victory. Unfortunately, he’d done this a number of times now and had run completely out.
The swordsman’s steward, knowing his master was soon to return, issued a reward of one century of rice to anyone who could satisfy his lord with drink.
A ginger monk of that province offered to turn his kabuki apples into cider, but warned that if his lord should drink too much therefrom, he would be blinded in one eye from it.
The steward knew he’d have to commit ritual suicide rather than face the shame of letting his master’s victory go imperfectly celebrated, so paid the monk his rice and filled his master’s store with cider.
On returning home, the lord and all his riders, swordsmen, archers, and ninjas feasted and drank the red sun up. The bonfire they built could be seen from afar by the twin gods of thunder and lightning, and the DJ they got was totally sweet.
The next day, all who partook of the cider were struck blind with a blank eye.
The monk visited the lord some days after, and explained to him that he could recover his sight by performing a task in service to one of his men, and that his men could recover their sight by performing a task in service to others.
In that month, an army went out to tend gardens, build bridges, fix roads, protect farms, bring bandits to justice, recover lost treasures, feed the poor, care for the sick, and apologize to women.
Soon they had recovered their sight, and the ginger monk became an honoured member of a famous court in a golden generation.
In his later writings on the 47 articles of strategy, the monk admitted that the blindness goes away on its own after a couple of days.
BlackBerry Hill’s famous cider farm has been in the production of kabuki apple cider for the last century.
Gruntfuttock Farm was originally a homestead tended by potato dwarves, but was purchased by ginger gnomes some decades later. It retains its original name in part because ginger gnomes don’t always use words to communicate and therefore view the name as something like a tree or a rock that came with the land.
The same family of ginger gnomes that settled that side of the hill to grow apples still resides there, making and selling batch after batch of their cider in traditional blind demon faced flasks.
“Mister Fuji” is the name of the prize winning kabuki apple at Gruntfuttock farm. Named for the iconic Japanese mountain, the apple has unfortunately been hollowed out and vandalized by a gang of bikers from the underground highways of Ratterdam.
“Struck by a Falling Star” is the name of the national blue ribbon winner for “most shocked expression”.
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