In every city in the world that has mulberry trees growing next to sidewalks, in June (at least in the northern hemisphere) you get mulberry-stained sidewalks. The fallen mulberry fruit can be squishy and slippery underfoot, and the stain is disturbingly dark, at least in my opinion.

Doing a web-search on the phrase "mulberry stained sidewalk," I find this is true even in a place as remote from the United States as Azerbaijan:

"When their fruit becomes ripe each June, it tends to drop to the ground and stain the sidewalks. That's how you know it's mulberry season in Azerbaijan..."

Some people walk around a mulberry-stained patch of sidewalk, while others don't mind walking through it, some not even watching where they step!

I haven't found too many "kuwa no mi" haiku, but there are a couple.

One by Basho:

kuwa no mi ya / hana naki choo no / yosute-zake

mulberry's fruit <> / flowerless butterfly of / a hermit's wine

(literal translation by Jane Reichhold)

mulberry fruit
without flowers a butterfly
is a hermit's wine

Tr. Reichhold

Reichhold's comment:

1683---summer. 'Yosute-bito' is a euphamism for "priest." The idea is that whoever lives behind a mulberry gate or fence is cut off from the rest of the world. Basho changes 'bito' ("man, person") to 'zake', or sake [the liquor] and keeps the connection to mulberries. There is a wine made from mulberries called 'soochinshu', but Basho is so poor that he can only get drunk by watching the flight of a butterfly. The butterfly has no flowers to visit because the tree bears only fruit, and thus Basho has no wine.

[end of comment]

This may be the only English translation of this haiku besides Oseko's in his two-volume translation, "Basho's Haiku." (I still regret not buying it when I had the opportunity!)

Another "kuwa no mi" haiku:

KUROKU MATA AKASHI KUWA NO MI NATSUKASHIKI ( •‚­–" Ô‚µŒK‚ÌŽÀ‚Ȃ‚©‚µ‚«)

A glimpse of mulberries black and red - memories of childhood come flood[ing] through my head

--Takano Sujuu (1893-1976), Tr. Avi Landau

http://blog.alientimes.org/2009/06/wild-mulberry-kuwa-no-mi-%E6%A1%91%E3%81%AE%E5%AE%9F-pickers-get-caught-red-handed/

And here is a haiku translated by Gabi in a couple of places on the WKD:

kuwa no mi ya Chuuji no haka e eki sanpun

the grave of Chuji
is three minutes from the station -
oh these mulberries

Rakuga, Tr. Gabi Greve

I haven't found another translation of a Rakuga haiku in English, so this may be the only one! I'm not sure what the connection is between mulberries and Chuji, but he was a folk-hero yakuza gambler and murderer whose execution sounds like it was quite bloody, so maybe mulberry stain is suggestive of that. Gabi has an interesting entry on Chuji:

http://darumamuseumgallery.blogspot.com/2009/11/jizo-kunisada-chuji.html

And although not a mulberry fruit haiku, here is another 'fallen fruit' haiku I find interesting:

tagadera ya mizakura ochite hito mo nashi

Taga Temple;
The cherries lie fallen,
Nobody there.

--Shiki, Tr. Blyth

An excerpt from Blyth's comment:

Between the reddish-black cherries that lie scattered on the ground like warriors after a battle, and the absence of men in the garden of the temple, there is a subtle connection which may be felt but not explained. The loneliness that the verse expresses is however in the fallen cherries, not in the lack of people present...

[end of excerpt]

I can see how the fallen cherries could look like "warriors after a battle," so, here is my mulberry haiku, written after reading what seems like an endless stream of news about gunned-down protesters and suicide bombers:

news of violence:
the mulberry-stained sidewalk
suddenly gruesome

Larry, 6/8/11