And we did, I am bound to report, have one unsettling food experience in Japan. The owner of a small, inelegant inn on the Ise peninsula confronted us in our room, not exactly against our will but let’s just say to our consternation, with a special many-course dinner that consisted in part of an overbroiled lobster apiece; six baked clams said to be named for the noise they make when alive (bapubapu); a cooked fish called, I think, asagi; heaping platters of octopus sashimi, tuna sashimi, salmon sashimi, and sea bream sashimi; several enormous peeled grapes; some pale, unclearly specified sashimi in a boat of ice with a fake cherry blossom bonsai garnish, and—sizzling sluggishly on a tinfoil platter over burning Sterno—half an onion, half a green pepper, and eight cubes of salami.
We were unable to eat more than half of this repast, and we didn’t want to hurt the proprietor’s feelings (we paid close to $300 for the night, but hey, that included karaoke), so we hid a lot of the sashimi in a plastic bag. In the morning, we walked down to the water, off behind some craggy rocks out of sight of the inn, and started tossing sashimi in the direction of several hovering seafowl. Which flew away.
After a long, awkward pause, a single bird reappeared. Joan’s parents, who are birders, tell us it was undoubtedly a black kite. It had what looked like a tissue in its beak. As it made a pass over what bits of sashimi were still clinging to the riprap, this kite transferred this tissue thing to its talons, as if it were cleaning them. Then the kite dropped the tissue thing into the sea, where it seemed to melt. Then the kite left. Then the kite returned, spiraled down, condescended to grab one bit of our fish (which by now, in the sun, was probably medium-rare), and flew away.
Here’s how I was able to come to terms with this experience: In a country where the seabirds are that picky, how risky can the restaurants be? After all, the restaurant food generally turned out to be less eerie than it looked. For instance, in a Kyoto restaurant called Agatha, for Agatha Christie, we were served skewered eggplant that had lots of little things moving on it. Teeny little wings or something. Were they supposed to be on there? Were they some manner of beings which, having been undercooked, had revived? Well, they were just flakes shaved off a chunk of bonito that had been dried in the sun, and they were moving because they were so thin that they fluttered with every little current of air in the place. I can’t say that they had much taste, which was okay by me, but once I was assured that they weren’t alive (we saw a sign somewhere for “Living Ham Pizza,” but I think that just meant “fresh”), they seemed friendly.
Among the other items we brought back are several little notebooks, three inches by four and one-eighth inches, in various pastel colors, all of which say on the cover, in small type, “Let simple and old-fashioned myself stay with you, while ordinary things have been disappearing in the world,” and below that, in minuscule cursive, “Gratitude for you.” We also brought home slightly larger notebooks, four by six, which say, “This is the most comfortable notebook you have ever run into. The best quality goods always make you happy.” We brought a still larger notebook whose red-and-white gingham-pattern cover says, “Be chic about a notebook. Facile/Tasty character is our basic criterion.”
We brought back containers of ground pepper. A four-inch bamboo section with a wooden stopper in the top, where the pepper went in, and a tiny stopper on the side, where the pepper comes out. A label on the side says, in Japanese, “Seven different peppers. Blended as to color and taste in seven-part harmony.”
We brought back stainless-steel grapefruit spoons, very subtly serrated, engraved with Japanese characters that may be rendered phonetically as “Gurepufurutsusupun.” We brought a spiral watercoloring book. Opening its dusty-rose–colored boards to the white paper, just faintly creamy, inside is like biting into a plum and finding gelato, or sliding a silk gown up over an even lovelier leg. “Human art materials,” it says on the first page. I am not saying it is impossible to get salmonella poisoning in a country that produces such items, but such items do give you a distinct impression of quality control.
Then there was the context in which we ate raw chicken. The Japanese tend to think more contextually, less linearly, than Westerners. The context in which we ate raw chicken was a mom-and-pop chicken joint called Toridori. Tori means “chicken” and dori means “street,” but toridori could also mean “chicken-chicken,” because when the Japanese double a word to make a compound they always change the first letter the second time, as we do in “fuzzy-wuzzy.”
Toridori, after we entered through the traditional hanging curtain, was just big enough to hold ten chairs along an L-shaped polished-wood counter, behind the counter a range and a cutting surface, and on a shelf the traditional welcoming cat—a plump poker-faced china figure holding up one paw in benediction. After we sat down, only one of the chairs was empty. Mom and Pop sliced, diced, cooked, served, and chatted with the cheery clientele.
We did not try to conceal the restaurant guide that had brought us there. We sensed an air of “Here come the hen-na-gaijin” (“strange foreigners,” a redundancy). Hosts and diners alike were undoubtedly bracing themselves for the sight of something truly barbaric, like a human being putting soy sauce on his or her rice, or pouring his or her own sake, or at least neglecting to lift the sake cup up from the counter while accepting more sake from his or her dinner companion. But we knew better than to do these things. And when Joan offered some pleasantries in Japanese, all present relaxed.
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