I went to Japan recently and no, I did not eat fugu, the blowfish that is deadly poisonous when imprecisely prepared. I am not finicky, but I draw the line at any delicacy preceded by a waiver. Nor did I eat eel-on-a-stick, ice cream made from whale fat, or a bowl of tiny squirming live fish. But I did, in Kyoto, eat raw chicken.
When you tell people you have eaten, say, fried armadillo, they may turn up their noses, but they do so with some grudging respect for your exposure to folk food. And they ask you what it tasted like. (A little like fried chicken.) When you tell people that you ate raw chicken—people who scour and bleach their cutting board for fear that some faint vestige of raw bird may lurk in the grain—they look at you as if you have descended to a low animal level, like that of an egg-sucking dog or a gerbil that devours its young. And they don’t ask you what it tasted like.
In fact, many of them seem to think that traveling to Japan these days (a long way from western Massachusetts, where I live), except out of dire business necessity, is in itself perverse. You have to cross the international date line, which I find—and I don’t mean to insist on the irony of this, but there it is—disorienting. You journey earlierward for the better part of a whole day, and yet when you reach the land of the rising sun, back home it is currently yesterday. Although for some time during the night, I think, it will be today.
Then there is the crazy exchange rate. The Reagan administration, in a feckless attempt to improve the trade imbalance between the two countries, devalued the dollar against the yen so drastically that an American tourist finds Japanese products priced higher in Japan than at home, and as for American products—Japanese theaters were charging roughly $l7 worth of yen for Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach.
Getting around in Japan can be daunting. Many street signs are only in Japanese characters (and there are several different types of Japanese characters). A house or building’s street address has no connection to where it is on the street. And although the Japanese study English in school and use it frequently for their own purposes, they tend to resist conversing in it with English speakers.
Well, my girlfriend, Joan, went to high school in Japan and has always wanted to go back. She knows enough Japanese to get around and to mingle some. Friends of hers over there helped us find affordable places to stay. And we didn’t want to see Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach. We didn’t think we wanted to eat raw chicken, either, but we changed our minds.
You are not likely to get poisoned accidentally in a country that produces toothpicks the way they do in Japan. I brought home some of these toothpicks, of the Nice Day brand. They come in a translucent plastic cylinder packed tight, not a micron of wasted space, so when you take off the top you see a solid mass of blunt tips, ranging in color from burnt-brown to tan. Together these tips suggest a cross section of a single many-stranded organism or cable. Or a beehive, maybe, but better organized: 850 toothpicks, needle-sharp and sturdy. The blunt end resembles a chessman: a head, and where the neck would be there’s a groove or circumnotch that fits your fingernail, and then there’s an elegantly beveled torso, and then a swelling like hips, and then another notch, this one less pronounced than the one above, and finally there’s the long shaft leading to the business end. Each pick would appear to have been hand-turned on a tiny lathe, and then cured and tempered. I have encountered such toothpicks before, in Japanese restaurants, but to have a jam-packed quiver of them, which should last for two or three years, is to truly appreciate them. And we may read, in tiny English beneath the Japanese for Nice Day, the following message: “We wish to enjoy meals as we have them every day.”
In China, which is the only other Asian country I have visited, the English language is completely up for grabs. T-shirts say, for instance, “all the world is cocorabbit.” The Chinese must care no more about what the English on their clothing means than do the French. And when the Chinese employ English for functional purposes, they have no qualms about, for instance, hyphenating the word the.
Japanese english is another kettle of fish. I have come to believe that the Japanese are reluctant to bandy their English about interculturally because its resemblance to the tongue of either Americans or Brits is only superficial. The words are English, but the template is Japanese. There are shops in Japan called simply Let’s. And Get! That’s what I call cutting to the chase. On the other hand, there is a bar-restaurant in Kyoto called (with all the dots and quotation marks) “Pooh’s?...” And when you see a sign that says “Relaxation Forest ... For Rest” outside a place where you go to unwind by sitting among potted plants and looking at videos of woodsy settings, you know that this is a culture that has been playing around with English words for some time. And mixing them with other languages, as in “Le Monde des only you,” a private club in the Gion district of Kyoto.
These linguistic considerations might, of course, make a person all the more wary of what he is eating in Japan. You should be aware, to be sure, that the Japanese word pronounced “taco” means “octopus,” and that the magazine B.L.T. deals with Beautiful Lady & Television.
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.
Our first course was the best fried dried tofu whey (yuba) we had ever had. In a Tokyo restaurant that specialized in every form of tofu, we had made our own yuba. Big squares of tofu came floating in the whey, simmering over a charcoal burner. After you ate the tofu, with onions and various sauces, you took a bamboo and rice-paper fan and waved it over the whey until a ... well, a layer of scum formed. And you scooped up the nice off-white scum with your chopsticks. But Toridori served three- by five-inch rectangles of extra-thin yuba that had been deep-fried to a crispness that melted as you chewed.
Then we ordered some yakitori—dark chicken meat on one skewer, white meat on another, livers on a third. Oishii. Means “delicious.” Then we ordered steamed chicken dumplings. Very oishii. Then we ordered fried chicken dumplings. Even more oishii. And then ...
The specialty of the house, we had read in the guide, was chicken sashimi. We had watched the husband of the proprietary couple slicing raw chicken breast extremely thin and serving up the slices in precisely staggered stacks. We had watched two stylish Japanese women, svelte (it almost goes without saying, when it comes to Japanese women) in basic black and pearls—women who gave every appearance of being a lot further removed from a low animal state than I am at best—dipping these slices into plum sauce and enjoying them. We had seen that they didn’t die.
We had had a number of nice draft beers, although Joan was not sure she was ordering them correctly. As they were medium-size draft beers, served in chunky glasses rather than in bottles, she couldn’t decide whether to use the word for tall, skinny things (nippon) or the word for short, squat things (hitatsu). In bottles they would clearly have been tall skinny things. Other words came to her mind: ni-hiki (for two animals of any shape); futari (for two people). Reluctantly, she resorted in the end to the all-purpose futatsu (meaning simply “two of those things”). Anyway, we had got several pairs of beers ordered. By this time, the husband had taken a break from his slicing to inform us that there was another pun involved in Toridori, because he came from the town of Tottori. And the wife had presented us with gifts: first a felt chicken on a chain commemorating Toridori’s fifth anniversary, and then a series of chopstick rests, which she had made herself, some of them wine-cork halves wrapped in decorative paper, some of them origami cranes, and some of them paper-wrapped and lacquered oshibori ties—the strips of plastic that go around the wet towels served before meals.
You would have ordered chicken sashimi, too, or I would have been disappointed in you. With that plum sauce, it was oishii. Pink, almost translucent, and each slice with a slender ridge of nice raw chicken skin. With that plum sauce.
toridori Kyoto-shi, Kamigyo-ku, Imadegawaw, Chienokain Sagaru (075-411-8788).
Open 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. No credit cards.