The Man Who Ate Everything (35 page)

August 1991

Standing on the corner of Takakura-dori and Shijo-dori, waiting for the light to change, I knew that I could eat here forever.

I was in downtown Kyoto, currently my favorite city in the entire world, “home of the Japanese spirit,” as someone has described it, capital of Japan for eleven centuries, birthplace of its traditional arts, crafts, and literature, and, more important than any of these, the source of its most refined, restrained, and elegant cuisine. Only my friends in nearby Osaka think that their food is better.

With just a few hours left in Japan, I headed toward the Takashimaya and Daimaru department stores, which I had first visited within minutes of arriving in Kyoto. Throughout Japan, the great department stores devote their entire basements to displays of food that rival the great food halls of Europe. There are exquisitely wrapped Japanese sweets and brand-name European chocolates; Chinese takeout and groceries from Milan; Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee for fifty dollars a pound and melons that fetch seventy-five dollars each; delicacies and delicatessen from Munich. Daimaru’s pride is a cafe and bakery run by Paul Bocuse, complete with plastic models of French breakfasts and a TV screen showing live bread bakers laboring somewhere in the bowels of the store.

But I was tired of grazing, and I had lost interest in most Western food, a potentially perilous condition in my line of work.

I wondered how I would eat when I returned home. Would any. thing satisfy me but three meals a day of Kyo-ryori, “Kyoto cuisine”? And I blamed it all on Mr. Shizuo Tsuji and Mr. Nagata’s bowl of soup.

So I walked two blocks to say goodbye to Nishikikoji. This medieval market street is a quarter mile long, roofed over with red, green, and yellow awnings, and lined with 141 specialized shops selling raw and cooked foods, seaweed and rice and tofu of every description, fresh-roasted tea, sashimi knives, whiskey, pickles, and more fish than in an average-sized ocean—a hundred species in cases and tanks, pickled, dried, and salted fish in barrels and trays, fish being grilled over charcoal, fried as tempura, or cut into sushi. In the early morning, restaurant chefs collect their raw materials at Nishiki; in the afternoon, housewives and grandmothers elbow you aside as they assemble their dinners.

For two weeks before arriving in Kyoto, my wife and I had toured the southern half of Japan on a luxury cruise ship, from Okinawa to the island of Kyushu and then through the Inland Sea from Hiroshima to Osaka. In exchange for our passage, my wife was obliged to deliver six lectures on Japanese art and pretend that the food aboard ship was nearly edible. My job was to play the grumbling spouse, a role so foreign to my nature that an entire hour passed before I got fully into it. My sea change was helped along by the appearance of an unexpected typhoon in the East China Sea, which for several days tossed our ship about as if it were a tiny morsel of tempura in a cauldron of boiling oil. But when the typhoon had moved on, we left the ship whenever its throbbing engines mercifully stopped, and with an adventurous little band of fellow passengers sampled the regional cooking of Japan.

Our constant companion was
Gateway to Japan
by June Kinoshita and Nicholas Palevsky (Kodansha, 1990), an amazingly comprehensive guide to the history, culture, shopping, sights-food, and lodgings of this country. The writing is compact an
witty, and the authors have included everything you need to know, from transit diagrams to an annotated list of Tokyo’s sex parlors, ranked “in order of difficulty.”
Gateway
is not simply the best guidebook to Japan—it is the best single guide to any country I’ve ever visited. And the restaurant suggestions we followed—mainly in provincial cities where we lacked personal recommendations—were highly rewarding.

I had prepared for Japan by reading
Japanese Etiquette
(Turtle), compiled by the Tokyo YWCA in 1955. I learned that there are three ways to bow in Japan and one way to drink your soup. First you remove the domed lid from the soup bowl with your right hand, place the lid upside down on the tray or table, lift the bowl with your right hand and place it onto the palm of your left, and drink some liquid. Then you pick up your chopsticks with your right hand, arranging them with your left, and eat some of the contents of the bowl. Next you eat some of your rice. Finally you can eat anything at will. But please don’t touch the pickles until you finish your soup.

The first time I tried this, fate quickly carried me beyond the scenario sketched out by the Tokyo YWCA. When I tried to lift the lid from my soup bowl, the entire bowl rose from the table. This is not unheard of: if you waste too much time arranging your chopsticks, your soup cools down and forms a vacuum under the lid. So I grasped the bowl firmly with one hand, I don’t remember which, and tried to dislodge the lid with the other. When that failed, I squeezed the bowl with both hands (lacquered wood is flexible), imagining that the lid would pop right off. Then, praying nobody would notice, I lodged the bowl in the crook of my right elbow for extra leverage and tried to wrench off the lid with my left hand. Finally I wedged the bowl between my knees and used both hands to tear it open. This worked like a charm. But the lid slipped from my hands, flipped over, and plopped into the bowl, splashing the thick white soup in a perfect circle over the tatami mat, the gleaming table, the flower arrangement, and me. shelved my book of Japanese etiquette and thenceforth played
the bumbling Westerner with no knowledge of local manners. I simply tried not to offend.

They used to say that it is impossible to get a bad meal in Paris. They were wrong. But try as we might, we could not find a truly bad Japanese meal in Japan. (We did find a wide variety of mediocre Western meals without even trying.) You can eat amply and well for six dollars a person at a noodle shop, for twenty dollars at a place serving everything grilled on skewers, for sixty dollars for a seven-course dinner in a private room at a handsome restaurant in the provinces, and for four hundred dollars a person and up at the most refined
kaiseki
banquet in Kyoto, probably the most expensive restaurant food in the world. The setting, the cost of the ingredients, and the level of artistry may differ, but concern for freshness and the urge to do one’s best seem nearly universal.

In Naha, on Okinawa, known as the Hawaii of Japan for its beaches and tropical climate, the cooking shows a Chinese influence in its rich sauces and enthusiastic use of pork and peanuts—a crunchy Japanese version of shredded pig’s ears with cucumbers, peanut tofu, and a delicious pig-tripe soup. In Kagoshima, on Kyushu, called the Naples of Japan by someone who has never been to Naples, we were introduced to delectable sardine sashimi with a mustard sauce, and raw chicken breasts and gizzards— thinly sliced, attractively fanned, nearly tasteless, and almost too chewy to swallow. At least there is no sign of salmonella in Japan.

Hiroshima is famous for, among other things, its oysters and its perennially last-place baseba
ll team, named the Carps. At Ka
kifune Kanawa—a converted barge anchored in the Motoyasu River at the edge of the Peace Memorial Park—oysters are served ten ways. Our oyster banquet included seven: raw, huge, and icy on the half shell; skewered and grilled; crisp juicy tempura; baked in their shells on a bed of salt; raw and marinated in a little cup of vinegar and soy (our favorite); stewed in a miso broth; and pan-fried, chopped, mixed with rice, and arbitrarily called risotto. A half-mile stroll upriver from Kakifune Kanawa through the graceful park is the skeleton of the one prewar structure remaining in a city that has otherwise been completely rebuilt. It stood at ground zero on August 6, 1945.

If the meals we ate before arriving in Kyoto seemed better than most of the Japanese food I’ve had in the United States, their superiority was more a matter of degree than of kind. The seafood was universally fresh, the flavors were remarkably clear, the spices and herbs were both more delicate and more vivid than in the Japanese food back home. But for our first two weeks in Japan, just as I do when I have a Japanese meal in New York or Los Angeles, I still longed for a hamburger, French fries, and a Milky Way bar after dinner. Kyoto changed all that.

It was May when we arrived in Kyoto. The
tai
were running, the
kinome
was in fine fettle, and
takenoko
were pushing up through the earth in the groves around Kyoto.
Tai
is Japanese sea bream, a firm, lean white-fleshed fish unlike the bream of other waters. Raw and sliced, it makes a fine sashimi (in May, often garnished with a baby cucumber, one inch long and still wearing its yellow flower); when slices of
tai
are wrapped around a long cone of vinegared rice and tied in bamboo leaf, it is called
chimaki.
May is also the month to eat bonito,
karei
flounder, horse mackerel, and sea trout. Westerners know that oysters are delectable only in cold months; Japanese chefs know the ideal time for a hundred kinds of fish.

Kinome
is the bright green, newly formed leaf of the
sancho
(prickly ash) tree and the favorite herb of professional Japanese chefs, always used fresh and not, I think, eaten anywhere outside Japan. We found little, fern-shaped sprigs of
kinome
in every meal we had in Kyoto. Commonly described as light and minty, its
w
onderful astringent taste I find also reminiscent of lemon peel and coriander. A few weeks before our visit, the
kinome
was tiny and tasteless; a few weeks after, gross and bitter. And while in
K
yoto, we could feel the
kinome
season slipping away as spring turned into summer and the leaves grew larger day by day.

Takenoko
are bamboo shoots. I have spent a lifetime avoiding those stringy, tough, bitter canned bamboo shoots you find in
Asian food in this country and wondering why anyone in the world would bother to cut off the tip of a bamboo plant just before it emerges from the earth, husk the thick woody covering, and eat its pale golden heart. Now, for the first time, I tasted them fresh—sweet and crunchy arid tender—in a restaurant on the outskirts of Kyoto called Kinsuitei that serves, in thatched pavilions along a shaded lake, a many-course lunch of fresh bamboo: bamboo grilled on bamboo skewers, bamboo shredded with seaweed, bamboo sliced like sashimi with a soy-based dipping sauce, bamboo floating in soup, bamboo simmered in broth, bamboo deep-fried as tempura, and bamboo chopped in rice. Perhaps that’s the problem with impeccably seasonal food—you wait an entire year for the fleeting moment to arrive, and then you overdose.

Kyoto is the home of
kaiseki ryori,
perhaps the most refined and exquisite branch of Japanese cooking. This is formal Japanese haute cuisine, served in nine courses or more on antique ceramics and lacquerware, usually in a small private room. A
kaiseki
meal appeals to all the senses; only seasonal ingredients are used and only at the peak of their freshness.

Our friend Sunja traveled from Kobe to Kyoto and took us to a
kaiseki
lunch at the famous restaurant Hyotei, five teahouses joined by bamboo walkways in a lush garden around a little pond. It was raining when we arrived at the gate, and each of us was given a light, broad bamboo basket to hold over our heads as we walked the twenty feet to a three-hundred-year-old teahouse. I felt as if I had become a figure in a Japanese print.

Inside, a hanging scroll and purple irises in a narrow alcove set the mood of late springtime, as did the patterns and colors on ceramics and lacquerware throughout the meal. We sat on a tatami floor of woven grass, some sections fresh and green, others dry and crackling. The paper window screen was open to the garden, and rain trickled down from the thatched roof.

A little wooden table was placed before each of us, and for the next two hours a set meal was served in groups of dishes on
lacquered trays, seven courses in all, loosely following the traditional order from appetizers to raw fish and soup to grilled foods to steamed to simmered to fried. We began with a dish of tiny, sweetly caramelized fish; thin slices of raw
tai
garnished with a baby cucumber; a white miso soup; and sesame tofu surrounded by
junsai,
a plant that grows on the bottom of deep, clear, old ponds such as Midorogaike, north of Kyoto. In late spring, its immature green buds are surrounded by a gelatinous sheath—
junsai
is a texture food.

The next tray held a little rectangular plate with three peeled fava beans; an egg cut in two (magically, the white was set and the lightly flavored yolk was liquid); a young ginger shoot that shaded from lavender to white; a cube of tofu omelet in a round dish; and two
chimaki,
one with raw
tai
and the other with eel, tied tightly in bamboo leaves. The tray was decorated with two tiny green maple leaves, a reminder of spring, in case we had forgotten.

In our clear soup we found a shrimp wrapped in
yuba
(a thick bean-curd skin), new peas, a tree-ear mushroom, and a lily root.
Suzuki
(sea bass) followed, deliriously panfried and brushed with a glistening, mildly sweet teriyaki sauce and garnished with the flower of the
sancho
tree, and then rice and pickles and another soup, this one containing bright green and white vegetables and abalone wrapped in a rectangle of fish. Bitter green tea was served with a slice of melon and then a light brown Japanese sweet that seemed no more explicable than any other Japanese sweet I’ve tasted. But the melon was an epiphany of melons: the skin of a cantaloupe, the green flesh and size of a honeydew, and the perfume and sweetness of a jungle thick with honeysuckles.