Tokyo Redux

I’d only been to Tokyo once before, but I knew that as soon as I hit the ground, I’d be tapping into that main vein again, a dead-bang, surefire, king-hell rush. For me, Tokyo is like one long film trailer – one of those quick-cut, fast-moving highlight teasers for a noisy action flick with only the best parts shown, in molar-shaking, heart-pounding surround sound, the pace getting quicker and quicker, the action more frenzied, leading up to sudden blackness and the promise of more excitement to come.

     No place I’ve ever been, or even heard about, is as guaranteed to cause stimulation in the deepest pleasure centers of a cook’s brain. No cuisine, broadly speaking, makes as much sense: the simplest, cleanest, freshest elements of gustatory pleasure, stripped down and refined to their most essential. Unlike Tokyo’s streets – and much of its popular culture – the traditional sectors of food and relaxation are austere, uncompromising, devoid of all distraction and repetition, beautiful in the manner of a single long-stemmed calla lily: unknowable, serene. The Japanese, hardworking, hyperregimented, obsessively well scrubbed, and painfully repressed, live lives of powerful – even lurid – imagination and fantasy. Over the centuries, they have given a lot of serious thought as to what, exactly, is needed and desirable in the taking of pleasure. The unnecessary, the extraneous, the redundant, the less than perfect – these are discarded. What is left is often an empty room, a futon, a single perfect flower.

     Their streets may be noisy, riotous Möbius strips of flashing lights, screaming jumbotrons, rank after rank of tightly constrained, identically dressed humanity (this year, all young women will dye their hair red!), their TV variety shows insanely over the top, hysterical assaults by break-dancing reindeer, hyperactive hosts, cloyingly cute, fluffy, pyschedelic-hued animal characters and doll-eyed cartoon heroines, their porn some of the ugliest, most brutal, and most disturbing on earth, their popular sexual obsessions may make even the Germans look well adjusted, and they may indeed teach their school children that all that nasty World War II nonsense never really happened, but from a cook’s perspective, who cares? I was there to eat. When it comes time to sit at a table, or take a long weekend relaxing in the countryside, no one on earth has figured things out so well or so thoroughly as the Japanese.

     It’s all about fish, fish, fish, daddy-o. You like fish? You’ll love Japan. They’ve scoured the world’s oceans looking for good stuff to eat. And they’ll pay anything – anything – for the good stuff. (I watched my friend Taka at Sushi Samba in New York unhesitatingly pay over eighty dollars a pound – wholesale – for a hunk of o-toro.) I actually get high walking through their fish markets; my pulse quickens even thinking about them. I missed a lot last time I was in Japan. I wasted a lot of time working and wandering blindly about. Early on, I’d been intimidated by the strangeness, the crowds, the different language, I’d been reluctant, at first, to throw myself into it, to plunge right into packed noodle joints and businessmen’s bars. This time, I was determined, at the very least, to miss less. My quest for ‘the perfect meal’ would be put on hold. This was Japan. I knew I’d be getting a lot of perfect meals here. That’s what they do.

     It was a packed flight out of JFK, and I was too excited to sleep. After three movies, three meals, and fourteen hours to Narita, with the plane’s engines droning on and on, it reached the point where I yearned crazily for that telltale change in the engine’s pitch, that moment when velocity slows, the plane begins its final descent, every ticking second of monotonous hum a fiendish form of torture. They ought to issue rubber chew toys in coach class. I needed one by the time the flight attendants started strapping down food carts and checking to see that our seats were in the upright position.

     I was staying at the Hotel Tateshina in Shinjuku, a tacky businessmen’s lodging on a side street. My dollhouse-sized room had a hard but comfortable bed, cheap bureau, a TV set, and a pillow that sounded and felt as if it were filled with sand. The walls were thin. Outside the room was a bank of vending machines selling my brand of cigarettes, coffee, Asahi beer, and plastic cards for the porno channels (Cherry Bomb). I showered in the hermetically sealed bath pod, dressed, and walked in the rain to Kabuki-cho, taking a hard right off a neon and billboard-lined street, ducking through a quiet Shinto shrine and into a bustling warren of pachinko parlors, hostess bars, pantyless coffee shops, yakitori joints, and whorehouses. Turning onto the Golden Gai, things were even narrower and the streets were bordered by tiny one- and two-table bars. Above, through a tangle of fire escapes, power lines, and hanging signage, skyscrapers winked red. Welcome to Tokyo. I squeezed into a phone booth-sized place, passed a bank of glowing hibachis, sat down, and ordered a draft beer.

     A hot towel arrived with my beer. I ordered pickles and crudités with miso paste, a bowl of onsen tamago (a soft-boiled egg with mountain potato and seaweed), cooked collar of yellowtail with radish, some chicken wings, stuffed shiitake mushrooms, and some roasted gingko berries. Life was good again. The grueling hours in cattle class, knees pressed to my chin, staring at Mel ‘Fucking’ Gibson and Helen ‘Two-Expression’ Hunt – you know them from such films as What Tony Does NOT Want, costarring Gene ‘He’s Good in Everything’ Hackman, playing (surprise) a gruff but kindhearted football coach, and Gene ‘Me Again’ Hackman playing a gruff but kindhearted former NSA agent – all of it faded into ugly memory.

     That night, I woke up at 3:00 a.m. and made myself green tea in my room, on the thoughtfully provided denji server. I tried to write. I attempted to telephone my wife back in New York but got the answering machine (Elvis Costello singing ‘sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking’). I hung up, feeling, for the first time since I’d hit the road, truly and permanently cut off from my former life – a universe away from home, everything I’d ever been and done somehow an abstraction. I’d thought I was alone in the Tateshina annex, until a toilet roared through the thin walls. Soon I could hear the sounds of moaning. My neighbor was catching up on Cherry Bomb.

     I slept for a while, and had a vivid dream that Nancy had renovated our apartment and thrown me a surprise party. All the guests were Asian. Everyone was doing a lot of hugging. For some reason, Leslie Gore was there, singing ‘It’s My Party.’ When Nancy hugged me in my dream, I could feel it.

     I woke up early and bought a hot can of coffee from the vending machine. Out front of the Tateshina, I met my fixer/translator, Michiko, a pretty, smartly dressed, extremely capable young woman the TV people had hooked me up with. Behind the wheel of a rented van was Shinji, my driver, a longhaired guy in a Yankees cap. Both spoke excellent English, and Shinji was completely up-to-date on his Yankees stats and recent trades, so I knew I was in capable hands. On the ride to the Ginza district, Michiko kept up a steady stream of patter on a slim silver cell phone, making arrangements, while Shinji and I worried over the implications of a possible Brosius trade.

     This time around, I had a definite agenda. At the top of my list was Edomae sushi. Edo was the old name for Tokyo, and the term Edomae when used with the word sushi implies that it’s old-school, Edo-style, the unvarnished grand-master version of sushi (in a culture where sushi is already revered). Michiko had introduced me to Mr Kiminari Togawa, the chef/owner of the Karaku restaurant in the expensive Ginza district and a master of Edomae sushi.

     While I had visited the awe-inspiring, life-changing mother of all fish markets before, this time I would be going with an expert. The plan was to meet Togawa-san at his restaurant, run over to Tsukiji to do his day’s shopping, then return to his restaurant and eat myself silly. I’ve written about Tsukiji in the past, and used up most of the superlatives I can think of. Just take my word for it: It’s the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, the Great Pyramid of seafood. All that unbelievable bounty, spread across acres and acres of concrete, wriggling and spitting from tanks, laid out in brightly colored rows, carefully arranged like dominoes in boxes, skittering and clawing from under piles of crushed ice, jockeyed around on fast-moving carts, the smell of limitless possibilities, countless sensual pleasures – I am inadequate to the task of saying more. There is nowhere else. Believe me.

     This time, instead of simply gaping, slack-jawed, I was doing it right. Mr Togawa was with me, and when the fish sellers saw him coming, it got their attention. A friendly but serious fellow of about my age, Togawa-san was looking for a few select items today: fresh live eels, live octopus, sea bream, tiger prawn, and o-toro – the best of the best of the tuna – in season. We spent a lot of time yanking living creatures out of fish tanks and examining them. Mr Togawa showed me something I hadn’t seen before. Lifting a flipping and flopping sea bream out of a tank, he took a knife and whacked it behind the head with the blade. The cut opened it up just enough to expose the spine. Mr Togawa quickly took a long, thin wire and inserted it into the fish’s marrow, running it up and down its length like a deep root canal. He explained that he was basically paralyzing the sea bream. The fish would live – in a comalike state of suspended animation – until the very last second, back in Mr Togawa’s kitchen, when he’d finish the job. Walking down one of the busy aisles, the chef caught sight of a large square of fatty toro, and he veered over to examine it more closely. After gazing at it reflectively for a while, and a little discussion with the fishmonger, the piece of tuna went in a bag. We bought a few kilos of very lively eels, an octopus – which very reluctantly released its grip on the glass walls of its tank – some brightly colored prawns, then headed back to Ginza.

     The chef’s cooks were waiting for us when we arrived, and they immediately fell on the morning’s shopping. They salted and pounded the octopus for slow cooking in mirin (rice wine), then butchered the tuna and sorted various parts for different purposes. The small, stark cellar space was soon filled with the smell of steaming rice and freshly grated ginger and wasabi. There came the sound – beautiful really, almost musical – of a very sharp knife cutting through the tiny pinbones of a very fresh fish, the blade scraping quickly along the spine with an extended ZiiiipppP! The cooks’ blades moved confidently through the eels, then finished off the sea bream with that distinctive sound: Ziiip! Ziiip! I sat at the sushi bar, watching them work, until, embarrassed by my growling stomach, I withdrew to a table.

     Finally, as zero hour approached, Michiko, Shinji, and I took our places in a small, private tatami room. Hot towels and cold beer were served; then one of the doors slid open and we were off.

     Octopus with fresh wasabi – the color and shape of a cherry blossom – came first; then grilled sardine with ponzu sauce and yuzu, the flavor electric, dazzling; followed by a platter of traditional sushi, each piece, as should be the case with Edomae sushi, containing a nearly identical number of grains of rice – and, as is also the style with Edomae, still warm and more loosely packed than the cold, gluey rice cakes you might be used to. I’d watched Mr Togawa make some of these earlier for another customer. His hands flew, twirled, an entire ballet with ten digits. It had taken him, he told me, three years, during his training and apprenticeship, just to be considered as having mastered rice alone. For three years in his first kitchen, it had been all he’d been allowed to touch.

     Half-beak came next, a pointy-nosed transluscent little fish, silvery and alive-looking, then maguro (the lean section of a tuna), marinated twelve hours, tiger prawns, flounder, o-toro, all served over the sticky yet fluffy rice, which was still warm. Everything – every fish (except the toro) – was from the Tokyo area. All of it was of the absolute highest quality. No price is too high for the best fish. And with Edomae sushi, one always buys the best.

     The meal continued in an uninterrupted flow of delights: a miso soup with tiny steamed cockles, a course of pickles and microgreen salad, a slice of tamago (omelette), big shell (whatever that is), abalone, sea eel. Was the meal over? No way! A tray of hand rolls came next: sea cucumber, ark shell, more eel, dried radish with powdered, dried king prawns, chopped toro with fresh chives. Bigger hand rolls arrived, each containing tamago (egg), shiitake, and cucumber, accompanied by a plate of dried, then pickled daikon. The sea bream appeared squeaky-fresh; it seemed alive on my plate. Then we were served a little bowl of butterfish roe poached in court bouillon, some luxuriously portioned uni (sea urchin roe).

     The screen slid back and Mr Togawa joined us with a jumbo-sized bottle of frozen sake. He sat down and poured me a glass of frozen, delicious, slushy goodness. In keeping with local custom, I poured back, returning the favor. This usually initiates a lengthy back-and-forth, and that day was no exception. Just when the beer and the frozen sake had combined to give us all mild, blissful grins, a final dish arrived: a few pieces of that incredible o-toro, lightly seared, still raw in the middle, with a subtle sweet-and-sour sauce. Perfect.

    Perfect. The best sushi ever. The best. Far and away. Let me repeat: the best, finest, freshest, best-prepared sushi meal I’ve ever had. It took every bit of discipline I had not to moan and giggle and gush throughout the meal. If you’re reading this, Togawa-san, and you ever need a favor at four o’clock in the morning, anywhere in the world, I’m there for you. You showed me the light.

     That night, my belly still distended from lunch, I strolled over to the old train station and Yurakucho alley, where the air was heavy with the smell of grilling chicken parts and caramelizing marinade. Every little chicken joint, every low-to-the-ground stool and upended beer-crate table, was packed with salarymen drinking and eating yakitori on skewers. I wandered for a while, amazed to find my appetite returning. Down one dark and narrow street, I found a single free stool next to a large and raucous group of business people, all from the same government office, letting loose after a hard day. One of them, in a gregarious mood, reached over and pulled my table near theirs, offering warm greetings and a big portion of hot sake. In a mix of broken English and slurred Japanese, we made introductions, and I found myself plunged unexpectedly into yet another orgy of drinking and eating. Trays of skewered yakitori – ground chicken balls, gizzards, marinated cartilage, and breast and leg meat – began arriving. As soon as my glass was half-empty, someone would fill it. Food kept coming, and soon everyone at the table was making jokes, telling stories, complaining about their spouses. One celebrant at the opposite end of the table slumped periodically onto his outstretched arm, unconscious, waking only for more sake. The others gave him little notice. My stated mission, to eat my way around the world, got a lot of interest. Suggestions rang out from every direction.

     ‘Bourdain-san! You try chanko?’

     ‘Bourdain-san! You go for onsen? Kaiseki food? Very good!’

     A pile of stripped skewers accumulated at each end of the table. The sake kept coming. Soon, one of the salarymen was demonstrating what might have been the twist, others making incomprehensible (in any language) mother-in-law jokes. There was a spirited discussion on the subject of who was cooler: Iron Chef Morimoto (my choice) or Iron Chef Sakai (the popular favorite). I did my best to explain the American reaction to the Bobby Flay ‘cutting board incident’ during the first Flay/Morimoto face-off, an event seen by many Japanese, apparently, as the culinary equivalent of the Tyson/Holyfield ear-chewing debacle.

     It turned into a very long night of backslapping, drink-spilling, and loud exchanges of ‘Kanpai!’ (Cheers!). Just before the evening threatened to veer dangerously into karaoke, I made sincere gestures of gratitude and appreciation and staggered home, leaving at least two of the party sleeping deeply, face down in their seats.

 

We are barbarians. We are big, hairy, smelly, foreign devils, unsophisticated, loud, clumsy, overexpressive, and overfed, blundering thoughtlessly through life. At least that’s how you might feel when preparing yourself for the ryokan experience. The Japanese – those that can afford it – like to unwind and relax. They like skiing. They adore golf. Fly-fishing is an obsession. But the traditional way to kick back is to spend a weekend at a ryokan, a country inn, usually in a rural area in the mountains, away from city life. There, one can spend a few days in quiet reflection, soaking in onsen (hot springs), enjoying the healthy benefits of a massage, perhaps taking in a little musical entertainment, and dining on kaiseki, the most refined, sophisticated style of eating in Japan. An outgrowth of the tea ceremony, kaiseki is the national version of haute cuisine, an experience designed to appeal to all the senses, and one’s spirit, in equal proportion, as well as one’s sense of history and location – a complete yin/yang workup. What better way for a stressed-out office drone to lose himself completely to pleasure than to step back for a few days into the sixteenth century?

     Nervously waiting for the shinkansen, the bullet train, to the seaside town of Atami, I was becoming painfully aware of my otherness. Kaiseki, like no other Japanese cuisine, offers a minefield of possible behavioral gaffes to the uninformed Westerner like myself. Now, I know how to use chopsticks. By New York standards, I’m impressive. But while reading up on proper dining etiquette at a kaiseki meal, the customary practices and procedures when staying at a ryokan, my heart filled with dread and terror.

 

Don’t point your chopsticks at anyone else.

Do not allow the soles of your feet to be exposed to anyone else.

Do not step on the wooden dividers between mats.

Never leave your chopsticks sticking straight up out of your food.

When drinking soup or tea, it’s one hand under, palm up, the other cradling around from the side.

If it’s a soup with chunks, hold your chopsticks thus, and lift the bowl to your lips to sip from it.

Do not drown your sushi in soy sauce; to leave granules of rice floating in your dipping sauce is the height of bad taste and brutishness.

When your geisha pours you sake (hot sake with cold food; cold sake with hot), wash your cup after drinking and pour her some into the same receptacle.

That was not a finger bowl.

Wash for dinner. Really wash.

Dress appropriately.

Remember to remove your sandals before entering the room.

 

     No experience is more guaranteed to make you feel like a nine-hundred-pound ape than a kaseiki dinner for which you are inadequately briefed. I was very jittery. Shinji had driven me to the station in his personal car, a tiny Renault two-seater convertible, top down. I’d sat in the miniature front seat, my head protruding out beyond the windshield, feeling freakish, huge, and bumbling. I knew I would soon be looking sillier and feeling more awkward than I had since sixth grade, when I’d briefly attended a ballroom-dancing class. The memory of that particular horror still makes my hands sweat and my face burn with shame.

     The shinkansen are magnificent machines. They slide quietly into train stations, their great bug-spattered nose cones looking like space shuttles. A cleaning crew in pink outfits rushed on board as soon as mine arrived. A few minutes later, liftoff. I was on my way to Atami, gliding at high speed through the outskirts of Tokyo, a bento box of unagi (eel) and rice and a cold Asahi in front of me. The bullet trains can reach speeds of 270 klicks an hour. Mine moved like a high-speed serpent. From the rear of the train, I could watch the front of it as it whipped like a snake head past Mount Fuji’s snow-capped peak, through mountains, fields, small towns, and tunnels, the sea appearing and disappearing to my left as the train hissed through space. About an hour later, I was in Atami, climbing the steep, twisting mountain roads in a taxi. It was sunny and relatively warm for wintertime. Up and up we went, one impossibly angled switchback after another, until we pulled into the hidden driveway of Ryokan Sekiyou, near a mountaintop high over the sea.

     I removed my shoes, careful to kick one off, then place a stockinged foot on the raised interior platform before removing the other shoe. I selected the largest of the sandals provided, which still left my heel hanging out by three inches, did my best to bow gracefully to the two women and one man who had hurled themselves to their knees at my entrance and were bowing so deeply that their noses nearly touched the floor. While my luggage was taken to my room, I sat in a small reading room by the entrance, a few coals glowing in a round brazier, mandarin oranges in a bowl, a stargazer lily and a painting by a local artist the only decoration. In a moment, I was escorted to my room by a woman in traditional garb, her feet moving noiselessly over the floor mats in tiny, rapid steps.

     My room was not so much a room as a collection of spaces: one large area to eat and sleep in (my futon would arrive later), another area with a low bureau and tall pivoting mirror and a few little drawers, and another area with a low writing table and a heating blanket called a kotatsu – basically a table you can bundle yourself up under and stay warm in while you write. There were a few flat pillows on the floor, a painting, and a single flower in an unadorned vase on a shelf. That was it. Sliding back one side of the room, I found myself looking out at a small garden, an orange tree, the mountains and valleys of Atami, and the ocean beyond. Every room at the inn had been ingeniously angled in such a way as to provide each visitor with a spectacular view – and yet maintain the illusion that one was completely alone, the only guest. I looked warily at the flat pillows on the floor. I knew what that meant. I’d be spending two days sitting exclusively on a hard mat floor, my long legs folded up beneath me. I was getting pretty good at contorting my six-foot-four-inch frame into correct Japanese dining position, my legs either tightly crossed or tucked under, knees in front. But getting up afterward was becoming tougher and noisier; the crunching and popping sounds of my forty-four-year-old legs reacquainting themselves with sensation after hours of numbness was not melodious to hear. Japan threatened to cripple me.

     A server opened one of the screens from the long foyer to my room and motioned for me to sit.

    Crunch! Pop! Snap!

     At the low lacquer table in the main space, she gave me a hot towel, followed by green tea and a candied fig. She left for a while, reappearing later with a neatly folded stack of clothing. To my discomfort, she stayed to show me how, once I’d bathed, I should dress. A long gray-patterned yukata with billowing arms, a belt – which took many attempts for me to master tying and knotting correctly – an outer jacket, from which my arms protruded ludicrously, and little two-toed white socks, which on my size-twelve feet looked like particularly unflattering Mary Janes.

     Left alone to bathe, I pondered my environment. I stared out the window, all thoughts of the outside world quickly banished. There was nothing in my room, just that single flower, the paper walls, the wide expanse of floor. In no time, I felt my metabolism shift, my whole system undergoing some kind of temporary metamorphosis from neurotic, hyperactive, short attention-spanned New Yorker to a character in a Kurosawa samurai flick. The surroundings were identical. I felt I could sit there forever in my yukata motionless, doing nothing more involved than contemplating an orange.

     There were two parts to the bathroom. The toilet, a typically Japanese device overloaded with gadgets, was in one room. It looked like a regular toilet that had been tricked out by a bunch of speed-freak aerospace engineers. From the array of multicolored buttons, plastic tubes, non-English instructions and diagrams, I gathered that the thing could clean and sterilize itself after each use; spinning and washing the seat, it could direct various widths and pressures of warm-water jet at your rectum – a feature that might cause my old sous-chef, Steven, never to leave; it could wash, sanitize, powder, and emoliate every recess of your nether regions; and it could probably play a medley of popular show tunes while doing it. I was afraid to flush the damn thing.

     The other part of the room was more in keeping with my idea of superior plumbing. A deep oblong cedar tub sat against one wall, next to an open window, from which one could gaze out at the mountaintops without being seen, along with an adjacent area in which to wash oneself prior to soaking in the tub. There were a small wooden stool, a scrub brush, a wooden bucket, and a high-powered-spray shower attachment. The idea was to squat on the wooden stool, soap up, scrub oneself down with the hard-bristle brush, pausing to rinse now and again with buckets of hot or cold water, as one liked, then shower. The whole floor, tiled in black granite, tilted conveniently into recessed troughs and drains. After one’s outer layers of skin had been scrubbed off, one slid gratefully into the waiting tub, soaking for a long, long time, the window open just enough for a cooling breeze, a view of ripe oranges dropping from the trees in the outer garden.

     After a bath, I nervously dressed myself in my yukata, socks, jacket, and belt, hoping to God that Steven – or worse, my cooks – would never see footage of this event. The yukata was long, ankle-length – and tight, constricting the legs like a long skirt, so I had to take short, quick steps. With the addition of the clunky, ill-fitting sandals one wore while moving from room to room, I felt like I was sashaying down a runway in an evening gown as I tottered off to the larger area of the room, which had been prepared for my dinner.

 

I would be dining alone at the long black table. By alone, I mean that I would be the only one eating. I would be attended to by two traditionally garbed geishas, who would assist me with my table tactics and food and drink service and provide musical entertainment. Mr Komatsu, the ryokan’s manager, in tie and tails, knelt in front of me at a respectful distance, observing and stage-managing the event. A server ran food from the kitchen, opening a screen and dropping to her knees with each course before sliding it across the floor to the geishas.

     I managed to seat myself appropriately behind the low table, without exposing any crotch, and washed my hands with a steaming towel. A handwritten menu with a personalized watercolor of a flower on rice paper (caligraphy and art by the chef) described in Japanese what I’d be eating. Kaiseki menus are a reflection of the region in which they are served and rely, to as great a degree as possible, on local products that are in season. The meal is in many ways a celebration of that season, the presentation, garnishes, plates, and serviceware designed to glorify that which is best about the particular place and time of year.

     The meal began with an amuse-gueule of hoshigaki abura-age goma-an, dried persimmon and fried soy curd with sesame paste. The portions were small, intricately crafted, brightly colored, and, as it was wintertime, constructed around a theme of death and regeneration. Turned leaves appeared as garnishes, plates (square food on round plate, round food on square plate) appearing in groups reminiscent of an artfully strewn forest floor, with many strategic contrasts of color, flavor, shape, and texture.

    Kisetsu no sakana goshu means an arrangement of five seasonal fish appetizers from nearby waters – either Ashi Lake or the Atami Bay area – five impeccable little plates and bowls exciting just to look at. I did my best with my chopsticks, looking to the nearest geisha for guidance as to what to eat first. She pointed out sea cucumber and its own liver – two little bowls, one containing what looked to be liver. The liver was gelatinous and golden-colored – like uni – and I dove right in with my chopsticks. Mr Komatsu was up in a flash, explaining – to much giggling – that the other item, the sea cucumber, was to be dipped in the liver, that I was basically eating the condiment straight. Blushing fiercely, I shamefacedly switched gears, feeling like I’d just walked into Les Halles, ordered pot-au-feu, and dug right in to the mustard with a knife and fork. I did better with a smoked trout dish with lotus root, the sake being poured by the geishas going a long way toward helping me relax. Oyster cooked in soy, I identified easily and ate with no problem (delicious). Dried mullet roe with radish – the roe salted for a month, then sun-dried – was also sensational. The geishas were helping me feel better about things, playfully teasing me and reaching over to help when I needed it, clearly amused by my ineptness but going to great lengths to make me feel okay about it.

     Soup was in a beautiful ceramic bowl: suppon-dofu, a soft-shell turtle in egg pudding with green onion and turtle broth. I handled that course easily, doing the chopstick two-hand bowl tilt just fine, it appeared, as there were no giggles or looks at the floor.

     The next course, however, presented real problems: ise ebi, grilled spiny lobster – in the shell. I stared hopelessly at the thing, all those tiny legs, even the tail meat resisting my first tenuous attempts to free it from the shell. A geisha was there to rescue me. Using her own set of chopsticks, she had every scrap of meat out and arranged in front of me in seconds. I began pouring the women sake after every one of mine, and the mood soon became more festive.

     Another appetizer-sized offering appeared: soba tsubu tororo mushi, buckwheat in grated yam paste. This was a whole new taste terrain now, products I hadn’t even imagined eating a few days earlier. Amadai kabura surinagashi, a fish course of sweet sea bream wrapped in yuba (a soy protein) with grated turnip came served in a clay pot, followed by a meat course – gyu shiromiso nikomi, a piece of tender beef wrapped in baby bok choy in white miso broth – and then another fish course – komochi konbu, seaweed marinated in rice vinegar and soy with herring roe. The herring lay their eggs directly into the seaweed, so I was enjoying the stuff nearly in situ. It was followed by tokobushi daizu hijiki – steamed rice with abalone, soy beans, and brown algae. Don’t think algae sounds good? It is.

     My head was swimming now, a pleasantly intoxicated dream state. I no longer knew or even cared what century it was. I was numb from the waist down, circulation long ago cut off to my legs. The heavily painted faces and costumes of my geisha companions, the spare black-and-white walls, the choo-choo train of tiny plates of jewel-like dishes – everything melted together into that rare full mind/body narcotized zone where everything/nothing matters. You know you’re having one of the meals of your life but are no longer intimidated by it. Consciousness of time and expense go out the window. Cares about table manners disappear. What happens next, later, or even tomorrow fades into insignificance. You become a happy passenger, completely submitting to whatever happens next, confident that somehow the whole universe is in particularly benevolent alignment, that nothing could possibly distract or detract from the wonderfulness of the moment.

     A small stone pot was slid across the floor on a tray and set up over a little stone brazier with two pieces of glowing charcoal. Kuwai modoki, grated and fried ‘arrowheads,’ served in red miso soup. I had no idea what an arrowhead was, but I was way past caring. I knew I was in expert hands. Whatever an arrowhead was, I knew it would be great. And it was. Many, many more sakes came my way – and were returned. I didn’t know how the two geishas – tiny middle-aged women – were putting it all away so well. After a final course of dessert sorbets and local fruit, I was damn near goofy with pleasure. The two geishas retreated to the far end of the room and, standing in front of a shimmering gold lacquer screen, began to perform. One played a syamisen, a sort of long-necked string instrument she struck with a pick, while the other beat lightly on a drum, whose tone she modulated and manipulated by strings held against her shoulder. They played and sang. One danced. You’ve seen bits of this kind of traditional Japanese dance – on television or in movies – and you’ve heard that high-pitched warbling, and you’ve thought, Jesus! It sounds like someone’s torturing a cat! You just hadn’t had enough sake to appreciate it. You weren’t sitting in that timeless dining room, after a long bath, reflecting on those mountains. You hadn’t eaten the meal I’d just enjoyed. The music was lovely, the slow-motion dance mesmerizing to watch. I felt like a feudal lord. I no longer cared about the silly clothes I was wearing. In fact, I felt cool. It was good to be the king. I was ready to order out the cavalry, burn castles, strategize with my warlords in the rock garden, think deep thoughts while I watched the winter cherry blossoms bloom.

     I walked carefully back to the sleeping area, where a futon had already been unrolled and turned down for me. I got under the covers, and one of the screen walls was pulled back. I was aware of an older woman entering the room in the dark. She gently drew back the covers and gave me what was easily the best massage of my life, an incredible hour-long treatment, her hands spinning, kneading powerfully through my yukata and over every muscle at undiminishing speed, like an agricultural thresher. A while later, half-asleep, half-awake, pleasantly drunk, freshly massaged, I slipped on my sandals and picked my way up a few stairs into a larger, communal version of my bathroom, where I squatted, scrubbed, and showered. It was midnight, and no one else was about. Leaving my clothes in a pile, I slid open another door, padded in the crisp night air across a few smooth flagstones, and lowered myself into the onsen, a hot spring-fed bath blasted into volcanic rock at the top of the mountain. I lay there in the water, breathing, listening to my heartbeat until even that seemed to disappear, happy as I’d ever been. When, an hour or so later, I finally climbed back under the covers of my futon and closed my eyes, I slept like the comfortably dead.

     Dinner at the ryokan may have been the greatest thing ever. Breakfast was another thing entirely. At about 8:00 a.m., the screen slid back and an attendant removed the futon. A few moments later, I found myself, once again, sitting cross-legged at a low table, with a full spectrum of beautiful dishes coming my way. I was not ready, that early in the morning, for a large and challenging meal. I was not ready for Mr Komatsu again, dressed, as always, in his stiff black manager’s outfit, kneeling a few yards away while I ate.

     I was OK with the smoked fish, which was very good – the sushi, the rice. What I was not ready for, and never will be, was natto. The Japanese love natto, an unbelievably foul, rank, slimy, glutenous, and stringy goop of fermented soybeans. It’s the Vegemite of Japan, dearly loved by everyone there, for reasons no outsider can understand. There were two kinds of natto for me that morning: the traditional soy variety, and an even scarier black bean natto. If the taste wasn’t bad enough, there’s the texture. There’s just no way to eat the stuff. I dug in my chopsticks and dragged a small bit to my mouth. Viscous long strands of mucuslike material followed, leaving numerous ugly and unmanageable strands running from my lips to the bowl. I tried severing the strands with my chopsticks, but to no avail. I tried rolling them around my sticks like recalcitrant angel-hair pasta. I tried slurping them in. But there was no way. I sat there, these horrible-looking strings extending from mouth to table like a spider’s web, doing my best to choke them down while still smiling for the attentive Mr Komatsu. All I wanted to do now was hurl myself through the paper walls and straight off the edge of the mountain. Hopefully, a big tub of boiling bleach or lye would be waiting at the bottom for me to gargle with.

     Waiting in the wings, right behind the natto, was another concoction, described as ‘mountain potato.’ Of this, I could handle only a single taste. To this day, I have no idea what it really was. It didn’t taste like a potato – and I can’t imagine anything on a mountain tasting so evil. I didn’t ask, frightened that my host might mistake my inquiry for enthusiasm and offer up another generous helping. The small, dark, chewy nugget can only be described as tasting like salt-cured, sun-dried goat rectum – unbelievably, woefully flavorful – garnished by small maggotlike wriggly things, so awful to my Western palate that I was forced, through the grim rictus of a smile, to ask politely that Mr Komatsu ‘leave me alone for a while so I can fully appreciate this fine breakfast in solitude.’ I had no choice. I thought I would die. Nothing, not bugs, not iguana, not live reptile parts, not tree grubs, nothing I’d ever eaten would approach the horror of these few not unusual Japanese breakfast items. I’m not sneering. I’m sure that natto and mountain rectum are, as they say, ‘acquired tastes.’ And I’m sure that over time I could learn to appreciate them. If I were incarcerated and natto was the only food provided. But for right now? Given a choice between eating natto and digging up my old dog Pucci (dead thirty-five years) and making rillettes out of him? Sorry, Pucci.

 

Fugu. The deadly puffer fish of legend. It’s a delicacy. It’s expensive. You must be licensed by the state – after a long and comprehensive course of training and examination – to prepare and serve it. It can kill you. And every year in Japan, it does kill a score or so of its devotees, who are poisoned by the potentially deadly nerve toxins in its liver. First comes a feeling of numbness around the lips, a numbness that rapidly spreads through the central nervous system, paralyzing the extremities. Quickly followed by death.

     Sounds cool, right? If I’d had a top ten list of things I absolutely had to try while in Tokyo, fugu would have been right near the top. I had high hopes. I was ready. I wanted the exhilaration of a near-death experience. I’d scheduled my whole trip around fugu season. As I understood it – from careful study of barroom speculation and an episode of The Simpsons – a fugu meal was a game of chicken with all those delicious, if potentially fatal, toxins. There had to be a psychoactive, or at least a physical dimension, to the fugu experience, maybe just enough of the liver in each portion to give you a momentary peek into the void, maybe a sharp but pleasant sensation in the belly after eating, an artificial sense of well-being, a slight MDA-like high as traces of nerve toxin flirted with heart muscles and synapses.

     I chose the Nibiki restaurant, run by chef/owner Kichiro Yoshida. Mr Yoshida’s father was the first licensed fugu chef in Japan. Nibiki has been operated by the Yoshida family for eighty years without incident or fatality. You get one shot at running a fugu restaurant. One strike and you’re out. Nibiki is a homey-looking little place with a large plastic puffer fish hanging over the door, an open kitchen with counter, and a raised dining area with tables and cushions.

     Mr Yoshida welcomed me into his kitchen and gave me the short course in fugu. A large example of the fabled fish lay on a spotless white cutting board, looking similar to monkfish with its scaleless, slimy, and knife-resistant skin. The anatomy was similar to monkfish, as well: a center spine, no pinbones, skin that had to be peeled off, and two meaty tenderloin-shaped filets on each fish. Yoshida-san quickly zipped off the skin and began carving away some dark bits. A small metal waste container with a hinged lid and padlock stood next to the cutting board. The chef removed a key from a chain and gravely unlocked it. The toxic parts – every toxic part – of the fugu, he explained, must, by law, be disposed of like medical waste, segregated and secure at all times. He trimmed away any remaining skin, a few parts around the gills, some tiny, innocuous-looking dark spots on the flesh, then soaked the clean white meat repeatedly in cold water. The liver, I have to say, was lovely: creamy café au lait-colored, engorged-looking, with a foie-gras consistency. It looked appetizing, like monkfish liver. ‘Do you eat any of the liver?’ I asked hopefully. ‘No,’ said Mr Yoshida. Many are tempted, he explained. Most of the fatalities from fugu, he assured me, occurred among fishermen and fishmongers who were unable to resist the tasty-looking livers – and whatever holistic, restorative powers they might believe the deadly but attractive organ to have. According to Mr Yoshida, the problem is that there’s no way to tell how much toxin occurs in any particular fish. A big fugu with a large, plump liver might have relatively little toxin in its liver. Take a nibble, or prepare a nabe (broth in a pot) with a tiny bit, and you might well be fine. Conversely, a small fish’s liver might well be overloaded with toxin; take one lick and you keel over stone-dead. A daredevil fugu fan might become emboldened by the occasional nip of liver, only to take one toxin-heavy bite of another one and check out for good.

     As the chef carefully cleaned and washed the fish again and again, I began to get the idea that I would not be risking my life at all. I sat down to a very nice, very fresh meal. There was a tray of fanned-out slices of fugu sashimi, arranged in a chrysanthemum pattern, with a garnish of scallion sticks and a dipping sauce. The flavor was subtle, bordering on bland. It needed the sauce and scallions. A nabe of fugu arrived next, served in a hot pot on a tableside burner – also excellent, but hardly the white-knuckle experience I’d hoped for. A batter-fried fugu dish was next, indistinguishable from a deep-fried fish filet at any of a thousand New England seaside seafood barns. Had I not been expecting a brain-bending, lip-numbing, look-the-devil-in-the-face dining adventure, I would have been thrilled with the meal. That it was only excellent was not enough. I had gotten it wrong. Maybe next time, I’ll hook up with those fishermen. They sound like party animals.

 

Very early the next morning, I hit the Ota fish market. Michiko had arranged for a special treat. As I stood and watched the whirlwind of activity going on around me at 4:00 a.m., three workers wrestled a four-hundred-pound tuna up and onto a cutting board in front of me. With a man-sized serrated blade, the size of a forester’s saw, they ran down the length of the still-in-rigor tuna, neatly removing the top half, exposing the pink and red meat inside, and the animal’s massive spine. The main man behind the cutting board removed the heart, quickly whacked it into slices, and threw it into a hot wok with some ginger. Then, with a few deft motions, he cut away a selection of the tuna’s flesh, each from a different part of the fish: head, loin, and two big hunks of that most treasured part of only the best of the best tunas in season – the o-toro. Relatively pale in color, heavily rippled with fat, and looking very much like well-marbled beef, this was sliced into manageable pieces and laid out in a maddeningly appetizing-looking buffet arrangement along the tuna’s spine. Taking a soup spoon, he scraped along and between the spinal bones, removing buttery-textured peelings of transluscent, unbelievably tender meat. A small bowl of dipping sauce and some freshly grated wasabi was put down in front of me, along with a pair of chopsticks, and I was urged to dig in. The fish I was using as a service table would fetch somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve thousand dollars – the otoro constituting only about 12 per cent of total weight. I was right in the middle of toro season, when the fish are at their most relaxed and well fed, their flesh at its fattiest and most tasty. This particular tuna, I was assured, was an aristocrat among its peers. I stood there and ate about a pound and a half of the best of it, knowing I would never taste tuna this good or this fresh again. What is love? Love is eating twenty-four ounces of raw fish at four o’clock in the morning.

 

Down an alley, I slid open a door, took off my shoes, and padded across a small foyer to an inner door. Immediately, there was the sound of flesh slapping against flesh, grunts of exertion, the noise from hundreds of pounds of wet humanity colliding. I opened the inner door and sat on a cushion on a slightly elevated platform at the back of the room, next to a chain-smoking oyakata, the boss of the Tomotsuna sumo stable. I was center stage, painfully cross-legged, at the back of the hot, low-ceilinged room, witnessing something very few Westerners had ever seen. A few feet away, about twenty gigantic, nearly naked men swayed, stretched, and flexed; they pounded their great sweaty no-necked heads against columns, pawed their bare and bandaged feet against the hard dirt floor. In the center of the room was a ring of what looked like a slightly raised hump of woven straw or hemp. A novice wrestler swept the dirt with a straw whisk broom.

     The noise! Two gargantuan wrestlers faced off at center ring, crouched down, knuckles resting on the dirt . . . then . . . smack! An incredible impact as two five-hundred-pound men crashed into each other at top speed, grappling, slapping with both hands, choking, striving for a hold, or leverage, momentum. Most matches were over in seconds, the winner remaining in the ring to meet one opponent after another until he was bested. The sense of bulk in the little room was overwhelming – a sea of flesh and muscle confined in the cramped space. Occasionally, when one of the mammoth athletes was thrown over another’s leg, he’d come spinning or tumbling right toward me, threatening to crush my spine like a bag of taro chips. A huge wrestler frog-walked on bended legs in front of me, back and forth, while at the edge of the ring a young novice, still small in size, stood in a painfully bent crouch, holding a basket of salt in outstretched arms, beads of sweat sprouting on an exertion-reddened face. Punishment? Initiation? I didn’t ask. Mr Tomotsuna, the boss, to my left – and an ex-sumo wrestler himself – did not emanate approachability and looked too focused on the activity in the room to disturb him with my witless questions. He hardly gave me a glance unless I was lighting his cigarette for him. Sumo wrestlers live as a family under one roof, all under the guidance and tutelage of the oyakata, who rigorously controls every aspect of their daily schedule and training: when they exercise, when they sleep, when they eat, what they eat. They rise early along hierarchical lines: novices first, higher ranks later. (You can distinguish rank by hairstyle.) The novices, much like kitchen interns, sweep, clean, and do household chores, including assisting with the cooking.

     I was here to see chanko, the food of the sumo wrestler. Typically, I had all the wrong ideas about what they eat. When I’d heard about chanko food, I’d assumed, since we’re talking about the stuff sumo wrestlers eat in order to blow up to refrigerator-sized grappling machines of fat and muscle, that daily fare would consist of vats of fatty pork and lasagna-density starches, big gulp-sized milkshakes, Cadbury bars between meals, brick-proportioned Snickers bars, whole pullets filled with lardons of bacon and cornmeal stuffing, Grand Slam breakfasts, and endless buffets. I was wrong about this, of course. As I was wrong about these wrestlers. They are not just really, really fat guys in diapers.

     Sumo wrestlers are perhaps the most visible and obvious expression of all those dark, suppressed urges in the Japanese subconscious that I referred to earlier, that tiny voice inside every whipped salaryman that wants to make like Godzilla (Gojira) and stomp cities flat. They are a projection of Japanese power, and, make no mistake, they are powerful. Under all that carefully layered bulk, it’s pure muscle, baby. It’s like watching rhinos sparring as one fat bastard crashes into another, digs in low, and pushes the other guy – all six hundred pounds of him – straight back and out of the ring, or flips him onto his back. The momentum and the focus are so great that during practice sparring, when one wrestler fells another, or drives him out of the ring, the other wrestlers step in quickly, all yelling something that sounds like ‘Hesss!’ – indicating that the bout is over, settle down, cease fire – and restraining the aggressor from further assaults. You do not want to make a sumo wrestler mad at you.

     In old-school chanko cuisine, four-legged creatures were rarely served, the idea being that sumo wrestlers who use all four limbs during a fight have lost the fight. Chicken – which stand on two feet, like a good wrestler – and fish were the preferred main ingredients. Mr Tomotsuna was making a soup of tuna and vegetables for lunch the day I visited – a fairly sensible choice for Calista Flockhart, I thought, but hardly the bulk-inducing pigfest I’d imagined. I’d have to wait until dinner to find out more.

     The Edosawa restaurant in the sumo district is a four-story place where customers eat in private dining rooms. The walls are decorated with paintings of famous wrestlers, and the restaurant attracts a steady crowd of sumo wrestlers and former sumo wrestlers. Michiko, Shinji, and I sat down in a top-floor room, with a simmering hot pot in the center of the table. Mr Matsuoka, the owner, prepared our meal personally. Sumo wrestlers, I discovered, don’t just eat that one bowl of soup, as I’d seen them do earlier at the stable. They eat often. They sleep in between meals, and the meal is a delicious multistage operation. Essentially, we had a nabe – a big pot of broth into which a procession of ingredients were fed and removed, replaced by other ingredients. Platter after platter of vegetables, meatballs, pork, fish, shellfish, and tofu arrived and were added slowly to the pot – according to cooking time – then transferred to our plates and consumed. The liquid was replenished from time to time as it cooked down or was ladled out, the added flavors growing more assertive over time. The less strongly flavored ingredients went in first; then, over time, things like anchovy paste were introduced.

     It was a lot of fun. I’d never seen Michiko and Shinji enjoy themselves so much. It’s a family-type thing, cooking nabe style, explained Michiko. At her family home, relatives might show up for a nabe meal with different ingredients – each relative bringing something – and the adding and removing and serving is casual and fun, like a fondue party. Fooled by the soup I’d seen at the stable, I ate with gusto early on, not prepared for the arrival of more and more plates of raw ingredients, scarfing up scallops and pork and tasty little meatballs with plenty of the hot spicy broth. Soon full, I was taken aback by the traditional ending to a chanko meal – the addition to the remaining broth of cooked rice and beaten egg, a mixture that quickly becomes a delicious but absolutely cementlike porridge. I groaned with apprehension as Mr Matsuoka ladled out generous portions of tasty gruel, but I soldiered on, my belly straining. When the meal was over, I needed help to get up. I was the first to exit the room, and as I painfully staggered down the hall, a door slid open across the way and a large party of about a dozen well-fed and slightly drunk businessmen came tumbling out. One of them looked at me with a surprised expression of recognition. He was one of the guys I’d gotten hammered with at the yakitori joint a week earlier. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been fast asleep in his chair, his face resting on the table.

     ‘Bourdain-san!’ he cried excitedly. ‘You crazy man chef! Where you go? What you eat next?’