20. FIRST TAKE YOUR CRYSTAL-CLEAR, FREE-FLOWING MOUNTAIN STREAM …

Nagashi-somen is a unique and improbable dish that few people even in Japan have tried, though most have heard of it: a meal—more a way of eating, really—that is symbolic of the purity, simplicity, and natural harmony that Japanese cuisine so often strives for.

Here is how it works (because nagashi-somen is very much a “how it works” dish, as opposed to a “how to make it” dish): The chef boils some somen noodles, ultrathin (less than 1/16 of an inch uncooked) wheat noodles made with a little sesame oil and dried in long, thin bunches like rope. When they are cooked and drained, he drops them, in small servings, into a nearby fast-flowing mountain river. The noodles travel downstream, becoming chilled by the glacial water along the way, and as they pass by, diners, sitting on wooden platforms called yuka over the water, pluck them from the stream with their chopsticks, dip them into a sauce, and eat. It sounded like an improbable fast-food delivery system, and not without its health and safety issues.

The fresh, clear, clean, soft water that flows from the mountains that surround Kyoto is an essential ingredient in its renowned and mineral-rich tofu, as well as its excellent sake, the tea ceremonies, and the dashi that is the foundation of kaiseki. It is also ideal for nagashi-somen, and I had heard there was a nagashi-somen restaurant close to the city—the only thing was, I didn’t know exactly where. I spent some fruitless days asking everyone who ought to know where it might be until, in the end, I did begin to wonder if the whole concept wasn’t just a myth propagated by the city’s tourist and water boards. But then came a chance meeting with an elderly kimono dealer in one of the city’s atmospheric old machiya, wooden houses built narrow but deep to circumvent the sixteenth-century shop-frontage tax. We’d gone to browse for vintage kimonos, a project that I naïvely thought might take an hour or so, but which ended up lasting the best part of a morning. As you can imagine, there are an awful lot of vintage kimonos in Kyoto, and I think I must have offered my considered opinion on a good number of them, while Asger and Emil slowly imploded with boredom.

But there was one silver lining: one of the kimono vendors managed to interpret my drawings of how I imagined a nagashi-somen restaurant might look. It turned out that one of only two nagashi-somen restaurants that she knew of in Japan was in the twin onsen towns of Kurama and Kibune, in the hills outside of Kyoto. She wrote the restaurant’s name—Hirobun—in both kanji characters and English and gave me detailed directions. We had to catch a train from the northeastern part of the city, get off at a station close to the end of the line, and walk uphill. There was only one road, which ran alongside a river toward the Kifune Shrine (dedicated to the god of water), she said. It wasn’t far from the station.

This was late September, the very end of the nagashi-somen season, she warned. She gave Hirobun a call just to check if they would be open and discovered that they were due to close for the winter the next day. This was our last chance to taste nagashi-somen.

We hurried straight from the kimono store to the nearest metro for the ride across Kyoto to take the local train up into the deep green, pine-covered mountains to the north. After an hour or so, we got off where the kimono seller had told us to, at the station by the Kibune River. The stationmaster there told us it was just a five-minute walk to the nagashi-somen restaurant. “Keep to the road beside the river,” he said, somewhat unnecessarily, as there was only one road, lined on the other side with impenetrable jungle.

This is where things started to go awry. “Five minutes! We can walk that, no problem,” I said gamely.

“Are you sure, Michael? It is quite a steep hill, and there’s no sidewalk,” said Lissen. Asger and Emil, playing with a large, now-dead hairy caterpillar they had found on the road, were too preoccupied to argue, and so we started walking, me a few yards ahead whistling a cheery hiking tune.

What was supposed to be a recreational family lunch outing soon turned into something rather more challenging, up a steep incline on a forest road strewn with the corpses of poisonous snakes and overhung with branches woven with the webs of spiders of a size I had never previously seen beyond the confines of a zoo.

We walked for over an hour—the shallow, sparkling river taunting our thirst—pausing every few minutes, initially to let Emil and Asger catch up, but then, after a while, to let me catch up. It had been some years since I’d tried to walk up a hill, particularly in humidity such as this. From time to time we were forced to jump into the undergrowth by rampaging buses whose timetables and stops remained a taunting enigma. I started to whimper, and I could sense Lissen’s mounting irritation at yet another arduous lunch pilgrimage, but Asger and Emil were happy enough poking the dead snakes.

We spotted civilization amid the pine trees ahead. We climbed farther until we eventually came to an onsen hotel and restaurant complex. But it was not our restaurant. Naturally, Hirobun would turn out to be the very last in the village, a further twenty minutes’ hike uphill. Along the way we passed about a dozen seductive wooden restaurants and hotels, many with wooden platforms over the river, decorated with softly glowing red lanterns and peopled by happy, relaxed diners and waitresses in lavish kimonos.

Finally, we came to Hirobun. I looked down to the platform over the river in the valley below. It was empty, but the waitress still sucked her teeth doubtfully, as they are taught to do at waitress school. She wasn’t sure whether she could fit us in. She disappeared into the kitchen to ask the owner, reappearing a while after to show us, grudgingly, to our table. At last, we were going to try nagashi-somen—to commune with the mighty spirit of the mountain river.

We descended a steep flight of wooden steps down the riverbank, passing a small bamboo hut, like an outhouse, and sat on the tatami platform suspended a foot or so over the shallow riverbed, beside the mossy rocks of the bank. In front of us was an open zinc gutter. It led from the wooden hut down to the platform, where it continued along a narrow counter in a loop in front of the diners’ seats.

As it turned out, rather than being dropped by the chef directly into the river for us to pluck as they flowed by, as if we were blessed visitors in some sylvan Arcadia, our noodles would be dumped into the gutter by the waitress just a couple of yards away, hiding out of sight in the hut.

It was a bit of an anticlimax. The waitress stuck her head around the corner of the hut to tell us to prepare for noodle launch. It was at that point, just as the first noodles rushed down-gutter toward us, catching us all by surprise, that I realized that I was sitting farthest downstream from the source of the noodles, with three other very hungry people, none of them renowned for their restraint at mealtimes, ahead of me. Needless to say, I spent most of lunch scrambling for leftovers. It soon became apparent that nagashi-somen has another flaw: the more wet noodles come your way, and the more you dip into your sauce, the more the sauce becomes diluted, so that, after a few mouthfuls, you end up dipping watery noodles in even more watery sauce. But by that stage we all just wanted to fill our groaning stomachs, and it was at least a quick way to do that.

The last bundle of noodles was pink and ume-, or pickled plum–, flavored, which our waitress had said would indicate our meal was over. “That was great!” said Asger. “Why can’t every dinner be like that!”