Urban Japan offers enough outlandish distractions to occupy even the most demanding visitors, but after more than two months of traveling, with only glimpses of countryside from fast-moving trains and planes, we were yearning for the beach and some subtropical sea.
Okinawa is an archipelago of 159 islands, historically known as the Kingdom of the Ryukyus. It lies midway between Japan and Taiwan, 425 miles from the southern tip of Japan proper. Thirty-seven of the islands are inhabited, but the majority of its 1.31 million people live on the main island, Okinawa Honto, which is also the home of the largest U.S. Air Force base in the western Pacific, with twenty thousand military personnel. These days, this is a largely unwelcome legacy of some of the most devastating battles of World War II, which left a third of this hitherto peaceful people dead. More died in Okinawa than in Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined, and much of the main island was leveled by bombing.
We rolled up—with our by now rather disheveled luggage—at a pleasant, vaguely Hawaiian-themed beach hotel. Even though it was October, the water was still just about warm enough to swim in, although the various signs on the beach warning of the myriad creatures that might cause us injury if we went into the water diminished our enthusiasm somewhat. We made do with burying each other in the sand and building castles.
As usual, I soon grew restless with sitting on a beach and managed to drum up some enthusiasm for a day trip to Naha, the capital. I had heard there was an excellent market on Heiwa Street and wanted to take a look.
On our way the next day, we stopped off in an awamori shop. Awamori is the local distilled liquor, similar to shochu, but made from rice. Okinawa is infested with habu snakes, and one use they find for them is to drown them in the liquor and leave the corpses to infuse—the 190-proof alcohol neutralizes the venom, apparently. You can’t really taste the snake, by the way; actually, you can’t taste much apart from the alcohol.
The market itself, though smaller than ones we had seen elsewhere in Japan, was fascinating, its produce totally different from anything I’d seen in mainland Japan. As with Tsukiji, a fish market lay at its heart, but there was plenty to divert our interest on the way in—more snakes, for starters, some six feet long, dried, coiled, and hanging from the ceiling like Gothic Catherine wheels; a preserved shark’s head for ¥135,000 ($1,200); sturdy-looking Okinawan doughnuts; vacuum-packed pigs’ heads (pork is very popular on the islands, a legacy of uninterrupted trading with China over many millennia); a large konbu and katsuobushi shop, an indication of the central role dashi plays in Okinawan food (they eat more konbu per capita than anyone else in Japan); and intriguing, lilac-colored sweet-potato cakes. The fishmongers’ stalls were filled with the most extraordinary tropical fish, some orange and yellow striped, others blue as a David Hockney swimming pool—and not just fish, but crustaceans: monster crabs, strange clawless lobsters, smaller purple crabs, massive conches, and sea snails.
One of the vendors explained that we could order anything we liked, and it would be sent upstairs to a restaurant to be cooked for us. I had to be physically restrained by Lissen from ordering a giant conch, but not before I had ordered numerous other, smaller fish, along with a serving of irabu-jiru, or snake stew, for us all.
Upstairs, in an enjoyably chaotic bus station–style atmosphere, at a ramshackle restaurant (one of several in an informal food court there) with mismatched chairs and paper napkins, we awaited our snake. We were slightly taken aback to see that it still looked very much like snake, black skin and all, but, to their credit, both Asger and Emil tucked in, picking the flesh from the hundreds of small bones. I could hardly balk at it myself now, so I took a deep breath and a small nibble. It was a little like a slow-braised oxtail, tender and gamy and full of bones, but I couldn’t see past the fact that I was eating a serpent and quietly moved the bowl aside to attack the whole grilled fish and astonishingly good sea urchin. The latter was locally caught and ferociously expensive, but simply one of the most sensuous and transcendent foodstuffs I have ever tasted. If mermaids were to open a small, artisanal ice cream parlor, this is how their vanilla ice cream would taste.
* * *
That night, for the first time in our whole journey, one of our number became ill. Emil started to complain that he felt “funny.” His arm hurt, he said. We rolled up his sleeve, or at least we tried to but couldn’t, as it had swollen up. We gave him an antihistamine tablet, but that had no effect. I would have to take him to a hospital.
The nearest was in the small coastal town of Nago. The hospital, high up on a hill overlooking the bay, took an age to find, and I drove around in thickening darkness and growing panic, lost in this strangest of lands with a sick (snake-poisoned?) child and no sense of direction. Emil had started to make wheezing noises, and I was terrified he was having a severe allergic reaction to something and that his throat was closing up.
Eventually, by sheer fluke, I found the hospital. It was in a bedraggled building, not what you would expect from one of the richest nations on earth. The waiting room was half-full; almost all of those waiting were elderly. They looked at Emil and me with some trepidation, and Emil shrank behind me in mutual terror. I smiled weakly at the desk staff, pointing to Emil’s arm while gripping my throat. He was looking dreadfully pale, with dark lines beneath his eyes. What on earth was wrong?
Rather embarrassingly, we were given preferential treatment, and after just a couple of minutes’ wait we were ushered through into the doctor’s office. The doctor, a shy young man, looked as startled to see us as his patients had, and for a moment, the panic in his eyes had me worried that he would simply flee and leave us there.
Quickly, to grab his attention, I rolled up Emil’s sleeve. Emil winced.
The doctor examined the arm in a vague, distracted way, then listened to Emil’s breathing with a stethoscope. “Don’t worry, I can still whistle,” Emil told him (he had recently learned, much to his non-whistling elder brother’s irritation). He then tried to demonstrate, but he didn’t have the breath.
At this point, the doctor walked out, which wasn’t encouraging, but he soon returned with an older, female doctor who spoke good English. She said that they were going to give him an injection. Of what, she did not say, but she did ask if he was allergic to anything. I wanted to say, well, yes, clearly, but that would have raised more questions than I could answer, so I said no, not that I knew of.
To this day, I have no idea what happened. Maybe Emil is allergic to snake (not that easy to test for where we live); perhaps it was one of the tropical fish we ate or more likely some kind of insect bite, but the doctor gave him the injection, and his arm deflated over the course of that evening. By the end of it, Emil was whistling like a kettle.