A Cook's Tour (24 page)

     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.