Memories Of Japan: A Paean to Perfection

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

by Diana Farr Louis

ATHENS Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—4/11/11—The strawberry vendor shook his head dolefully. “Very sorry, Madam. I have strawberries for this afternoon, strawberries for this evening and strawberrries for tomorrow but, to eat right now, I have nothing.”

I looked at him in amazement. His barrow was aglow with juicy-looking, luscious fruit, all uniformly red and appetizing. Surely, somewhere amongst those ruby jewels there must lurk a handful for present delectation? With difficulty, I persuaded him to sell me a small bagful of strawberries that wouldn’t damage his self-esteem.

This little interchange took place on a quiet back street in Tokyo in June 1970. I can’t remember how I found myself there, but the scene remains imprinted on my memory, emblematic of the perfection that so many Japanese seemed to strive for and so often attained.

I wandered on, savoring the sweet berries, unable to imagine their tasting any better in a few hours’ time. And somehow arrived near one of Tokyo’s main metro stations, where Herb, a business colleague of my husband’s, was waiting to take me to lunch. Herb was one of those people who had fallen in love with the Far East and had spent so much time there that his manner(s) had become much more refined than those of the New Yorker he had once been.

As we walked towards the station, Herb was holding a cigarette butt. “I can’t throw this on the sidewalk. Look how clean it is!” After another block, a street sweeper came to the rescue. She was at the curb, coaxing some specks of dirt into an almost empty dustpan. I thought of New York and all its litter.

Then, Herb surprised me further. We took the escalator into the depths of the station, three stories down, to a restaurant fitted out like a Victorian pub: beamed ceilings, booths with wooden benches and thick tables, blue-and-white porcelain decorating the shelves. But there were no pork pies and sausage rolls. There was, in fact, no menu. Instead, the waiter brought one tiny dish at a time. Each one more beautiful and exquisite than the next. Of about perhaps 15, a single asparagus spear joined to a morsel of crabmeat stands out. The combinations were held together by some alchemy, not a batter like tempura, but something divine and crunchy. And when we had had enough, the waiter simply stopped serving; he didn’t have to ask. Was it experience or telepathy?

Later that week, a small group of us company employees and wives dined at the smallest restaurant I have ever seen. There were no tables, just a long counter that sat perhaps 12 people. The chef performed before us, executing something between a ballet and a puppet show with impossibly long chopsticks that seemed grafted onto his hands. Using no other utensil, he mixed a tempura batter so light it might have been made with fairy dust, and dipped a score of different delicacies in and out of it, into the frying wok, and onto communal plates one by one. Gossamer, ethereal, sublime . . . . No words come even close to describing his art. He had been tempura chef to the emperor.

In another life, I was lucky enough to visit Japan twice, in the winter of 66 and June of 70. Both times thanks to my then husband, Alexi’s, job as VP for International Development at Encyclopaedia Britannica. The first time was the last stop on a two-month trip around the world. The second, we flew straight from New York for a board meeting that coincided with Expo 70 in Osaka. (Talk about executive perks!)

Unsurprisingly, perfection did not reside around every corner. I did not find it in the restaurant that specialized in raw chicken (!); I was too nervous to enjoy it in the restaurant that served only fugu (blowfish), where one nick of the gall bladder in the cleaning process would release a lethal poison, making each bite potentially your last; and our cruise down the Inland Sea was memorable only for the density of the fog.

But it was present in much higher doses than in most countries I’d seen. The train to Kyoto passed by sock-like hills stuck with spiky trees that I’d assumed were impressionistic renditions when I’d seen them in Japanese landscape paintings; Mt Fuji wore its mantle of snow as regally as in any photograph; and not a pebble or rake stroke was out of place in the famous Zen garden. As for the Moss Garden, have man and nature ever produced anything as harmonious and delicate? It radiated serenity, perfection, both in sunshine and in rain.

But, sometimes, the Japanese sensibility did not quite match ours.

On our first trip to Kyoto, we had no Herb to give us dining tips. So Alexi flipped through the tourist guide in search of the best restaurant. He settled on a rural inn that advertised wild boar. A taxi driver with few words of English drove us for miles through the darkness up a mountain until we reached a long low building made of paper and pine. A stuffed porker stood at the entrance. The hostess spoke no English at all, but Alexi started grunting, made his forefingers into tusks, while miming eating and pointing at the boar. The woman looked puzzled but then nodded and led us down an empty corridor past several closed doors before she opened one at the end.

She bade us sit on mats on the floor next to an electric radiator. Our stockinged feet took ages to warm up. We waited so long we thought we’d been forgotten but, finally, a kimono-clad woman entered our bare cell. With a dish of candied fish. Our hearts sank. Even though famished, we could not eat them.

After another long wait, the piece de resistance arrived. Wild boar unrecognizably sliced into prosciutto-thin strips, accompanied by fine vegetable shavings and a pot of boiling water placed above an alcohol flame. With gestures our waitress explained that we were to dip the veg and meat into the pot with our chopsticks, cook them briefly, and then drink the broth. The dish was called misutaki, but Alexi thought she’d said Mitsotaki, the name of a Greek politician.

His chuckles turned to grumbles of frustration when he realized just how far removed our boiled slivers of meat were from the boar steak he’d imagined. “Harrumph,” he growled, “this won’t do.” Desire being the mother of ingenuity, Alexi skewered a slice with a chopstick and proceeded to grill it over the chafing dish flame. We burned the chopsticks and our fingers, charred the meat, and sipped watery broth, no doubt confirming the image of utterly barbarous Westerners. Our quest for wild boar ended up a gastronomical and financial disaster, costing $150 (in 1966).

Despite not having returned to Japan in 40 years, I have countless indelible memories of those two visits. Of my first bullet train streaking soundlessly through the countryside. Of the civilized way to bathe—scrub outside the tub and then get in to soak. Of the Tokyo fish market at dawn, a raucous auction of huge tuna and breakfasting on sashimi at the workers’ bar. Of unfailing politeness, including an L-challenged note at the hotel: “Dear Mrs. Radas, did you reave your groves in the robby?”

But I know that such striving for and appreciation of perfection continued on so many levels. Just last fall, a friend who travels often to Japan sent me a birthday present of two laquered toothpick holders in the shape of mini-eggplants. You cannot imagine how pleasing they are to the eye and to the touch; even the toothpicks are carved.

My heart goes out to all the Japanese. I am so sorry their quest for perfection did not extend to nuclear reactors and tsunamis. But even in their suffering they are showing us how to behave: with little acts of perfect kindness to strangers and neighbors in the most appalling conditions.