Untangling My Chopsticks (21 page)

A more recent phenomenon in the gadget-crazy country of Japan is the electric mochi-making machine for the home. As compact as a bread machine, this automatic device is rapidly becoming a countertop fixture for many Japanese families.

Other artisanal products, such as tofu, soba, and miso, face the same perilous future. With machines producing all these foodstuffs, they no longer contain the individual expression of the maker, and thus are robbed of their significance and spirit. I realized I would probably never taste homemade mochi like this again. Even worse, nor would many of the Omura children.

12.

ew Year's Eve day began with a trip to Nishiki market. My first pilgrimage to this temple of food took place several days after I had arrived in Kyoto. Whenever I visit a foreign city, my initial stop is rarely a famous monument or museum. It is a food market.

I have always believed you can learn as much about a culture by the ingredients they put in their mouths, as by the buildings they erect. The abundance and freshness of the foodstuffs, for example, indicate the strength of a country's economy, as well as its transportation system. The actual items on display offer insight into people's diet, health, and lifestyle. An open market is like a living museum of history. And that morning at Nishiki there was a special exhibit: ingredients for the New Year's feast.

A fine mist hung in the air as Tomiko, her mother, and I ap
proached the green-, red-, and canary-yellow-striped awning of the market. Surrounded by clanging
pachinko
parlors and two-hundred-year-old inns, Nishiki lies one block north of Shijo Street in the heart of Kyoto. The four-hundred-meter-long corridor of food stalls is called Brocade Street, after the colorful Nishijin textile district, where most of Kyoto's kimono makers reside. Although this was probably my sixth visit to the market, I could feel my heart quicken in anticipation of the more than one hundred fifty stalls that lay waiting.

Initially, Nishiki was a place to sell fish, sake, and produce. But after the warring samurai destroyed it in the Onin War (1467–77), the market was rebuilt in the early 1500s to its present expanded form. In the early morning, chefs from Kyoto's elite inns and kaiseki restaurants can be seen picking up delicacies for their evening menus. Mushanokoji tea school purchases foods for its tea kaiseki classes at the market. And that day, it seemed, the whole of Kyoto had wedged itself in that narrow colorful corridor to procure the bounty that lay pickled, iced, dried, smoked, pressed, piled, and carefully arranged for Oshogatsu.

Before I knew it, I had gotten caught up in the rush of mothers, babies in strollers, clusters of housewives, teenagers, old men, and kids. A grandmother in a kimono gored me in the ribs with her elbow. Someone butted me from behind. Several housewives jostled past me. This was a new sensation in a country where physical contact is reserved for the bedroom. I immediately sought refuge in a pickle shop, Tomiko's first stop. Wooden barrels lined with heavy sheets of clear plastic held dozens of pickled vegetables, including limp whole Chinese cabbages, skinny green cucumbers buried in rice-bran mash, and sweet white radishes seasoned with hot peppers and kelp. The store was jammed with people. Small white ceramic platters held samples to be picked up with tiny metal tongs.

Folded moist washcloths lay nearby to clean your fingers. “This is crazy,” yelled Tomiko over her shoulder. “We'll find another pickle shop farther on.” We plunged back into the crowd.

Like a leaf on a river, I was carried past a sushi stand selling
maki
rolls, fat rice logs covered with nori and bulging with sweet pickled gourd, carrot, braised shiitake mushroom caps, sweet omelet, and cooked spinach. I coasted past a dry cleaner on my left, a
yakitori
shop on my right, then a tea and herbal medicine shop, and a store selling bowls of sweet white beans and eel livers in a glossy brown sauce.

Suddenly, Tomiko swerved into a flower shop to pick up pine boughs, clusters of ruby nandina berries, and dusty-green ferns to use as decorative garnishes. After grabbing the greenery, she and her mother ducked into another store selling dried beans. They had the market list. They were in charge. I tagged behind.

The smell of roasting tea billowed into the air, mingling with the salty tang of miso, perfume, wet wool, and grilling fish. Bicycles and motorbikes leaned up against the sides of stalls, next to stacks of Styrofoam fish boxes. Men in rubber boots splashed about the puddled floors unloading fish onto white enamel trays.

I lost Tomiko and her mother at the eel stall. It was the place to buy prepared fillets of
unagi,
as meltingly tender as a stick of soft butter. A spotlight shone down on the delicate fillets, gleaming under a varnish of sweet soy glaze. Every eel shop and restaurant makes its own special glaze, which eel purists often forgo. All eel lovers, however, sprinkle on sansho, the tingly tongue-numbing green powder from the ground dried seedpods of the prickly ash tree that lifts the dish from sumptuous to sensational.

At that particular eel shop, the fillets, priced according to their fatty succulence, were still warm and drenched with sauce.

The next few shops were a sashimi lover's paradise. Spiky
forest-green sea urchins swollen with creamy yellow eggs sat in green plastic baskets beside huge steak-like sides of tuna, caught only hours ago from the icy waters off Japan. Gigantic octopuses with suction cups like the bottom of rubber bathtub mats rested on ice near sapphire-silver mackerel imbricated on round white platters.

I pivoted around on tiptoe trying to spot Tomiko or her mother bobbing about in the sea of black-haired women. They had disappeared. Fortunately, a Fuji film salesman outside the market had given me a Mylar balloon, which was still looped around my fingers. “Hold on to it,” Tomiko had advised. “That way you'll be easy to spot.”

So I kept moving with the crowd, soaring past a shop selling smoky pink bonito fish flakes and another one peddling wrinkly dried mushroom caps. I shot by a shop proffering wheat gluten, red and white for New Year's and shaped into knots and flowers, followed by a liquor store with ziggurats of sake, whiskey, and wine in the window. I flew past a stall crammed with split-toed white socks and restaurant tunics, a shop dedicated to fresh and dried yuba, the high-protein skin skimmed off boiling soymilk, and a pork store selling raw and cooked cutlets dredged in
panko,
the fluffy white breadcrumbs that look like snowflakes. Then I heard a familiar voice.

“Victoria, over here,” called Tomiko, waving from a kelp shop. She and her mother were fingering huge olive-brown sheets that looked like skateboards. There were also cellophane packages of the dried algae cut into crisp snacking squares the size of Scrabble pieces. When I apologized for getting separated, Tomiko flicked her hand, in a gesture of “don't worry,” then purchased a sheet of kelp. We would use it to make dashi for our New Year's Eve noodle soup, as well as other dishes.

We hurried on to several more stalls, buying eggs, soba noodles, long-whiskered shrimp, wheat gluten, cooked duck, and a chunk of tenderloin. I hooked a bag over my arm to make room for a new one filled with a bag of loose green tea, a bottle of sake, and some field yams, small brown shingle-skinned tubers that when peeled and cooked turn sticky and sweet. In went some broccoli, fresh shiitake mushrooms, and Japanese red carrots, rarely found outside Japan, and a box of strawberries wrapped like a Christmas gift in glossy white paper. Tomiko carried three bags, and her mother carried two. I staggered out with four. Then, after heaving the groceries into the trunk of the Honda, we drove home to cook.

With no time to spare, Tomiko and her mother spread our purchases around the kitchen to begin preparing the Oshogatsu meal called osechi ryori. I had thought the term referred to a single feast, like Thanksgiving, that we would cook New Year's Day and enjoy that night. I was mistaken. Osechi ryori consists of thirty-four or so small dishes that are cooked in advance of New Year's night and then eaten cold or at room temperature over the three-day Oshogatsu holiday period. To keep the foods from spoiling during a time when refrigerators did not exist, cooks would “preserve” them in a potent mixture of dashi, soy, and sugar before packing them into a three-tiered stack of lacquer boxes.

The practice of preparing this special feast to last in cold storage for several days evolved as a way to give everyone, including the family cook, a three-day period of rest. Shops closed, so foods were not available over the holiday. Families snuffed out the cooking fire in the floor pit of traditional homes on December 31 (it would be lit again after the New Year).

The word osechi is an abbreviation of
osechiku,
a term originally used to describe the special foods that were prepared to celebrate the
go sekku,
or five seasonal festivals. In a tradition brought over from China, seasonal offerings (such as newly harvested rice, vegetables, or fish) were made to the appropriate gods on the
sechi-bi
(ritual day). Most of the five sekku have lost their religious significance (many have become festivals for children) and the term osechi has become associated exclusively with the special foods prepared for New Year's. Since
ryori
means “cooking” in Japanese, department stores, when they first started offering pre-made New Year's foods, borrowed the term
osechi ryori
to give their boxed treats a luxurious image. It obviously worked; nowadays, few families make their own osechi ryori, but instead purchase it from department stores and caterers.

Tomiko withdrew several knives from the kitchen drawer and handed them out, along with aprons. She took the denim one, her mother tied on a white one, and I put on the black one printed with dancing pigs. “Do you need this?” Tomiko held out a small cutting board. I nodded and took it over to the wooden table where she and I sometimes ate breakfast. Then, having organized my ingredients, I began making two dishes from tea kaiseki class: the brown-and-coral sweet-and-sour salmon-kelp rolls and clams cloaked with golden sweet miso.

Tomiko and her mother set to work on the counter by the stove. And what a pair! Knives flashing, water rushing, and chopsticks clicking, they simmered dashi; braised mushrooms; grilled shrimp; seared tenderloin; slivered carrots; softened field yams; boiled black soybeans; steamed broccoli; hydrated wheat gluten; blanched snow peas; and pickled radish. In a matter of hours, Tomiko and her mother had prepared thirty-two dishes. I had fin
ished two. But to my relief, they looked just like the ones from tea kaiseki class.

We carefully arranged all the foods in Tomiko's beautiful stacked lacquer boxes that she only pulled out for Oshogatsu. Called
jubako,
they were brick red inside and black outside with painted gold pine boughs adorning the tops and sides.

Jubako are a fancy form of
bento
(a compartmentalized boxed meal). Apparently, warrior lords invented them as a way to divide their spartan rations among their vassals. Allotments of rice, vegetables, and pickles were placed in small sectioned boxes made of wood and woven reeds. Over time, the boxes became elegant lacquer containers that commoners would fill with picnic foods to take to cherry-viewing parties, Kabuki theater performances (to nibble on between acts), or on long train rides. Today, you can buy casual bento in supermarkets, train stations, highway rest areas, and subway stations. Made of cardboard, Styrofoam, or balsa, they contain all kinds of cold cooked nibbles, such as braised vegetables, tofu, sushi, and at least two regional specialties that add a local flavor to Japan's own form of take-out food.

After garnishing the goodies in Tomiko's jubako with sprigs of pine, fern fronds, and shiny red nandina berries to symbolize purification, we placed the boxes in the unheated tatami room off the kitchen. Yasu had built this traditional Japanese room for Tomiko, who still hoped to teach flower arranging in it one day.

That night, Tomiko and her mother, Yasu, Toro, and I gathered around the television in the family room to watch the “Singing Battle Between the Red and the White Teams,” a cherished New Year's Eve program starring Japan's hottest pop singers.