I first went to Kyoto, Japan as a youth of 26 in 1979, where to my horror I discovered that even after three months of study, I couldn’t speak the language. At the time, my concept was to do a book on Nagisa Oshima, who you could say was the Godard of Japan, but I underestimated the difficulties and necessary budget. Forty years later, even though I’m now fluent, I am still amazed when I go to a small Japanese eatery that can’t possibly have a limitless menu, that the waiter will discuss what I can and won’t eat, as if there’s much of a choice in the first place. Rather than assure them that I am food macho, meaning “I can eat anything weirder than you have,” I prefer to name some far-out victual and say that I don’t quite enjoy it. “I really hate funazushi,” I explain, “but I like most kusaya.” Funazushi is historically one of sushi’s ancestors, a funa carp aged in salt for a year or four, intensely stinky and quite difficult to like. Kusaya is mild by comparison, being merely a fish that is fermented in aged sea brine, often a brine recipe handed down through generations of its craftsmen.

These are not often known by white boys, much less savored. I didn’t get to this point by being squeamish. When I first landed, I hadn’t yet tried the soft, very white, custardy tofu popular in Kyoto; the pork gyoza dumplings, either boiled or fried; the local cabbage and seafood pancake called okonomi-yaki; or even the most elementary sushi. I lived next door to a kamaboko fish cake factory, where aging craftsmen in white hats and tall green rubber boots waded around stainless-steel tables refining fish into pink-colored logs on little stamped wood serving trays that are included in the final package. I made a point of trying everything at least once. On my humble budget at the time, it was experiment or starve. Within three months, my money and language skills were exhausted and I returned to New York.

For about twenty years, I continued to study Japanese, worked in a Japanese real estate brokerage on Madison Avenue, and traveled to Tokyo on business several times. In 1997, my Asian adventure reawakened with a small bowl of salted squid called shio-kara. I had gone to open a gallery show in Tokyo’s Harajuku district with a painter buddy from Tribeca, where my loft was just down Varick from his. Taro Chiezo cut a slight and delicate boyish and artistic figure. When we got to Tokyo, his wife introduced me to a tall model named Kanako. About 5’7”, short natural hair and very skinny, dressed in an unpretentious sweater and pants with little jewelry, she was lounging on their sofa when I came in. Very cheerful and full of energy, she seemed tempting and fresh.

Taro and his wife took us out for tempura at Miyakawa across from the Nezu Museum in a fancy part of town. An aging wizard and his young apprentice had their mise en place down perfectly and churned out fried veggies and fish non-stop while a granny rushed around delivering miso soup, rice, and pickles. It was super-fresh and tasty.

Taro asked Kanako and me to make the second party for their close friends to come to their house after the opening, cast aside the formality and get down. We agreed and made a budget with them for wine, cheese and crackers, and so on. Kanako and I agreed to meet at 3 p.m. the day of the opening and set up the party.

The day arrived and Kanako and I bought the supplies and taxied to their place. We opened their apartment door and beheld…absolute Bedlam. Their place was filthy. The carpet looked like the pavement of the Avenue B subway station, with gum spots ground into a featureless mouse gray. There was actual garbage just laying around and old newspapers and used food containers. It was very surprising in Japan, where everyone spends all day cleaning just for the exercise.

Kanako and I stared at each other and then wandered around doing triage. The kitchen had cockroaches bad. The bathroom tile may have been white underneath but we couldn’t tell. We found some garbage bags and started to clean up. Then I took the bathroom and scrubbed it for an hour until it was a light gray and Kanako squirted cleanser around the kitchen and did what she could.

It was kind of funny. You know how when people first meet, they usually are very nervous and say clichés like, “Er, nice weather, isn’t it?” By contrast, we would periodically meet in the living room, wipe the sweat from our brows and teach each other expletives or how to say ‘disgusting’ in our native languages. We learned that we liked to entertain, we liked it clean, and we weren’t afraid of hard work. It was a nice way to start a relationship.

We battled the bugs to a standoff and laid out the food, well-wrapped, iced the drinks, and then went to the opening. The hour for our second party duly arrived and about twenty trooped up to their pad. Taro and his wife didn’t comment on our efforts, which we thought was outrageous.

During the party, someone asked Kanako who was her boyfriend. She said, “I don’t have one.”

Then they asked me who was my girlfriend. I said, “Kanako,” and kissed her full on the mouth. She didn’t react but she didn’t pull away, either, so I thought I was doing well.

In those days, Kanako had a conversation trick. She would ask you something and then hold her fist under your mouth like a microphone. After the party, we were outside by a subway entrance and she said, “How long do you have left in your trip here?”

“A week,” I replied.

“And what do you want to do with your week?” and she stuck the microphone in my face.

I was flabbergasted but recovered quickly, “Find a hotel and stay there the whole time with you, of course!”

Now it was her turn to be surprised.

“Oh,” she said, and then noticed the subway entrance. “Well, this is my train. Bye!” and she disappeared down the steps at a dead run.

I burst out laughing. “Bye!” I shouted after her. I was 44 years old at the time. I knew this behavior meant that she wasn’t interested. OK, I was an adult. We’d go to a dinner or something and then I’d get on the plane. No problem.

 

We met for dinner in the densely crowded and garishly lit Shibuya Station area of Tokyo, where eight major train lines serve 3 million passengers every day—figure four Grand Central Stations. I said I was fine with any kind of food and she suggested a sort of bar and restaurant of the type called a nomiya. We walked through the back streets and found a humble wooden building with a blue cloth sign over the door and a red lantern standing beside it. The sign was so low we had to bow to enter, which I now know is the point of hanging it so low.

The compact place was a rectangular counter around a tight square kitchen in which two chefs stood like sushi guys, ready to chat, pour, plate your food, and when all else failed, crack terrible jokes. Ten salarymen with their ties loose were drinking, laughing, and snacking. The wall behind the counter seats was given to coat racks, posters, and a Shinto shrine with folded white and gold paper tied with red strings on a board up by the ceiling.

The chef assumed I didn’t speak Japanese and asked Kanako, “Does he like fish?”

“My favorite seafood is squid,” I answered. I no longer take offense when Japanese automatically assume that I can’t speak their language.

The chef expressed his regret to Kanako while vigorously wiping the counter, “We don’t have any fresh squid today but maybe he’d like to try some shio-kara salted squid…?”

She caught my nod and relayed my assent to him.

In a small blue and white bowl, raw squid was cut into strips rather than rings and presented in a brownish sauce of salted fermented squid innards. I lifted a strip to my mouth with my chopsticks, wagged my eyebrows, and chowed. The intense saltiness was perfect with sake. The chef seemed a bit disappointed that I liked it but Kanako was only encouraged. I almost heard her thinking, “Hmm, maybe this guy could live in Japan after all.”

Japanese comprise 2.5% of the world’s population but eat about 17% of the world’s fish production, a completely unsustainable party that I feel privileged to partake of while it lasts. Many of my favorite fish are quite small, say 4” or 5” in length. Among other dishes, we tried kohada, a shad that changes its Japanese name with its size, having different names for small, medium, and large, with kohada being only the medium size. They reminded me of herring, in part because they were strongly vinegared. We tried sayori, a half-beak with a protruding nose. I marveled at how thin sayori were and Kanako told me that people called her that because she was thin. We then turned to cradle robbing and had shirasu, tiny sardine sprats, each about a half-inch long with two black eyes arranged on either side of a miniscule white body.

Asians find it odd that Westerners begin meals with bread. It’s traditional in rice cultures to begin with something small, move on to more substantial bites, and end the meal with rice or noodles. That night, we finished with tea on rice, a dish called ocha-zuke. It’s an anti-hangover provision—the tea rehydrates you, the rice absorbs any sake in your stomach, and there’s a bit of protein or seaweed or pickle to hold your interest and test your ability to focus.

Over the complementary final cup of tea, the conversation turned to poetry. “Who’s your favorite poet?” she asked.

I had to think awhile. “I guess uh, Yeats? Wallace Stevens? Gee, it’s kinda hard to choose. Frank O’Hara? John Donne. Rimbaud or Baudelaire? Li Po. Pablo Neruda? Who’s yours?”

“I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of…Stéphane Mallarmé?” I goggled at her, flummoxed. “You never heard of him?”

“Wow, ‘…A n’importe ce qui valut/ le blanc souci de notre toile,’ ” I quoted. “No, I’m just amazed. Do you know how few Americans have ever heard of Mallarmé? Is he popular in Japan?”

“No, and I don’t really know much about him but…”

“It’s really amazing that you’ve read him.” Even if she didn’t know much about him, it showed fantastic style and taste. She probably heard me thinking, “Hmm, maybe she could live in New York after all.”

Outside, we walked by the same subway entrance as the other night. I unhooked my arm from hers and said, “Well, here’s your train.”

“Oh no,” Kanako replied, relinking our arms tightly. “I’m coming home with you!”

“You are? But I rented the cheapest damn’ business hotel in Tokyo! Oh no!”

 

In fact, Kanako and I did hook up, and have been together since that fateful bowl of squid. The next day, we moved to the Four Seasons for the week I had envisioned. In New York, we ate more or less normally but every day we were in Japan for the total of a year after that night, I experienced at least one food I had never tasted before, and some days ten such foods. I learned the words for hundreds of unfamiliar fish, fruits, vegetables, roots, and dumplings. Some of these experiences really tested my faith, like blowfish, parts of which are poisonous and result in a horrible and painful death. But others were just weird.

For example, take the chicken ramen master. We cadged a twenty-minute ride from our home to residential Gotanda with Eri-chan, a well-heeled tea friend of Kanako’s who extravagantly maintained a car in Tokyo. We went early, around 6:30 p.m., because according to Eri, the chef only made 25 portions of ramen noodles per day and just closed when he ran out. And even worse, he ate one portion per day to taste-test it so really there were only 24 customer portions. It occurred to me that the guy probably hand-made his noodles every day.

By the side of a thoroughfare near a local subway stop, there was a small, low, plain concrete building with a beat-up sign that said something indecipherable to me about peaches and cherries. Eri poked her nose through the cloth curtain and announced our threesome. We entered and took stools at a worn wooden counter that seated only eight, with another two seats on each side of the door, twelve seats total.

After a while, the diminutive proprietor took our order—each would have one gyoza dumpling and one bowl of the house signature chicken ramen. Now to my taste, the most delicious dumplings still come from China, their place of origin. My local gyoza dumpling place in Minami-Aoyama is called Darma-ya, after the roly-poly Buddha doll, and they also make wicked ramen. Besides the ramen noodles in pork soup, which come plain, you can get various additions—wads of pork stew redolent with fat, pickled vegetables, or tofu. The whole business is characteristically cheap at around $10.

And the customers demonstrate another kind of food machismo when they eat the noodles pretty much straight from the pot. While our culture is no exception, given that chicken soup comes at the temperature of molten lava, I find this behavior puzzling. Don’t they burn their palates? True, they take the noodles with gusty slurps of air, thus cooling them slightly while adding to the general din, but I’ve tried this and the noodles’ temperature remains just below boiling. It’s just one of those arcane Asian mysteries that I will probably never understand, although I have plenty of time to meditate on the issue while the noodles, suspended in midair on chopsticks, get to cool down to the point where they are edible.

Eri, Kanako and I fell into a discussion of our favorite classic films. I pleaded for Casablanca, which they readily concurred was fantastic. Their choices were Japanese: Eri went for All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe, a young fantasy author who was new to me. Kanako liked Kon Ichikawa’s The Makioka Sisters, which I recognized as the classic masterpiece of the famous novelist Tanizaki.

The conversation turned to vegetarianism, and how some vegetarians eat eggs but not chicken. “I don’t understand,” Eri said. “Someone could eat eggs and call it nutrition but not chicken ’cause that’s being a carnivore?”

“What’s so strange about that?” I asked. “I mean… it’s the same sort of deal: If you use a feather, you’re being erotic; if you use the whole chicken, they call you a pervert.”

The gyoza were served and we were distracted from the conversation by their sheer size. Most gyoza are bite-sized morsels. These were more like sliders, with a minced pork and garlic chive middle surrounded by the handmade dumpling dough. They were delicious but I was glad I hadn’t ordered two.

Next the chicken soup arrived. I was a bit nonplussed since ramen usually comes fully assembled, whereas this was just a rich yellow chicken broth that wasn’t even salted. The old guy brought over two long baskets full of packets of salt from around the world—Himalayan, Asian, South American, French, and others I didn’t recognize. The idea was to put a pinch on your spoon to taste, dip in some soup, and slurp.

He came by with noodles for each of us and put them in our bowls with long cooking chopsticks, then added a few scallions. I gave up on the pinches of salt on my spoon and just added my own salt to the broth. As I did so, my ears started to parse the other conversations from the side tables.

“Does he pull his own noodles?”

“Sure, it’s only 25 portions. Why would he buy them?”

“Delicious! So maybe five or six chickens a night, right?”

“Hmm, maybe ginger but no garlic. Negi leeks and…” I didn’t understand the rest but Kanako told me that they sounded like chefs, who had come to taste the master’s broth.

The old guy called his wife to help, for the joint was now packed and people were waiting outdoors. I was almost finished when his wife, also under five feet tall in traditional indigo working garb, showed up and promptly started berating him for his lackadaisical service, which made for a grumpy two-headed vaudeville act to go with the noodles.

 

In early 1998, Kanako and her friend Ha-chan took me to a yakitori joint called Hagakure, named after the 18^th century book about bushido, which is the martial arts way of the samurai. Ha-chan makes rock videos for a living, a rather nice living, and collects Astro Boy and other figurines; his apartment is full of them. In fact, there’s little room to sit what with all the collectibles littering the place. That day we had gone to a show of antique kimonos which were elegant but then hit on this low life contrast idea for dinner. Kanako and Ha-chan seemed to be long-time platonic friends of the sort that is unusual even in Tokyo, where due to small apartments and the hugeness of the city, lack of convenience makes for lots of hanging around. We saw him every few weeks at that time, and he seemed completely devoted to Kanako in an elder-brotherly way.

But perhaps there is a latent sexuality there, and not just his fascination with antique women’s clothes. The restaurant Hagakure was a dirtyish place for Japan, and along with innards and skin and other normal food macho excursions, which were pretty tasty I might add, he ordered kobukuro (baby bags). They turned out to be young pork uteri, cut into narrow rounds and presented in vinegar with scallions. Raw. They looked like sausages, pink with a white rim, but with a faint triangular opening in the center. A hefty portion, too. I was shocked to discover they were quite edible with very subtle flavor, although they were more weird than delicious. Kanako couldn’t eat but one, joking that she felt like a cannibal.

I remember wondering why Ha-chan would inject this bizarre sexuality into their platonic relationship, and particularly in front of me. Was it an oblique reference to foreigner’s willingness to orally please ladies in bed? Was he asserting his manhood? He too can consume females, although he mostly just sits next to them, regarding them with appetite? His brown eyes seemed innocent enough.

The place also advertised tama, (testicles), and Kanako immediately fantasized going there with six of her model friends and ordering two dozen, popping them while discussing their boyfriends or whatever. Suddenly the wood decor of the joint suggested Tennessee and mountain oysters, and I wanted to hear a jukebox play Patsy Kline. Looking at the kobukuro, I wondered whose girlfriend I had stolen. We said good night, and Ha-chan returned to his apartment full of boyish figurines.

 

For meals that we didn’t eat out, I managed to cook various things in our tiny apartment. I expected to cook because many of my previous girlfriends had only rudimentary kitchen skills. We sat down one night to my fiftieth version of mushroom tacos with my homemade beans and Kanako piped up, “Why don’t I try to cook tomorrow?”

I said, “Sure,” but I wondered what slimy undersea creature I was in for. Would it be from among my favorites: live baby squid; or squid-ink pasta; or uni sea urchin? Maybe goma-tofu made of sesame; or clams and seaweed soup; or ba-sashi horsemeat sashimi? Or if she really couldn’t cook, would it be instant ramen? I was dying to find out.

Tomorrow arrived and I was called to the table from my laptop. There in a bowl was…spaghetti marinara. I tasted a little of the sauce and my eyes widened. It was fantastic and perfectly Italian. The garlic was savory without being overpowering and the sauce was melded beautifully with the noodles.

“Louie,” I said to her, quoting Casablanca, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”