Goulding - Rice, noodle, fish: deep travels through Japans food culture

(Laura Prez)

COVER DESIGN BY DOUGLAS HUGHMANICK

RICE, NOODLE, FISH. Copyright 2015 by Matt Goulding and Nathan Thornburgh. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goulding, Matt.

Rice, noodle, fish : deep travels through Japans food culture / Matt Goulding ; edited by Nathan Thornburgh. First Edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-06-239403-3

EPub Edition October 2015 ISBN 9780062394040

1. Food habitsJapan. 2. Food tourismJapan. 3. Goulding, MattTravelJapan. I. Title.

15 16 17 18 19 ID/QGT 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the shokunin of Japan, pursuers of perfection,
for showing us the true meaning of devotion

Dear Tony,

Im writing you from a laundromat attached to an old teahouse down a dark alley in Kyoto. Ive spent the past month eating my way south from Hokkaidofrom the uni shrines of Hakodate to the okonomiyaki dens of Osaka. Ive been invited to dine with the Sugimoto clan tonight, the oldest family in Kyoto, in their 300-year-old home with their 600-year-old recipes, and I need something decent to wear. So while five weeks worth of memories dissolve in the spin cycle, let me tell you about this idea I have.

If Parts Unknown and its many imitators have taught us anything, its that were living in the Golden Age of Gastrotourism. The same people who once traveled to Rome to stare at statues now go to twirl bucatini on their forks and filter balls of burrata onto their Instagram accounts. Youve helped inspire a generation of food-obsessed pilgrims, the same people we try to reach every day at Roads & Kingdoms: the ones who want to be smarter, eat better, travel deeper. Weve given them ice cream crawls in Mogadishu, the chili sauce wars of the Caucasus, the burger kings of Karachi.

But it feels like theres something even bigger out there to tap into, a more complete way to capture the seismic shift that takes place inside of us as we first eat our way through a country. And Japan, where a tangle of undressed noodles can feel like a seminal life moment, is the perfect place to start. Im imagining a book that attempts to make sense of the many wondrous, beautiful, confounding things the outsider experiences hereboth at the table and beyond.

I dont have any clear answers yet, but I know you share my affection for this country and I thought this might be something youd want to be a part of. Give it some thought and let me know what you think. Ill be here, watching the laundry spin.

Cheers,

Matt

***

Dear Matt,

Thats pretty much where Id like to be right now, preparing to go out to dinner in a 300-year-old homein Kyoto. I stayed in a magnificent old ryokan there once, so old there were sword slashes in the ceiling beams. Evidence, I was told, of samurai-related violence.

As you know, Japan hooked me. It was the first Asian country I ever visited. I was alone, clueless, horribly, cripplingly jet-lagged (back when I still suffered from such things), and on an ill-fated mission to consult on a French restaurant project. Id wake up in Roppongi early in the morning to the shrieks of those giant crows and wander the streets, trying to summon the courage to enter a noodle shop. I will never forget the sense of deep satisfaction I felt when I finally managed to order breakfast for myself.

Tokyo was so dense, so crowded with... stuff, so complicated, tempting, delicious, and seemingly unknowable: layer upon layer of maddeningly interesting izakayas in one building alone. One city block a lifes work of exploration. It was a glorious and lasting derangement of the senses that first trip, and Ive never been the same since.

I became selfish that first time in Tokyo in ways I had never been. Previously, when viewing something incredible, impressive, strikingly beautiful, or interesting, my first instinct was to share. Who might I share this with? How might I best relate this experience?

In Tokyo, alone and traumatized in the best possible ways by this new universe of possibilities, I just said fuck it to that voice. This was for me. There was no sharing. I wanted morewhatever it tookand I resolved, consciously or not, I think, to burn down the whole world if necessary to get more of this.

In Japan you are confronted constantly, almost violently, with how much you dont know. I liked that feeling. I liked that steep, virtually impossible learning curve. I liked, it turned out, that feeling of being a stranger in a strange yet wonderful land, not understanding the language, lost. Every little thing was a discovery.

Things kind of worked out. I found a way to ensure many more trips to Japan, television being a small price to pay for the privilege. I know now exactly what you mean when you speak of the joys of undressed noodles. I yearn for the smoke and sizzle of many parts of pampered chickens in an old-school yakitori joint, the clean smell of the fish market at four in the morning (cigarettes and seawater), chankonabe, grilled fish collars in Golden Gai, the glory of the Japanese bathroom. They may work punishingly, insanely hard in Japan. But they have relaxation down to a science. To spend a weekend at a traditional ryokan, marinating in an outdoor onsen, is a life-changing thing. Theres no going back. Not all the way back anyway.

I dont know if you know this but Ive found that if you sat at a table with eight or nine of the worlds best chefsfrom France, Brazil, America, whereverand you asked them where theyd choose if they had to eat in one, and only one country, for the rest of their lives, they would ALL of them pick Japan without hesitation. We both know why.

I have no doubt that you would make that case brilliantly in the book to come, but Im going to need more details if I want to convince my cruel masters at HarperCollins. How do you see this playing out on the page?

Best,

Tony

***

Hi Tony,

I know what you mean when you say youve never been the same. Im supposed to be on a honeymoon with my Catalan wife, but every time a piece of uni nigiri or shirako tempura is placed before me, I feel like Im cheating on her. I try to shift the focus back to my bride, but then I look over and see her eyes glazed with that same new Japan sheen, and I know that there will forever be a line in our lives: Before Japan, After Japan.

I could see how you would want to keep this to yourself. Something so intense and intimateits hard to share without feeling like youre somehow butchering the translation. Judging by the episodes youve logged from Japan, though, you got over that feeling, no doubt for much the same reason that Im getting over it: we tell stories for a living, and these stories are the best Ive found anywhere.