Winifred Bird - Eating Wild Japan: Tracking the Culture of Foraged Foods, with a Guide to Plants and Recipes

Emperor Koko (83087), from the Hyakunin Isshu

What little I know of Japans immense and intricate culture of wild foods I owe to many peopleto housewives and farmers, scientists and geographers, bureaucrats, back-to-the-landers, and countless others I met in the eight years I lived in rural Japan and the three I spent researching this book after returning to the United States. To none, however, do I owe a greater debt of gratitude than to my neighbor of three years, Sadako Ban, because it was she who first showed me that these foods are woven into Japanese culture in ways far deeper than the pages of a cookbook or field guide might suggest.

Ban-san befriended me at a funeral. My then-husband and I had just moved into a cavernous farmhouse on the outskirts of Matsumoto, that lovely old city in central Japan with its wedding-cake castle and views of the Japan Alps, and were going about our own back-to-the-land experiment in rice farming, carpentry (him), and writing (me). Ours was a traditional apple-growing neighborhood, and custom had it that whenever anyone within the community of eighty households died, a member of each household was expected to pay their respects. This time the matriarch of the local temple had passed away. Ban-san was her sister-in-lawthe daughter of the temples former priestand after the service ended she stationed herself at the temple door to bid farewell to departing mourners. My first impression was of a tiny, bird-like, but very self-possessed woman with bobbed white hair and a gentle smile. She was already eighty-five, more than half a century older than me. Perhaps because she was curious about the new foreigner in town, or perhaps because she intuited in me a kindred spirit, she invited me to stop by her house for tea some time.

It was an early winter day when I walked the hundred yards or so up the steep road we both lived on and knocked on her door. She greeted me graciously, tucked me under the blanket of a snug kotatsuin the living room, and disappeared into the kitchen to get the tea ready. As I waited, I looked over her bookcases (being the offspring of a bookselling family, this is my habit in new places). There were two: a large one filled with Japanese novels and a small one for Western classics. I deciphered the names of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir written in katakana on several spines before she returned. How oddly comforting it was, and how rare in that distant corner of the world, to think that she might have read those writers that I, too, admired. She set down the tray.