The Man Who Ate the World (21 page)

Still, I couldn’t help wondering: Back home I would never go to a sushi bar staffed by a bunch of white boys from, say, Wimbledon because, well . . . you wouldn’t, would you? The culture of Japanese food was understood to be too deep, too intense and complex to allow for that sort of casual journeyman approach. Was it outrageous to suppose that the same applied in the opposite direction? Michelin stars or no, had I been foolish to assume a Japanese chef could run a really good French restaurant without tripping up? Or had I started to formulate some unpalatable theory of culinary apartheid, extrapolating unfairly from one dismal experience?

Of one thing I was certain: The next night I was booked into another
high-end Japanese restaurant, courtesy of Hide Yamamoto at the Mandarin Oriental, and that would make everything better again.

Wrong again.

I
am lost in Ginza. Unlike on my first night, this evening my cab driver simply abandoned me. He brought the car to a halt, activated the automatic back doors that all Tokyo taxis have, told me to give him just 1,000 of the 1,300 yen ($12) fare showing on the meter, and drove off. I do not even know whether I am on the right street. Worse, the weather is closing in. A gusty, warm wind is blowing around me, carrying a scatter of raindrops, and I have no umbrella or coat.

I pull my jacket tightly about me and run, head down into the wind, across to the doorman standing guard on a smart but somber-looking restaurant across the road. I have with me a computer printout of a map, with the details of my destination, a place called Asami, but the doorman shakes his head and gestures carelessly toward the darkened, farthest reaches of the street. I reward him with the one word of Japanese I have—
Origato
, for thank you—and carry on, stopping at the next lit doorway; another smart restaurant.

There the hostess also appears to have no idea where it is, but again waves me away in the same direction. I move on, hopping from what I now realize is one fancy restaurant to another. Do they really not know where one of their neighbors is located, or are they simply refusing to acknowledge the competition? The wind blows. The rain threatens.

Eventually I find it, marked by a stark sliding wooden door, which leads on to a low-ceilinged room with the now familiar counter, this time seating ten. This, however, is a very different place from Yukimura. Yes, the waitress smiles, and they have clearly gone to some trouble on my behalf; waiting on the lacquered wooden tray where I am to be seated is tonight’s menu, translated into English.

But the mood here is serious. The chef does not look up or acknowledge me. A late-middle-aged man to one side of me actively
looks away when I sit down. At the far end of the bar is an elderly couple with a sour expression, as if they have a mouthful of wasps. I bury myself in the ritual of the hot towel, which is presented at the beginning of every meal, withdraw my notebook and pen, and study the menu in search of clues.

The first dish is listed as steamed black rice with salt-fermented sea cucumber. The tiny wooden bowl arrives almost immediately and contains something which, even allowing for the lamb in rotting milk that I sampled in Dubai, is one of the nastiest things I have ever eaten. The rice by itself would have been fine, but it is dressed with a sticky, fishy, stinky gunge that makes me retch silently. It tastes like I imagine the slime that gathers on the skin of day-old fish might taste, if one was ever moved to lick it off, and has the consistency of phlegm. I am, however, well dragged up, and I know I must eat it all. I do this quickly both to get the terrible business over with, and to move me on to the next dish, which has to be better.

It is, but only just: In a light broth there is a large square of very soft tofu with sea urchin. Usually I love sea urchin, which has a musky, dirty, sexy taste, but I have always eaten it alongside something with a more solid texture, some rice or sheets of toasted seaweed, or both. Here in this bowl are two slippery things, wrestling with each other, and in my mouth they flop about my tongue as if trying to decide whether to slip back out again. That’s if I can get them to my mouth. Obviously I have only chopsticks and it’s like trying to eat jelly with knitting needles. Scratch the attempt at illuminating analogy. It is eating jelly with knitting needles.

On to some clam. That should be fine. I like clam, but tonight everything is a shock. The long pink, purple, and white flap of seafood is tough and rubbery, everything the novice might assume raw mollusc to be. Where the tofu and sea urchin skidded around my mouth, this just bounces, getting caught in one twisted lump in my esophagus until I swallow hard with a jerk that makes my shoulders rise and fall suddenly. The man on my right stares at me, and I manage a closed-mouth smile. I
imagine myself saying a big, satisfied “mmmmmmm,” but no sound comes out.

I consider myself a broad and fearless eater. I consider myself an enthusiast. When I was a child, my mother would tell me that I could not say I did not like something unless I had tried it at least once, and so, by an early age, I had tried a lot of things that were foreign to my friends. I had eaten those snails and then moved on to frogs’ legs. I had snaffled offaly bits, and the occasional fiery chili. This was a matter of pride to me, and I have tried to pass on the message to my kids. Here, in my forty-first year, I realized I had met my match. There was, it seemed, a place where the Japanese culinary repertoire became too challenging for the Western palate. Or at least for this Westerner’s palate.

Then a thought came into my mind, one husbanded by too many hours spent in front of kitsch trash television. The thought was this: I am eating Klingon food. All I could think of was Commander Wharf in
Star Trek
attacking a bowl of squelching, squeaking, still-pulsating tentacles, and barking, “Bring me heart of targ and a flagon of bloodwine!”

Immediately I felt ashamed. The problem, I told myself, was not the food. It was me. I was not worthy of it. I was not up to the task. Then again, I realized, I was being inconsistent. Did I not always say that authentic was not the same as good? If that applied to Cantonese chicken feet should it not also apply to salt-fermented sea cucumber, or raw clam with the texture of rubber? Was I holding the Japanese culinary tradition in higher regard than that of China? Surely I had the confidence to say no; that actually this is horrible and I don’t want to eat it anymore?

I wasn’t sure I did, not here in this restaurant that Mr. Yamamoto had gone to such trouble to book me into. For a moment I wondered whether I was the victim of one huge prank. Clearly a foreigner like me, a
gaijin,
was a rarity in this place. Perhaps I was the first foreigner ever to eat at Asami. Maybe they were throwing all the really weird stuff at me that nobody ever eats to see whether I’d be too polite to refuse.

“Look!” I imagined them whispering to one another behind the curtain
that led to the back kitchen. “He’s actually putting it in his mouth! Can you believe it! The clam!”

Then I saw that my neighbors were getting many of the same dishes.

I did not have much time to think about this, because I had just read the fourth course, and that was far more troubling.

At the airport in London, just before flying out, my mother had telephoned me on my mobile, as mothers do.

“Have a lovely time, dear,” she said, “and you are not to eat any fugu.”

I laughed and told her that my wife had said exactly the same thing; that the blowfish, famed for the fatalities caused when it was badly prepared and the violent toxins from its internal organs allowed to infect the flesh, was out of bounds.

Back in London I had e-mailed Eric Drache, the professional poker player, who had been so fascinated when we dined at Nobu Las Vegas by the odds on dying from eating fugu. I had asked him whether he would try fugu if he was in my position, but he had not replied by the time I left. (When he did reply, his response had shown him to be less of a gambler than I had imagined. “I probably would eat the second half of your portion,” he wrote, “after observing you for thirty minutes or so.”)

None of this was of any use to me now as I awaited the imminent arrival of what the menu told me was a fugu dish: grilled blowfish milt. The word
milt
was familiar. I recalled reading accounts of high-end Japanese meals as part of my research, flicking back and forth through a dictionary of food terms to orientate myself. Finally it came to me, as it never would come to the blowfish ever again. It was sperm. In front of me was placed a plate holding two white, wobbly pouches of bulging membrane, bearing the slightest grill marks from where they had been cooked. It looked like an awful lot of sperm for a straight guy. Still, like everything else, I couldn’t not eat it. I remembered my mother’s commandment, that I must first try, and piled them into my mouth. It was thick and creamy and ripe and rich, and after the sea cucumber and the tofu and the sea urchin and the clam, still so much more of much too much.

There were occasions as the meal progressed, when I felt myself to
be advancing on to more solid and reliable ground. There was a tiny tranche of marinated, grilled salmon, say, or a piece of impeccably made sushi of sea bream. Then something else would come along and throw me back: a dish of soft-shelled turtle, which looked in the bowl like uncooked entrails and felt like it, too, in the mouth, or some octopus that was more hard, knotty sucker than soft, yielding tentacle. It did not help that, in the middle of the meal, the weather delivered on its threat. Torrential rain could be heard battering against the windows of the back kitchen, and the wind howled. I was adrift, caught in a storm of so many kinds, and dreaming of the sanctuary of dessert.

Even that was a challenge: a large bowl of iced water containing huge, fat, clear-ribbon noodles made with kuzu root that had the texture of frog spawn, which I was supposed to dredge from the liquid, dunk into another dish of cane syrup, and somehow drag to my mouth. I leaned my head down as far as I could in the hope that the faulty mechanics of the chopsticks could be supplemented with a little suction. Somehow I cleared the bowl and when they brought the bill, for north of £200, I paid more with relief than gratitude and still felt guilty about it.

They called me a cab and, when it arrived, asked me to stand just inside the door for a moment while unexplained arrangements were made furtively beyond my line of site. I could hear the rain lashing down and could see the door shaking in its frame. When they slid it across, the three chefs were standing in a line on the steps to form an honor guard, umbrellas lifted to protect me from the downpour on the short walk from the door of restaurant to cab. I threw myself into the backseat and, as the automatic door closed, turned to look back. Through the rain-drenched window all I could see were the three chefs, bowing deeply in unison to my retreating cab.

A
couple of days later, and I am in the Ryogoku district of town, where the sumo wrestler stables are located, when I feel an urgent twinge in my guts. I am with Robb Satterwhite, an expatriate American who is the
founder of a restaurant guide Web site for Tokyo. We have just been for what he called “ultimate unagi”—eel, Japanese style—in a tiny restaurant a short distance from the imposing sumo stadium with its oxidized green copper roof.

I have always loved unagi, but have long been disappointed in London’s Japanese restaurants that it comes in such meager portions, usually just a single slice draped across a cushion of sushi rice; a hit of crisply grilled oily flesh, slicked with intensely savory sauce, which is gone as quickly as it arrives. Here we had been able to order whole slabs of eel, both white—without sauce—and with sauce, alongside a bowl of candied liver. It had been a quick but delicious meal, and now Robb was walking me across to have a look at the blocky modernist Edo-Tokyo Museum.

Robb is talking about how sushi restaurants sometimes charge Westerners more than locals just to scare them off when, there it is again, a sudden straining in my stomach, a bubble of discomfort that rises and subsides only to rise again. I continue the conversation and tell myself I have a case of mere wind, nothing more, but somewhere at the back of my mind, alarm bells are ringing. The discomfort is too insistent, too determined, to be just wind. I have experienced forms of gastric distress while on trips before, in both Toronto and New York. Until now I had thought of these episodes only in terms of inconvenience: of time wasted, meetings cancelled. As we walk, I slip away inside myself to analyze the information my body is giving me, to listen to the breaking news, and it occurs to me that I face a more serious threat. I am in a city I don’t know, with a pleasant but reserved man I have only just met, and I need a toilet. Now!

Robb suggests we visit Akihabara or Electric Town, which is only a short distance away by subway. On any other occasion I would love nothing more. I have always been fascinated by the Japanese obsession with gadgetry. Today, the very thought of a train journey sends sweat gushing down the small of my back. I have no choice. I tell him my needs, and to his credit, he stays very calm. He says there will be facilities at the train station we are near, but he doesn’t know where.

He is walking around asking people, and I am now deeply suspicious that, for the first time in my adult life, I might just be about to do something that is grossly humiliating for a five-year-old, and completely unthinkable for an adult. I am trembling, as though I have become the epicenter of my own coming earthquake. More sweat is breaking out across my brow. I feel like I am on the run, a fugitive in fear of my own body.

Finally he’s got directions. He leads me across to a simple block. I am grateful but so desperate, I barely have time to thank him. I barge in there, leaving him standing outside. It’s a tiny space designed for small Japanese men and I am a large man, even by European standards, but there is a cubicle, which is what I need, except—oh, please! Give me a break!—it contains a traditional bowl-less affair. There are just two footpads and a hole in the floor. I can barely stand, let alone squat. Somehow I work out the necessary gymnastics and it’s fine.