A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [75]
Nervously waiting for the shinkansen, the bullet train, to the seaside town of Atami, I was becoming painfully aware of my otherness. Kaiseki, like no other Japanese cuisine, offers a minefield of possible behavioral gaffes to the uninformed Westerner like myself. Now, I know how to use chopsticks. By New York standards, I’m impressive. But while reading up on proper dining etiquette at a kaiseki meal, the customary practices and procedures when staying at a ryokan, my heart filled with dread and terror.
Don’t point your chopsticks at anyone else.
Do not allow the soles of your feet to be exposed to anyone else.
Do not step on the wooden dividers between mats.
Never leave your chopsticks sticking straight up out of your food.
When drinking soup or tea, it’s one hand under, palm up, the other cradling around from the side.
If it’s a soup with chunks, hold your chopsticks thus, and lift the bowl to your lips to sip from it.
Do not drown your sushi in soy sauce; to leave granules of rice floating in your dipping sauce is the height of bad taste and brutishness.
When your geisha pours you sake (hot sake with cold food; cold sake with hot), wash your cup after drinking and pour her some into the same receptacle.
That was not a finger bowl.
Wash for dinner. Really wash.
Dress appropriately.
Remember to remove your sandals before entering the room.
No experience is more guaranteed to make you feel like a nine-hundred-pound ape than a kaseiki dinner for which you are inadequately briefed. I was very jittery. Shinji had driven me to the station in his personal car, a tiny Renault two-seater convertible, top down. I’d sat in the miniature front seat, my head protruding out beyond the windshield, feeling freakish, huge, and bumbling. I knew I would soon be looking sillier and feeling more awkward than I had since sixth grade, when I’d briefly attended a ballroom-dancing class. The memory of that particular horror still makes my hands sweat and my face burn with shame.
The shinkansen are magnificent machines. They slide quietly into train stations, their great bug-spattered nose cones looking like space shuttles. A cleaning crew in pink outfits rushed on board as soon as mine arrived. A few minutes later, liftoff. I was on my way to Atami, gliding at high speed through the outskirts of Tokyo, a bento box of unagi (eel) and rice and a cold Asahi in front of me. The bullet trains can reach speeds of 270 klicks an hour. Mine moved like a high-speed serpent. From the rear of the train, I could watch the front of it as it whipped like a snake head past Mount Fuji’s snow-capped peak, through mountains, fields, small towns, and tunnels, the sea appearing and disappearing to my left as the train hissed through space. About an hour later, I was in Atami, climbing the steep, twisting mountain roads in a taxi. It was sunny and relatively warm for wintertime. Up and up we went, one impossibly angled switchback after another, until we pulled into the hidden driveway of Ryokan Sekiyou, near a mountaintop high over the sea.
I removed my shoes, careful to kick one off, then place a stockinged foot on the raised interior platform before removing the other shoe. I selected the largest of the sandals provided, which still left my heel hanging out by three inches, did my best to bow gracefully to the two women and one man who had hurled themselves to their knees at my entrance and were bowing so deeply that their noses nearly touched the floor. While my luggage was taken to my room, I sat in a small reading room by the entrance, a few coals glowing in a round brazier, mandarin oranges in a bowl, a stargazer lily and a painting by a local artist the only decoration. In a moment, I was escorted to my room by a woman in traditional garb, her feet moving noiselessly over the floor mats in tiny, rapid steps.
My room was not so much a room as a collection of spaces: one large area to eat and sleep in (my futon would arrive later), another area with