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By Root 733 0

back. I was aware of an older woman entering the room in the dark. She gently drew back the covers and gave me what was easily the best massage of my life, an incredible hour-long treatment, her hands spinning, kneading powerfully through my yukata and over every muscle at undiminishing speed, like an agricultural thresher. A while later, half-asleep, half-awake, pleasantly drunk, freshly massaged, I slipped on my sandals and picked my way up a few stairs into a larger, communal version of my bathroom, where I squatted, scrubbed, and showered. It was midnight, and no one else was about. Leaving my clothes in a pile, I slid open another door, padded in the crisp night air across a few smooth flagstones, and lowered myself into the onsen, a hot spring-fed bath blasted into volcanic rock at the top of the mountain. I lay there in the water, breathing, listening to my heartbeat until even that seemed to disappear, happy as I’d ever been. When, an hour or so later, I finally climbed back under the covers of my futon and closed my eyes, I slept like the comfortably dead.

Dinner at the ryokan may have been the greatest thing ever. Breakfast was another thing entirely. At about 8:00 a.m., the screen slid back and an attendant removed the futon. A few moments later, I found myself, once again, sitting cross-legged at a low table, with a full spectrum of beautiful dishes coming my way. I was not ready, that early in the morning, for a large and challenging meal. I was not ready for Mr Komatsu again, dressed, as always, in his stiff black manager’s outfit, kneeling a few yards away while I ate.

I was OK with the smoked fish, which was very good – the sushi, the rice. What I was not ready for, and never will be, was natto. The Japanese love natto, an unbelievably foul, rank, slimy, glutenous, and stringy goop of fermented soybeans. It’s the Vegemite of Japan, dearly loved by everyone there, for reasons no outsider can understand. There were two kinds of natto for me that morning: the traditional soy variety, and an even scarier black bean natto. If the taste wasn’t bad enough, there’s the texture. There’s just no way to eat the stuff. I dug in my chopsticks and dragged a small bit to my mouth. Viscous long strands of mucuslike material followed, leaving numerous ugly and unmanageable strands running from my lips to the bowl. I tried severing the strands with my chopsticks, but to no avail. I tried rolling them around my sticks like recalcitrant angel-hair pasta. I tried slurping them in. But there was no way. I sat there, these horrible-looking strings extending from mouth to table like a spider’s web, doing my best to choke them down while still smiling for the attentive Mr Komatsu. All I wanted to do now was hurl myself through the paper walls and straight off the edge of the mountain. Hopefully, a big tub of boiling bleach or lye would be waiting at the bottom for me to gargle with.

Waiting in the wings, right behind the natto, was another concoction, described as ‘mountain potato.’ Of this, I could handle only a single taste. To this day, I have no idea what it really was. It didn’t taste like a potato – and I can’t imagine anything on a mountain tasting so evil. I didn’t ask, frightened that my host might mistake my inquiry for enthusiasm and offer up another generous helping. The small, dark, chewy nugget can only be described as tasting like salt-cured, sun-dried goat rectum – unbelievably, woefully flavorful – garnished by small maggotlike wriggly things, so awful to my Western palate that I was forced, through the grim rictus of a smile, to ask politely that Mr Komatsu ‘leave me alone for a while so I can fully appreciate this fine breakfast in solitude.’ I had no choice. I thought I would die. Nothing, not bugs, not iguana, not live reptile parts, not tree grubs, nothing I’d ever eaten would approach the horror of these few not unusual Japanese breakfast items. I’m not sneering. I’m sure that natto and mountain rectum are, as they say, ‘acquired tastes.’ And I’m sure that over time I could learn to appreciate them. If I