Born and raised in Tokyo, Katherine Tamiko Arguile is an author and arts journalist of mixed Japanese and British descent. Her award-winning short stories have been published in the UK and in Australia, and her debut novel, The Things She Owned, was published in 2020 and shortlisted for the 2021 MUD Literary Prize for best debut literary fiction novel by an Australian author. She migrated to Australia after living for almost two decades in London. She lives beside the sea on the metropolitan coast of Adelaide, on the lands of the Kaurna people.

Published by Affirm Press in 2022

28 Thistlethwaite Street, South Melbourne,

Boon Wurrung Country, VIC 3205

affirmpress.com.au

Text and illustrations copyright © Katherine Tamiko Arguile, 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher.

Title: Meshi / Katherine Tamiko Arguile, author.
ISBN: 9781922400703 (hardback)

Cover design by Lisa White
Internal design by Lisa White
Linocut illustrations by Katherine Tamiko Arguile
Typeset by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane

For all the ancestors

CONTENTS

Nanigoto ni mo shun ga aru
To everything, a season

Usui
Rainwater

Keichitsu
Insects awaken

Shunbun
Spring equinox

Seimei
Pure and clear

Kokū
Grain rains

Rikka
Beginning of summer

Shōman
Lesser ripening

Bōshu
Grain beards and seeds

Geshi
Summer solstice

Shōsho
Lesser heat

Taisho
Greater heat

Risshū
Beginning of autumn

Shosho
Manageable heat

Hakuro
White dew

Shūbun
Autumn equinox

Kanro
Cold dew

Sōkō
Frost falls

Rittō
Beginning of winter

Shōsetsu
Lesser snow

Taisetsu
Greater snow

Tōji
Winter solstice

Shōkan
Lesser cold

Daikan
Greater cold

Risshun
Birth of spring

Acknowledgements
Recipe index

何事にも旬がある

Nanigoto ni mo shun ga aru

To everything, a season

I suppose I’m an exile. A dramatic word, I know, but this is how it seems to me.

I was born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and British father, raised close to my Japanese grandmother, uncles, aunts and cousins. I am an Edokko, a child of Edo*. My mother’s family has sold umami-rich, salty-sweet tsukudani, a traditional Tokyo delicacy, out of a shop on the ground floor of the family home in central Tokyo for six generations. They are food people.

Those of us with half-Japanese ethnicity are known as ‘hafu’, a Japanification of the English word ‘half’. Most of my fellow Hafu Japanese Facebook group members – 7200 half-Japanese people around the world – are happy with this label, though some argue that ‘half’ suggests a diminished identity. Some of us look entirely Japanese; others resemble their non-Japanese parent. Some, like me, look more ambiguous. Growing up in Tokyo, I’d startle if I caught my reflection in a shop window, so different did I look from everyone around me and from how I felt inside. I didn’t learn English properly until I went to kindergarten and it took another year or so for me to learn western ways of thinking, behaving and being.

Tokyo, the people I loved, the language I spoke, the memories I made there and the food I grew up eating formed the scaffolding for the human I became.

My British citizenship was chosen for me early on. It was necessary for the English education my father had planned for me before I was born. In 2013, five and a half years after migrating to Adelaide, I also became Australian. I feel deep gratitude for both passports. Wishing for a third seems greedy, yet if I were to claim Japanese citizenship, I would be forced to renounce the others. I could cut ties to my British heritage and my home in Australia, and work to overcome bureaucratic obstacles to prove my Japanese blood, but even with a Japanese passport, this ethnically ambiguous face of mine means my native country will never accept me as one of its own.

Over the years, most of the threads connecting me to my mother country have frayed. Many have snapped. But one still remains, keeping me from drifting too far from my roots: washoku. Japanese food.

Like the culture that cradles it, washoku is a universe unto itself, so fantastically diverse that most of it isn’t seen or eaten outside the country, sometimes not even outside smaller localities within Japan. In 2013, in recognition of its cultural importance and the need for its preservation, UNESCO awarded washoku Intangible Cultural Heritage status.

There are 826 restaurants currently awarded Michelin stars in Japan, but the quest for culinary perfection is by no means limited to washoku. Of the Michelin-starred restaurants in Japan, 547 serve washoku, 115 are French, and the rest serve a range of national cuisines, including Indian, Chinese, Korean, Peruvian and Portuguese. I’ve been lucky enough to eat at some of these places, most of them washoku restaurants and most of them in Tokyo, a city awarded more Michelin stars than any other in the world, including Paris.

‘If I had to eat only in one city for the rest of my life,’ said the late, great New York chef Anthony Bourdain in a blog post for CNN on his TV series Parts Unknown, ‘Tokyo would be it. Most chefs I know would agree with me.’

An important characteristic of washoku is its seasonal expression. Ingredients and dishes are celebrated according to season in many countries, but in all my meanderings around the world, I’ve never come across a seasonality – culinary or otherwise – that’s as deeply embedded in the culture and national psyche as it is in Japan. There are hundreds of different Japanese words for rain, mist, snow, wind, clouds and sunlight, depending on the season and environment in which they manifest. There’s a vocabulary for the physical sensations and emotions aroused by each season; by the foods, sights, sounds, animals and objects that belong to them. The beloved tradition of Japanese poetry is anchored to the seasons, with a dictionary used by haiku poets listing hundreds of kigo, or season words – used as shorthand prompts to conjure feelings associated with a particular season. Seasonal motifs can be seen everywhere: on crockery, chopstick rests, kimono fabric, furoshiki wrapping cloths, in music, dance, haiku poetry, television advertising.

This seasonality, known as 旬 – shun – is an essential ingredient in the most ‘haute’ of washoku cuisines, kaiseki ryōri. This multi-course meal of artfully arranged, exquisite morsels is said to have influenced the French nouvelle cuisine movement of the 1960s and continues to inspire contemporary European and Australian fine dining. Kaiseki follows the philosophy of chadō, the way of tea, where the season during which the meal or tea ceremony takes place is observed in minute detail, not only in the choice of ingredients and recipes, but in the way the food is plated, the kind of crockery, chopsticks and drinking vessels used, the ikebana flower arrangements and calligraphy scrolls placed in the restaurant or chashitsu tea house. Some of these seasonal references are obvious: a fish that’s known to be available only at a certain time of year, or a pattern of budding sakura cherry blossom on a plate of food served in early spring. Others are more subtle; the pleasure of making the connection between a motif on a bowl and the food inside it is possible only if you can, say, decipher the cryptic reference made by a bush-warbler motif on a plate of katsuo sashimi to a 350-year-old spring haiku written by Bashō.

Seasonal themes are closely observed: an auburn-coloured kimono with a maple leaf pattern would never be worn in spring; nori-wrapped pounded-rice mochi cakes would not be served on a plate decorated with hydrangeas and eaten in summer; a dish of sōmen noodles served in a clear glass bowl would be unthinkable in winter. Festivals, sumo wrestling tournaments, kabuki and noh theatre adhere to seasonal cycles. People head out to view cherry blossoms in spring or the turning of leaves in autumn the way people attend places of religious worship; the feelings evoked by the falling blossoms or leaves is known as mono no aware (‘the pathos of things’), or wabi-sabi, a hard-to-translate term describing the Japanese aesthetic of beauty found in quiet simplicity and imperfection. The term ‘mujō’, meaning ‘transience, impermanence or mutability’, carries the weight of a Zen Buddhist philosophy that cautions against clinging to things in the hope they won’t change; becoming too attached to lives, people, possessions or circumstances only causes suffering when they inevitably do. It’s a reminder to dwell fully in each moment, and that by doing so, you might glimpse something made all the more beautiful by the melancholic knowledge that it, too, will fade.

There’s an idiom, ‘ichigo-ichie’, which originates in the tea ceremony. It means ‘one time, one meeting’ – even if the same people were to get together again, that one meeting, in that season, with that conversation, eating that dish under those circumstances, will never be repeated. It’s bittersweet when it suddenly dawns on you that a particular gathering with people you loved was the last time you’d ever be together. After that, all you have left are memories.

One and a half thousand years ago, Japan’s love of Chinese knowledge led to the adoption of China’s Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist ideals and its education and logographic writing systems. It also adopted its lunisolar calendar, which divides the annual orbit of the earth around the sun into twenty-four parcels of time, called sekki. Each fifteen-day sekki is named after the characteristics of that season, helping farmers decide when they should plough, sow or reap.

The Chinese calendar didn’t quite match the varying climates across Japan, so it was adapted in the 17th century by further dividing each sekki into three five-day segments, resulting in seventy-two microseasons, or kō. A 17th-century Japanese court astronomer gave each kō a poetic name, reflecting the country’s deep reverence for both seasonality and poetry. Even today, waka and tanka poems from the much-loved twenty-volume 8th-century anthology the Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves) are chanted during Imperial Court rituals. The Man’yōshū mentions over 150 varieties of plants that are still grown – many of them still eaten – and the shared emotional response to the natural world continues to unite people in modern Japan.

When Emperor Naruhito ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne in 2019, his reign was given the gengo, or era name, Reiwa, breaking with the tradition of drawing on ancient Chinese texts for era names. The two kanji characters for Reiwa, meaning ‘beautiful harmony’, refer to a Japanese source, the preface to the fifth volume of the Man’yōshū:

It is now the auspicious month of early spring,

The weather is fine, the wind soft.

The plum blossom opens …

Time rolls ever onwards. The eighty-eight-year reign of one emperor leads to the thirty-year reign of another, and then another, whose season it is now. The vital forces of nature, despite alarming evidence of climate crisis, continue their cycles of sprouting, blooming, decaying, sprouting, blooming, decaying.

Rice has been cultivated in Japan for over 3000 years. Legends say the grains were bestowed on the first emperor of Japan, Jimmu, by his ancestor Amaterasu Ōmikami, goddess of the sun and one of the most important deities in the indigenous Shintō religion. Rice was such a defining feature of the land that in ancient times the country was referred to as ‘Mizuho no Kuni’ or ‘Land of the Lush Ears of Rice’.

The type of rice eaten throughout Japan is unique to the nation: the short-grain Oryza sativa Japonica, its stickiness a result of its high starch content. Known as uruchimai, it is eaten daily, and has many grades and varietals, its characteristics changing depending on where and how it is grown, the way wine takes on the characteristics of the terroir that nurtures the grapes.

There are more words for rice in the Japanese language than there are for love. There’s ine, the growing rice plant; genmai and haigamai, which are wholegrain rice; hakumai – hulled white rice; kome, the name for uncooked rice (usually spoken with the honorary prefix ‘o’ to mark its sacredness, as in ‘okome’); gohan and meshi, which are cooked rice; and raisu – the Japanese pronunciation of the English word – used in foreign-influenced dishes like omuraisu (savoury mixed rice encased inside a soft omelette), hayashiraisu (a French-inspired beef stew on rice invented in the 1860s) or karēraisu (a delicious, idiosyncratically Japanese version of curry that bears little resemblance to what’s eaten on the Indian subcontinent). Regardless of their country of inspiration, all raisu dishes use uruchimai.

The two words for cooked rice, gohan and meshi, are used interchangeably as the word for ‘meal’. Gohan is part of the name for each meal of the day: asagohan means breakfast; hirugohan, lunch; yorugohan or yūgohan, dinner. You’ll be asked: gohan tabeta? – have you eaten rice yet? – to ascertain if you have eaten, regardless of whether your meal might have had rice in it or not.

Meshi has a more complex social usage. You’ll rarely hear a Japanese woman use ‘meshi’ in polite company to refer to a meal, while men use it freely. Even the verb for ‘eat’ that comes with it changes; ‘taberu’ goes with ‘gohan’, while ‘kū’ goes with ‘meshi’. ‘Kū’ is normally used to describe animals eating. If you know any German, it’s like the verb fressen.

Yet meshi is uncontroversial if appended to the names of certain cooked rice dishes. Kamameshi, for example, is rice steamed in dashi stock with vegetables, seafood or meat, served in the small metal kama pot it is cooked in; sakurameshi is rice cooked with salted cherry blossom; ikameshi is whole simmered squid stuffed with rice; tauemeshi is the name given to rice eaten in a hurry on rice harvesting days. Women can say the names of these rustic dishes without embarrassment, and meshi is also used to denote a simple, no-frills, home-cooked style of comfort food. In the Netflix series Tokyo Diner, the hiragana characters on the chōchin lantern outside the Master’s shop read: めし – ‘meshi’.

Japanese language is gendered, hierarchical and political. The rough, rustic flavour of the word ‘meshi’ belongs to the vocabulary of the peasant farmers who work hard to grow and tend to the rice. It’s also used by some women as an act of subversion; by the gender fluid, by the socially rebellious, by those living on the margins of Japanese society. By outsiders.

There’s a family story about the time my cousin Asako, who’d just started kindergarten, was sent by her father to our grandmother to tell her that lunch was ready.

‘Obā-chan, gohan meshiagatte kudasai, Otō-san mō meshi kutta kara,’ she announced.

The first half of her sentence is the respectful language she’d been taught to use towards her elders. She uses ‘gohan’, and the verb ‘meshiagatte’, the polite form of ‘eat’ that comes from a highly formal manner of speaking known as keigo. To illustrate the complexity of Japanese language, the word ‘meshi’ in this verb doesn’t mean rice. It’s represented by a different kanji character that comes from the ancient honorific verb ‘mēsu’, which means to see, look at, observe.

In the second half of her sentence, my cousin simply repeated her father’s words verbatim. Since he was referring to himself, he’d used the coarse, masculine words ‘meshi’ and ‘kū’. The closest translation of Asako’s sentence might be: ‘Honourable grandmother, please do come and savour the midday repast that has been prepared for you, ’cos Dad’s already scoffed his nosh.’

The uruchimai so beloved by Japanese people is nothing like the rice that occupies most of the shelf space in British and Australian supermarkets. It isn’t even like the stuff that’s labelled ‘sushi rice’, which is Calrose, a different Japonica varietal cultivated in California by early Japanese migrants, which is pleasant enough, though not as delicious or finely textured as home-grown varieties. Italian arborio rice, the sticky jasmine rice of Southeast Asia, the short-grain rice used for British rice pudding, the fragrant basmati of the Indian subcontinent and the long-grain, non-sticky rice varieties of China are all tasty in their own way. But none have the distinctive characteristics of Oryza sativa Japonica: that perfect degree of stickiness, that toothsome, springy texture of the grain, that clean, elegant, earthy-grassy flavour that partners so perfectly with the washoku cuisine that has developed around it. Uruchimai is a sacred cornerstone of almost every meal eaten in Japan, an inextricable part of the Japanese soul.

I gaze out of my window at the gum tree tossing its leaves in the cold southerly wind blowing across the St Vincent Gulf, a pair of rainbow lorikeets clinging to a branch as if riding it for a lark. I set some water to boil for a pot of hōjicha, the roasted bancha green tea that’s most often drunk in Japanese homes. I scoop the dark, bronzed leaves into my mother’s 45-year-old teapot of traditional blue-and-white sometsuke porcelain. I take the smallest of a set of three blood-red lacquer bowls someone gave her long ago, and run my fingers over its smooth matte surface. I tip in a mound of golden arare rice crackers I bought from Little Tokyo, a small Japanese store in Adelaide’s Central Market. They’re delicately flavoured with sweetened soy sauce; some are speckled green with flakes of wakame seaweed, some flecked with black shreds of nori, others sparkling with sugar crystals that temper the saltiness and make the mouth water.

Strange how the sharpness of salt brings out the sweetness of sugar.

I remember my mother sometimes set arare out for me in a little bowl when I came home from my school in Hirō. The lorikeets in the gum tree fade from my vision and in my mind’s eye I find myself back in our old apartment in Tokyo, still wearing my school uniform, swinging my knee-socked legs as I sit at the dining table to eat my osanji – my afternoon snack – off the colourful melamine plates I still use, absorbed and at peace.

The sound of the kettle boiling pulls me back to my Australian kitchen. I’m wrapped in a thick jumper in August, the seasons upside down. The smoky fragrance of the tea leaves as I pour hot water into the teapot stirs up slumbering memories: of endless cups drunk at every meal; of sitting at the table to eat with people I loved. So many of them are long gone from this life or scattered across the world, disconnected. I toss another handful of arare into my mouth and crunch as I warm my hands on my yunomi teacup and return to the window to watch the lorikeets, but they’ve flown away.

Since my mother, grandmother and uncle died, I’ve kept my sense of connection to them and to my native culture alive by eating the food I grew up with. It isn’t always easy. Many of the ingredients I need to make familiar dishes aren’t available outside Japan. I do my best to cobble together home-cooked meals with the limited range I can find in Little Tokyo or in Adelaide’s Asian supermarkets, but it’s a tiny fraction of what’s available in my mother country. So much of what makes Japanese ingredients special is their short-lived seasonality, their freshness, their connection to a specific locality.

I’m aware that the split between the world I was born into and the world I live in now is widening. The postwar Shōwa-era Tokyo I grew up in during the 60s and 70s no longer exists. The city is continually changing, new buildings springing up and rendering beloved neighbourhoods unrecognisable; so much so that on a return visit to Tokyo in the 80s, I emerged from the subterranean walkways of Shibuya station and stood bewildered at the top of the stairs before heading back down again, thinking I’d got off at the wrong stop.

I can’t go back to the Tokyo of my childhood, but I can cook the food I remember, using the recipes handed down to me. If I’d been able to have a family, my children might have inherited those recipes the way they’d have inherited meaningful objects my mother left behind. I might have shared my stories with them; stories about those objects and recipes, stories told to me by people I loved and lost, whom they’d never have had the chance to meet. In my novel, The Things She Owned, I wrote some of my mother’s old possessions into a kind of permanence by giving them fictionalised roles in the story. Here, recording recipes and memories of food eaten in a long-lost Tokyo with family and friends is my way of keeping those people and places alive, of finding something that might last in this impermanent world.

Recently, I opened a box of photographs to find an album I hadn’t looked at for over twenty years. I found pictures of a feast, everyone dressed in black. The contents of the dishes on the table aren’t clearly visible. I’m so emaciated I hardly recognise myself, and there’s little I remember from that day. There are people around the table I’d forgotten were there, and I can’t recall who took the photos. Whoever it was, their aim was to record who was there, not what was eaten. When I looked more closely, I realised in a flush of shock that my mother’s funeral feast hadn’t taken place in the family’s Zen Buddhist temple, as I remembered. I could have sworn it took place there, and felt the world shift off its axis a little.

How much have I forgotten? How much have I misremembered?

I think of my memories as an old patchwork quilt that’s become so worn and familiar, so soft and comfortable that I no longer notice the pieces that have become threadbare and torn. There may be some mending necessary. But as long as the thread that holds all the pieces together remains true, the quilt pretty much holds together. I can still wrap myself up in it whenever the world feels a little too cold and dark.

I top up the blue-and-white teapot with freshly boiled water and stare out of the window at the gum tree dancing in the icy wind. The chill of the southern Australian winter takes me by surprise each year, even after living here for over a decade. The seasons seem more fluid, less distinct or regular than in Japan, and more complex than a straightforward reversal of those in England. Their long-cycling patterns have been understood for millennia by the Kaurna people, the traditional owners of the land where I live and write. My small suburban garden isn’t how that rectangle of sandy earth would have looked before 1836, but in tending to it I’ve come to recognise its different faces; the tumultuous transitions that bring storms and flooding rains, or scorching heat, drought and fire; the cycles of dormancy, blooming, fruiting and decay; the annual return of honeyeaters and spotted doves to build nests and raise their young in the tall lilly pilly tree that stands guard in one corner. Each year, peaches, apricots and figs ripen, broad beans swell and peas pop. I know when it’s time to harvest the olives for brining, when to pick the lemons at their juiciest. But none of this, not even the English seasons, which have their own pleasures, evokes the depth of feeling that overtakes me when I’m back in Japan, when my body is back in conversation with its distinct, swift-changing seasons. And it’s my body that remembers, long before my consciousness awakens to the fragments floating up from the past.

I dig out my torn, threadbare quilt of memories and spread it out to see what unfolds.

I’ve probably passed the mid-point of my life. I see the impermanence of my existence in a world that’s perpetually changing. The Tokyo of my childhood and most of the people I loved who lived in it are gone. But for now, I want to draw this past back to me, pulling on that surviving thread to revisit my most reliable memories of a lost world. The only continuity I’ve had in my life, my greatest comfort, is the Japanese food that made me. Washoku. My meshi.

*
Edokko: slang for someone born and raised in Tokyo (Edo was the old name for Tokyo), with a lineage of Tokyo-born family members going back at least three generations. The oldest, strictest definition of Edokko, however, is someone whose parents were both Tokyo-born and raised; to have one parent born outside Tokyo makes you a ‘madara’, which means ‘mottled’, ‘spotted’ or ‘brindled’.

If I had to eat only in one city for the rest of my life, Tokyo would be it. Most chefs I know would agree with me. For those with restless, curious minds, fascinated by layer upon layer of things, flavors, tastes and customs which we will never fully be able to understand, Tokyo is deliciously unknowable. I’m sure I could spend the rest of my life there, learn the language, and still die happily ignorant.

Anthony Bourdain, 1956–2018

Like a vanishing dew, a passing apparition or sudden flash of lightning – already gone – thus should one regard one’s self.

The monk Ikkyū, 1394–1481

土脉潤起

19–23 February

Tsuchi no shō uruoi okuru

Rain dampens the earth

霞始靆

24–28 February

Kasumi hajimete tanabiku

Gentle mists start to linger

草木萌動

1–5 March

Sōmoku mebae izuru

Grass sprouts, trees bud

Usui is officially the second sekki of spring, but it still feels like winter throughout most of Japan. Families with daughters set out colourful hinakazari decorations in preparation for Hinamatsuri, Girls’ Day, a festival which takes place on the third day of March every year, brightening winter-weary spirits the way Christmas decorations bring light to the darkest days of a European winter.

Long ago, the third day of the third month of the Chinese lunar calendar was a day to celebrate the arrival of the peach blossoms that signalled spring was coming. What was then called Momo no Sekku – the Festival of Peaches – eventually became Hinamatsuri, a day when families appeal to the gods to protect their young daughters and grant them secure futures, which, until recently, meant favourable marriages. After the Meiji government adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1873, it was decided, as for so many other ancient rituals and festival celebrations, that the day should be fixed so it would be the same each year, and 3 March became the official day for the annual celebration.

The hinakazari can be as modest as two origami dolls stuck on a pretty cardboard backdrop, or as elaborate as a red-felt-lined, seven-tiered display of hand-painted porcelain hinaningyo dolls with real hair, dressed in hand-stitched clothes in the style of the 8th-century Heian court. These grander hinakazari displays can be large enough to reach as high as the low ceiling of a traditional home and are often heirlooms passed from mother to daughter in well-to-do families. They’re eye-wateringly expensive to buy new.

The Emperor and Empress hinaningyo dolls hold court on the top tier – he sitting cross-legged, and she with legs folded beneath her in seiza kneeling pose – while the ladies-in-waiting, court attendants and musicians sit on the lower tiers in hierarchical order, with tiny carriages, palanquins, treasure boxes and sprigs of sakura blossom or yellow nanohana (canola) arranged around them. Small plates of hishimochi, a diamond-shaped sweet in layers of pink, white and pale green, are sometimes part of the display, and the young daughters of the household, often dressed in kimono, their hair styled with pretty combs and decorations, invite friends to share these and other traditional treats in the festival celebrations, and to play traditional hinaasobi games like karuta, where the first line of a centuries-old tanka is read out from an illustrated card before players scramble to be the first to find the card that bears the name of the poet and the lines that complete it.

For the festive meal, there might be chirashizushi – ‘scattered sushi’ – a delicate, colourful, spring-like arrangement of ingredients on sweet-vinegared sushi rice served in a bowl or lacquer box, which often looks too pretty to eat. The ingredients vary according to family tradition or locality, but usually include fish, shellfish, crustaceans, sliced bamboo shoots, sprigs of green herbs, decoratively cut fragments of vegetables such as carrots, or golden crumbs of egg. On the side there might be an owan soup bowl full of ushiojiru, a delicate, clear broth of bonito or shellfish dashi stock containing a handful of hamaguri clams. There might be hamagurimeshi too, a delicious umami-rich rice steamed with the pillow-soft, juicy clams and their broth. The clams are considered auspicious, since the two halves of each shell fit together perfectly like a well-matched husband and wife.

The girls might also drink hot amazake – ‘sweet saké’ – a thick, fortifying drink made of rice. It’s fermented, but just short of becoming alcohol. Just as well, since girls celebrate Hinamatsuri only until they’re about eleven years old, after which they’re considered too old to be indulged in childish things.

I was born in Tokyo in late February in a hospital next to Tsukiji, the biggest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world. It was a wintery Thursday morning, though officially spring, in the forty-second year of the Shōwa reign of Emperor Hirohito, and two weeks into the Lunar New Year. Three hours before I drew my first breath, there was an earthquake – a harbinger of what lay ahead, perhaps.

With that first breath I drew in the salt air of the sea; St Luke’s International Hospital stands on the banks of the tidal Sumidagawa, the river that flows in from Tokyo Bay. As my mother laboured, the buzz of the morning auction at Tsukiji Market six hundred metres away would have been reaching a crescendo, having begun at 5am. Itamae, chefs or cooks, and buyers from every kind of food business in Tokyo – sushi and izakaya bars, fine kaiseki restaurants, teppanyaki grills, French Cordon Bleu restaurants, unagi and tempura shops, homely downtown diners, tsukudani shops (perhaps even my uncle) – would have been clustering around fishmongers’ stalls, inspecting gleaming displays of seafood on crushed ice or in freshwater tanks in the vast, bustling inner market. Tsukiji was – still is – a monumental institution, Tokyo’s culinary backbone, selling over four hundred different types of seafood throughout the year.

The day I was born, fish, crustaceans and shellfish of every size, shape and hue would have been for sale, sparkling gems of the late cold season, still plentiful in February – yellowtail, sea cucumbers, pufferfish, whelks, king crabs, glass-shrimp – while in another part of the inner market, open only to those with a licence, the white-coated, white-rubber-booted auctioneers would have been shooting their rapid-fire, coded patter across an ice-fogged landscape ranged with the ghostly hulks of blue-fin tuna. Those wolves of the sea raised unimaginably high prices even back then. In the outer markets, open to the public, Tokyosiders would have been sitting down for a late breakfast or early lunch of sushi or kaisendon beside fishermen in white overalls and blue caps eating their last meal of the day, tired after a full night’s work. You can still order kaisendon these days, a selection of slivered seasonal sashimi, raw fish and shellfish, sparkling fresh from that morning’s catch, over sweet-vinegared rice, but you won’t be eating it in the company of fishermen. While the outer market remains in place beside the hospital, the wholesale market was relocated to another part of Tokyo harbour in 2018, taking with it Tsukiji’s 86-year-old soul.

The earthquake that struck the morning I was born measured magnitude six on the Richter scale, its epicentre off the coast of Okinawa. While its tremors weren’t felt as violently in Tokyo, they were strong enough to make the taxi taking my father to the hospital to see my mother, and to meet me, lurch drunkenly across the road.

My mother’s labour was agonising, long and difficult, as she’d remind me whenever I displayed a lack of gratitude for my existence by misbehaving. I stubbornly refused to enter the world and had to be retrieved with forceps. Worse still, it was during labour that my mother showed the first signs of cardiac distress. At the time, doctors couldn’t identify the problem; it was only later that the condition was diagnosed as congenital hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, where the heart gradually grows hardened, restricting the flow of blood, the lungs slowly filling with fluid and stealing breath from the body. Doctors warned that one more pregnancy might be the end of her. To what I suspect was my parents’ disappointment, I ended up the only one.

I grew up believing I’d caused my mother’s illness. She had a twisted sense of humour and discovered that an effective way of keeping me in check was to tell me she could drop dead without warning if I misbehaved. Once, when I must have been especially challenging, she played a prank on me, playing dead on the floor of our apartment for long minutes as I ran about the house screaming. She was born in 1938, and grew up in Tokyo during the war. She told me how she’d race home from kindergarten, terrified, hearing the whine of strafer bullets as they spat up dust in the road behind her. Even decades later, she’d block her ears if she heard the slow wail of an air raid siren in a movie or on the radio. When overwhelmed by traumatic experiences, the nervous system can step in to protect the psyche by numbing emotional responses to certain situations. A prank like the one she played on me would have seemed harmless in comparison to her wartime experiences, no more than a silly game: a way to teach me a lesson so I’d never forget it.

My mother often told me stories about her wartime childhood. Most often she talked about the scarcity of food and her endless hunger. She and her siblings – her older sister, Yoshie, and her older and younger brothers, Yūichi and Ryōji – tried to distract themselves from the gnawing of their stomachs by laying out drawings they made of their favourite dishes on the table and pretending to eat them, a scene I re-created in my novel. Like the fictional family in The Things She Owned, my mother’s family ran out of rice. During those years they ate nothing but satsumaimo, a Japanese variety of sweet potato, eking them out by cooking them down into gruel. Like Chiyo, the grandmother in my novel, my Obā-chan took a train to the outskirts of Tokyo with my young mother to trade some of the tsukudani shop’s stores of sugar with farmers there, an illegal practice that many relied on during the war to keep their families from starving. Like Chiyo, my Obā-chan had to throw the sweet potatoes they’d just traded out of the window when the military police showed up, sugar gone and nothing to take home and eat.

Once, my mother said, she was thrilled to find black beans floating in her bowl of weak broth – something solid and real to eat, at last! – only to realise it was a reflection of her eyeballs staring back at her. Another time, my grandmother managed to get hold of a single, unlabelled can painted in camouflage khaki, from army provisions that had found their way onto the black market. The opening of this can was a big event; the family gathered round to watch, hoping for SPAM or tuna or some other nutritious novelty that might relieve the monotony of the satsumaimo gruel. The lid was removed to great fanfare, revealing what looked like flour: not quite the luxury they’d hoped for. My grandmother tried to make dumplings with it, but as soon as she added some water, it dissolved. The can was filled with baking soda.

My mother struggled to throw out leftover food to the end of her days, even when it was starting to go bad. When I was older we had a private comedy routine that involved her going through Tupperware containers of leftovers in the fridge, looking for something we could eat with our rice. How about this? she’d ask, holding up some kind of ex-food covered in mould. WHAT? I’d say, hamming up the outrage to make her laugh, Of course not, it’s nowhere near mouldy enough yet!

She’d be furious if I left anything uneaten, especially rice. Even leaving a few grains behind in my ochawan rice bowl could prompt a scolding. You’ll go blind! she’d cry. It’s a common threat in households across the land: leaving rice in your bowl is an insult to the rice gods and an affront to the good people who laboured to grow it. The standard mode of divine punishment for this transgression, it seems, is to be struck blind. It’s stayed with me; if I drop even a single grain of uncooked rice while I’m preparing it for steaming, I’ll obsessively seek it out, wash it and use it, and my ochawan at the end of the meal is always squeaky clean.

In the eleven years I lived at home with her, my mother made sure I ate well. The food she cooked for me as I grew up was nutritious, balanced and delicious. Her meals were the way she offered me her unspoken love. They were some of the best meals of my life.

Being born so close to the beating heart of Japanese food culture seems appropriate for a lifelong devotee of washoku like me. Maybe it magnified the power of the food-fanatic gene I inherited from my mother, who had a fine palate like the rest of the family, honed over generations of making and selling artisanal delicacies. At first, the family was in the business of selling yōkan, a block-shaped wagashi sweet made with azuki red bean paste, sugar and agar-agar, but during the Edo period, transitioned to making and selling tsukudani. It has been the family specialty and livelihood ever since.

Tsukudani is so named because it’s said to have originated from Tsukuda, a small island in the middle of the Sumidagawa that flows 200 metres away from the hospital where I was born. ‘Tsukuda’ means cultivated rice paddy and ‘ni’ means boiled. Tsukudani was invented around four hundred years ago, during the Edo period, as a way of preserving seafood and other proteins. It’s as salty as it is flavoursome, so it’s eaten only in small portions. The family shop sells a wide variety that includes eel; shītake mushroom; fuki (butterbur stems); shrimp; the tiny fry of sardines; finely slivered, salt-candied squid; konbu seaweed, sold cut into flat squares or shredded; finely flaked horse mackerel; burdock root; clams; chilli pepper leaf; diced tuna; cod roe and salt-candied smelt. Some varieties, such as unagi (Japanese freshwater eel), are an expensive luxury; others, such as konbu or fuki, are more economical, day-to-day tsukudani. Every year during the busy gift-giving seasons of ochūgen in summer and oseibō in winter, the orders pile into the shop for neatly packed bags of tsukudani arranged inside beautiful lightweight wooden boxes, wrapped in the shop’s elegantly branded bronze-coloured paper and ribbon, ready to be distributed as gifts.

The recipe for cooking tsukudani is tweaked according to the ingredient that’s being preserved, but most of the time it’s made by simmering the chosen ingredient slowly for hours in a mixture of good quality shōyu (soy sauce), mirin (sweet rice wine for cooking) and sugar until the whole lot has reduced to a sticky, gooey brown mass. Whenever the huge cauldrons in the kitchen at the back of the shop are simmering away, the entire place fills with a mouth-watering aroma.

When I was a teenager I helped out during the school holidays, packing the bags of tsukudani that were to go into the gift boxes ordered by customers. Each morning I proudly donned my white shop coat with ‘Ariakeya’ embroidered on the pocket to start the day’s packing and weighing, but it seemed I wasn’t up to it. My aunt, Ōkī Oji-chan’s wife, kept sending back bags that I’d smeared with sauce, or hadn’t folded into perfect squares. I never seemed to be able to get it right or to do it fast enough. One afternoon, while we all sat for a break in the kitchen over a cup of green tea and senbei crackers, my aunt gazed at me for a while, then said, ‘Maybe it’s your face. Seeing someone who looks like you handling tsukudani makes it seem unappetising.’

There’d been a time I’d fantasised about working at the shop counter, but there was the reality: customers came to Ariakeya to purchase something deeply, traditionally Japanese. The last thing they’d want to see was someone who looked like a gaijin – an ‘outsider’, or ‘foreigner’ – serving it to them.

I was never asked to help out again.

The day I was born, Hironomiya Naruhito was celebrating his seventh birthday. He was destined to become Emperor in 2019. The family shop sits a few hundred metres from the Imperial Palace, the school the two princes attended visible from my Obā-chan’s old apartment verandah. The proximity and our shared birthdays somehow made Naruhito seem familiar to me; yet he – the epitome of Japaneseness, once thought to be divine, having descended from the Sun Goddess herself – and I – whose Japanese identity would remain forever contested because the genetic roll of the dice made me look more Anglo than Japanese – might as well have existed in alternate universes.

We never marked Hinamatsuri at home. Maybe it was because we didn’t have a set of hinaningyo dolls. Maybe my mother didn’t have the energy to organise the display, the invitations or meals with friends. Maybe as a modern, internationally minded woman, she felt celebrating such a day was too old-fashioned. Maybe she thought my father would feel excluded and didn’t want to cause friction when I was an only child, who would eventually have to land on one side of the cultural divide or the other. Maybe it was because we were still living in Japan; if I’d grown up in England, she might have embraced such traditions. In my twenties I had a boyfriend whose parents had migrated from Pakistan to London. They clung fiercely to the old traditions, and whenever he went back to Lahore with his parents, he said, his cousins who still lived in Lahore laughed at how stuck they seemed in their old-fashioned ways. The grief of leaving a place you belong to can leave you frozen in the past.

Each Christmas, although not Christian, my mother would decorate our artificial tree with tasteful, hand-painted wooden decorations she’d bought on holidays in Scandinavia. Maybe it was for my father’s benefit; maybe after enduring the long misery of the postwar years, it was something of a novelty for her: something exotic, exciting. But she never explained why she seemed so reluctant to let me celebrate Hinamatsuri and the other traditional childhood rituals my cousins and friends enjoyed. Watching them go through these rites of passage without me planted the first seeds of doubt about my identity. I wonder, sometimes, whether my mother would have celebrated Hinamatsuri with me if I’d been fully Japanese.

CHIRASHIZUSHI

‘Scattered sushi’

Serves 4

The toppings listed below are typical, though there are many alternative options to choose from. You can add fine slices of any sashimi-grade seafood such as salmon or scallops if you prefer the Kanto style, or slivers of avocado and smoked salmon for an east–west fusion version. If you can find it, ikura (salmon caviar) is a delicious addition and makes the chirashizushi look spectacular, as if it’s been scattered with tiny gemstones.

Before putting together your chirashizushi, get all your toppings ready. You can find the recipes for these on the following pages. You’ll need to prepare your shītake mushrooms and lotus root at least a day in advance.

INGREDIENTS

1 tbsp white sesame seeds

100g snow peas

8 slices of amazu renkon (marinated lotus root), prepared in advance

8 shōyu-simmered shītake mushrooms, prepared in advance

6 cups sushi rice, made with 3 cups uruchimai, brought to room temperature

8 freshly cooked and shelled prawns

2 eggs, prepared as kinshi tamago

½ cup green edamame, blanched and cooled

¼ cup finely shredded nori

Sashimi (optional)

Shōyu, to serve

METHOD

Toast the sesame seeds in a dry pan over low heat for a few mintues until golden, stirring constantly to prevent burning. Set aside to cool.

Rinse the snow peas and top them, removing the ‘thread’ by pulling downwards along the edge after snapping off the stalk. Blanch in salted boiling water for a few seconds, then remove to cool. When cool to the touch, slice them in half, or into diagonal strips about a centimetre wide. Cut the lotus-root slices and shītake mushrooms into quarters, or halves if they’re on the smaller side.

Turn your sushi rice out into an ojūbako, a traditional lacquer serving box, or otherwise a wide, attractive bowl with a flat bottom. Using a spatula, gently press the rice down and spread it out to the edges, making a flat surface. Let your aesthetic sense guide you as you scatter the snow peas, lotus root, shītake mushrooms, prawns, kinshi tamago and edamame over the rice, then sprinkle the shredded nori and sesame over everything to finish.

If using sashimi, you can either put the shōyu in a separate dish to dip the fish into or drizzle a little over the top as you eat.

SUSHI MESHI

Seasoned sushi rice, also called shari

Serves 4

Although you’ll see packets of ‘sushi rice’ in supermarkets, this is just plain uruchimai rice. It still needs sushi seasoning mixed into it once it’s cooked before use in any sushi dish. It’s easy to make your own sushi seasoning, but you can also buy it pre-made. I prefer the Mizkan brand, which is available in many Asian supermarkets, but check the label for the words ‘sushi seasoning’ because the bottle looks almost identical to Mizkan’s rice vinegar.

Key to this dish is taking care with seasoning and cooling the rice. I mix my sushi seasoning into hot rice straight out of the rice cooker in my mother’s hangiri (wooden rice tub) with a rice spatula in one hand, wafting away the steam as I go with an uchiwa paper fan held in the other. The wood of the hangiri absorbs excess moisture, resulting in perfect glossy grains. You don’t have to have one of these to make decent sushi rice; a large bowl with a wide, flat base or a baking sheet lined with greaseproof paper (not wax paper) will do – even better if you can fan the rice while you mix. Drawing off moisture while it cools prevents the seasoning from making the rice soggy. You want to end up with firm, shiny, room-temperature grains.

You can add an optional 5 x 5cm square of dried konbu kelp seaweed (wiped with a damp cloth first) to the water before steaming for added umami.

To make your own sushi seasoning, combine 4 tbsp Japanese rice vinegar, 2 tbsp caster sugar and 1 tsp fine sea salt in a small pan and bring to the boil over medium heat, stirring well until sugar and salt have dissolved. Allow to cool before using.

INGREDIENTS

Freshly steamed rice made with 3 cups uncooked uruchimai (see here)

1/3 cup store-bought sushi seasoning or home-made sushi seasoning

METHOD

Transfer the freshly cooked rice to your hangiri, bowl or lined baking sheet and spread it out evenly. Using a spatula held at a 45-degree angle so as not to squash the grains, gently turn the rice while sprinkling the sushi vinegar mixture evenly over the top. Once all the seasoning is in, continue turning the rice with care while fanning it with the other hand. Keep fanning and turning the rice until it has cooled to just above room temperature, the seasoning has been fully absorbed and the grains are glossy. Keep the rice covered with a clean, damp tea towel and keep in a cool place until needed. Don’t refrigerate it if you’re planning to eat it the same day, as this will make the rice hard and unpalatable. It can be refrigerated or frozen, but it will need to be steamed or microwaved to restore the grains to their glossy, sticky glory.

SIMMERED SHITAKE MUSHROOMS

INGREDIENTS

200g dried shītake mushrooms

8 cups water

6 tbsp shōyu

6 tbsp mirin

4 tbsp caster sugar

METHOD

Put the dried shītake mushrooms in a large airtight container, add the water and cover with a plate small enough to fit inside. This will keep them submerged. Put the lid on and leave the container in the fridge overnight. Don’t use hot water to hurry along the reconstituting process, as this won’t extract the full depth of flavour.

In the morning, remove the shītake mushrooms, reserving the soaking water. This is an umami-rich shītake dashi (stock) suitable for vegans.

Cut the stalks from the shītake and discard.

Strain the reserved soaking water through a sieve lined with muslin or a piece of paper towel to remove any grit. Place 4 cups of this soaking water into a pan with the shītake mushrooms and add the shōyu, mirin and caster sugar.

Cut a piece of greaseproof paper to fit inside the pan, piercing it with a few holes, and lay it over the mixture. Bring the mixture to a boil over medium heat, then turn the heat down to low. After 15 minutes, remove the paper. Simmer for 10 minutes more, or until all the liquid has evaporated and the shītake are plump and shiny. Allow them to cool. Serve with rice as they are or sauté them with cubes of firm tofu, greens, prawns or thinly sliced beef. They can be kept for about a week in the fridge, or for longer in the freezer.

KINSHI TAMAGO

Paper-thin egg ‘crepe’ strips

INGREDIENTS

2 eggs

Pinch salt

Pinch caster sugar

2 tsp cooking oil

METHOD

Beat the eggs, sugar and salt with a fork or a pair of cooking chopsticks, making sure the whites are well blended in.

Heat the oil in a medium-sized non-stick frying pan over medium-high heat and, once hot, wipe the excess off with a paper towel. Turn the heat down to medium-low.

Pour half the mixture into the middle of the pan and swirl around evenly until the bottom is coated with a fine layer of egg.

Allow the egg to cook until the surface is beginning to set, then use a non-metallic spatula or chopsticks to lift the edges gently away from the pan and flip it over. Allow the other side to cook for 10 seconds or until set. Remove and place on a piece of greaseproof paper, a damp tea towel or a chopping board.

Repeat the process with the remaining egg mixture.

Once cooled, lay the egg ‘crepes’ on top of each other and cut in half. Lay the halves on top of each other and place them so the long edge is facing you. Cut across the semicircle of egg into very fine strips about 2–3mm wide.

AMAZU RENKON

Amazu-marinated lotus root

You can use this amazu mixture to marinate other types of thinly sliced vegetables, such as Japanese or Lebanese cucumbers, carrots or daikon. Leftover amazu-marinated lotus-root slices can be used up in stir-fries or added to salads. If you can’t find fresh lotus root, you can substitute 1 cup shop-bought frozen lotus root – just blanch in boiling water before marinating in the amazu mixture.

INGREDIENTS

½ fresh lotus root

1 tbsp rice vinegar

Amazu marinade

1 tbsp Japanese rice vinegar

1 tbsp caster sugar

Pinch fine sea salt

METHOD

Mix the vinegar, sugar and salt for the marinade, stirring well until the sugar and salt have dissolved.

If using fresh lotus root, peel and slice into 3mm slices. Bring a pan of water to boil. Add the lotus-root slices and 1tbsp vinegar and simmer for 2–3 minutes or until tender. Drain and add to the amazu mixture while still hot, keeping in an airtight container in the fridge overnight.

蟄虫啓戸

6–10 March

Sugomori mushi tō o hiraku

Hibernating insects emerge

桃始笑

11–15 March

Momo hajimete saku

First peach blossoms

菜虫化蝶

16–20 March

Namushi chō to naru

Caterpillars become butterflies

At this time of year, spring battles for dominance over the dying days of winter. The literal translation of the first kō of this season is ‘hibernating insects open their doors’. I imagine little insects emerging from their underground burrows, blinking in the sunlight and hungry for their first meal of spring, only to scurry back into the warmth on days when the winter chill fights back. There’s a similar transition between seasons here in South Australia, where hot, sunny days prompt a packing away of winter clothes only for the temperature to plummet, so they have to be unpacked again. In Japan, this rapid cycling of cold and warm days is called sankan-shion – ‘three cold, four hot’. It’s as if winter, aware that its strength is fading, fights ever harder to hang on before surrendering to the seasonal cycle that keeps rolling on.

In March, tiny firefly squid swim in their thousands into Toyama Bay on the north-western coast of Japan, their bioluminescence so bright at night you can read a paper by it. They spawn, then die. As their lights go out, the fishermen haul them in with their nets. Soft and translucent, the squid are sliced into thin, tender strands and dipped into shōyu freshened with grated ginger, a dish named Ryūgū sōmen. It’s available only for a short season, a matter of a few days each year. Sōmen are the delicately thin, refreshing white noodles eaten in summer. Ryūgū is the name of the sacred underwater realm of Ryūjin, the dragon-like Shintō deity that reigns over all that lies beneath the sea. A rare gift: lives relinquished while other lives are sustained.

The daishiken, or nyūgaku shiken, the crucial university entrance exams, take place between January and March each year. Doing well and getting into a good university is a passport to a secure and prosperous future. Everything rides on these exams, as school grades gained during the year don’t count. If a student fails, they have to wait a whole year to try again, during which they’re called rōnin, a term for a masterless samurai that conveys the shame felt by the student and the family, especially mothers, whose role traditionally includes responsibility for children’s education. I remember the pressure my cousins and friends faced in the year leading up to this time, going to regular school during the day, coming home for an early meal before heading out again to juku – crammer school – at night and at weekends, with homework from both sets of classes to complete in what little spare time they had left, often working late into the night.

The level of education in Japan is one of the highest in the world; literacy rates have remained static at over 99 per cent of the population for years, impressive given children have to learn three alphabets: the phonetic hiragana and katakana scripts and the ideographic kanji characters. During their time at school, Japanese children learn 2136 kanji. To read a newspaper you need to know around 2500 characters, and a university graduate will know about double that number. Remembering exactly how the more complex kanji are written is another matter; the average character is made up of eleven different strokes (the most complex kanji has eighty-four), all of which must be written in a particular order for the kanji to look correct, as well as aesthetically pleasing. My mother, a voracious reader with an elegant, artistic writing style, had to consult her pocket dictionary from time to time to remind herself how to write kanji she used less frequently, especially when she lived outside Japan. And that was even before the advent of computers and smartphones that offer a choice of possible kanji whenever a word is typed in simple hiragana or katakana, making it even harder to remember how to write less common kanji by hand.

I can read between 250 and 300 characters, and write less than half that from memory. Most of my hafu schoolmates attended Japanese classes on Saturdays so they could keep up with their kanji, but for some reason I was never enrolled. I wish I’d realised the importance of learning them then; I might have asked my parents to let me go. Not going means my reading skills are at the level of the average eight-year-old: nowhere near enough to tackle books by Japanese authors I’d love to read, books that would give me more nuanced knowledge about my language, culture, society and history.

Kanji characters are building blocks for developing and memorising new vocabulary. You might see a word you don’t know, but can work it out fairly accurately by recognising elements contained within the kanji. Processing the word as an image, rather than as an arrangement of letters and sounds, makes it easier to memorise, and each new word learned is the foundation for another. There are also thousands of homonyms in Japanese; the word ‘kanji’ itself can mean either ‘kanji character’ or ‘feeling’, and you can only distinguish which is which by seeing how it’s written.

Not being able to read Japanese the way I’ve read in English most of my life limits my vocabulary and makes it difficult for me to take my place as an adult among my peers. I can’t have the kind of conversations I’m curious to have with them, magnifying the feeling of estrangement from my own country, of being left behind.

I speak unaccented, standard Japanese with the odd Tokyo colloquialism thrown in, just like any other Edokko. It can be tricky when talking to strangers on the phone. They’d never guess I have the face I do at the start of the call, but if our conversation becomes more involved I sense a missed beat at the other end of the phone, as if they’re wondering what’s wrong with this Japanese person who doesn’t use keigo formal language appropriately, who sounds like an adult but uses odd words like a child, who orders their sentences in strange ways.

My vocabulary remains limited, and since my mother died I no longer speak in my native language every day, except when I pay my respects at my ancestral altar. It limits my ability to express myself and interact with people I care about in Japan. I ponder the possibility of taking kanji lessons at the local Japanese language school, or cramming the required 2136 kanji by enrolling in a two-year online course. The idea of knowing enough vocabulary to have the kinds of conversations I’d like to, the kind that allow me to express myself as an adult rather than a child and understand every nuance of what someone is telling me, feels like bright sunlight burning away a heavy fog that’s been obscuring the view for far too long.

During daishiken time, families do all they can to avoid the use of words like ‘suberu’ – ‘slip’ – a colloquialism for failing exams. In Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, some schools even suspend their skiing classes so as to avoid any unlucky ‘slipping’ or ‘falling’. There are various rituals for exam luck. The night before exams, students might eat a bowl of katsudon, slices of panko-crumbed pork cutlet cooked into a dashi-softened omelette on hot rice, because while the word ‘katsu’ is short for the English word ‘cutlet’, it also means ‘win’.

KitKats also become laden with ritualistic meaning during this season; a once-a-year exam-passing special edition arrives in the shops, to be given as gifts and eaten for luck. The practice became popular in the last twenty years, long after I left Japan; KitKat is pronounced ‘Kitto Katto’ in Japanese. ‘Katto’ sounds similar to ‘katsu’ (win) and ‘kitto’ means ‘surely’. KitKat – kitto katsu – means ‘you/I will surely win’.

In my final year of school in Hamburg, one of my tutors expressed doubt I’d gain a place at any university, let alone a place at Oxford or Cambridge as I hoped, given the overwhelming difficulty I experienced focusing, and my near-phobic antipathy to revision until forced to do it at the last minute. It took thirty-five years for me to be diagnosed as neurally atypical, but at the time I couldn’t understand why I struggled to engage my brain in what I knew I needed to do, to achieve the outcome I wanted. My father was alarmed; he, rather than my mother, took charge of my education, since I was destined for a British tertiary institution, a fact that made my mother back off from involving herself in my studies, saying, ‘You don’t need two mothers.’ But in March of the year I was due to take my university entrance exams, my mother took me to Yushima Tenjin for luck. An ancient Shintō shrine in Tokyo established in the year 458 in honour of Ame no Tajikarao, the god of physical power, it was dedicated in 1355 to the spirit of Sugawara no Michizone, a 9th-century Heian scholar, poet, nobleman and statesman. He was so beloved by all that he was posthumously deified as Tenjin, patron spirit of academia, and a number of shrines dedicated to Tenjin-sama sprung up across the country.

Yushima Tenjin is the most famous of these in Tokyo, and students and their families go there in their thousands at this time of year to petition Tenjin-sama for exam success. That year my mother watched as I wrote my academic aspirations on a small wooden ema (prayer tablet) she’d bought from the shrine office. I was too embarrassed to write in my stunted Japanese and used English instead, but as I tied the ema to the large frame provided for the purpose that bristled with thousands of others, I felt my will and determination surge so powerfully that I can’t even remember what I chose to eat for the lunch my mother promised to treat me with afterwards. The odds are pretty good that I chose sushi.

Many sansai, wild-gathered mountain vegetables, come into season during Keichitsu, and other leafy greens and herbs, like takana (mustard greens, a variety of brassica), are harvested, to be chopped and stir-fried into small side dishes or, more commonly, pickled. Pickled takana is fairly easy to find overseas in the Japanese food section of Asian supermarkets. It keeps well in the fridge in an airtight container and, like all Japanese pickles, is delicious eaten with fresh-steamed rice.

Bunches of nanohana – the bright yellow flowers and young shoots of canola plants known as ‘nabana’ – are sold between December and March. With their auspicious colour, they’re sometimes used as decorations for Hinamatsuri and included in the festive feast, too. Nabana means ‘flowers of the vegetables’ and only the tops of the plants, including the flowers, are eaten. Their mildly bitter taste increases the larger the plants grow, so they’re harvested early, while still tender. The slight bitterness is pleasantly balanced when served as karashiae, mixed with a mild, sweet Japanese yellow mustard dressing, but like many other greens, and with non-native vegetables such as broccoli or asparagus, it goes well blanched and pepped up with dashi, miso, ground sesame or shōyu-vinegar dressings, too.

Times are changing. Nabana and other sansai vegetables now belong firmly in the old-fashioned camp, however much their health-giving properties are appreciated. They’re the kind of thing your obā-chan urged you to eat so you’d grow up strong.

I was born on a Thursday, and Thursday’s child has far to go, according to the old nursery rhyme. The places I lived in my first four decades may seem glamorous, but it didn’t feel that way. Tokyo. Kobe. Back to Tokyo. Two-month stints in the UK at ages two and seven to live with my English aunt in Surrey, attending a primary school there the second time. At eleven, I was sent to Yorkshire to begin five grim years at an English boarding school that felt like it hadn’t changed much since the Brontë sisters boarded there three hundred years earlier. The two eldest, Maria and Elizabeth, contracted tuberculosis there and died. Charlotte hated her time there so much that she modelled Lowood School in Jane Eyre after it. When I boarded there in the 70s, it seemed just as terrible as it had been back then.

At the same time I was despatched to boarding school, my parents moved to Hong Kong; my father had taken a new job there. I visited them in their new apartment during the too-short school holiday following the first of the three annual thirteen-week terms. I found most of my toys, books and clothes and my beloved red chenille bedspread had been discarded to make the move easier. Feeling unmoored, I slept in a room with two single beds covered with the turquoise bedspreads from the guest bedroom of our old Tokyo home.

Two years later, my father took another job, this time in Singapore. There were holiday visits there, and to the north of England where my parents owned a small cottage in picturesque surroundings, too close to my boarding school to afford relief. Then – joy! – my parents moved back to Tokyo. They didn’t go back to the apartment I grew up in, but it meant that during the holidays I could be with family and friends again, happy and anchored on home ground.

I escaped from boarding school misery to Hamburg for my final year of school, then moved to Edinburgh for a gap year before university. My father took another job, this time in London. I started university. Three years later my parents moved to a village an hour’s drive from Paris. My father had taken a job nearby in Fontainebleau, where he fell in love. I graduated just as my parents’ marriage was ending, and moved to London to continue my studies. My father moved in with his new love in France; five years later, they would get married. My mother returned to Tokyo, then back to England, to be near me and to repair her heart.

In London, I moved house eleven times over eighteen years. I met my husband there, and then, the biggest move of all: ten thousand miles and half a hemisphere to South Australia, where I’ve come to a stop – for now. Sometimes I call this place home. Other times, I’m not sure what home really means.

I wouldn’t have moved to Australia if my mother’s heart could have been repaired; I’d have stayed in England to be near her. After she came back to be with me in London, she lived only another five years. She was fifty-six when she died, just a few years older than I am now, her heart broken.

I used to sing a duet with my mother, a much-loved song of early spring called ‘Oborozukiyo’, meaning ‘O hazy moon’. It’s the name of Lady Kokiden’s sister in Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th-century novel, The Tale of Genji, but here, it sets the scene of a spring night in a rural village. My mother learned the song as a schoolgirl, and she taught it to me when I was around the same age. She’d sing the alto line and I’d sing soprano.

Nanohana batake ni irihi usure

Miwatasu yama no ha, kasumi fukashi

Harukaze soyofuku, sora o mireba

Yūzuki kakarīte, nioi awashi

The sun is setting over fields of golden mustard blossoms

I look across to the distant mountain ridge where deep mist lingers

A spring breeze softly stirs; when I look up at the sky

The evening moon hangs hazy in the sweet-scented air

Kasumi, the word for ‘gentle mist’ in the second line of the song, is mentioned in the previous sekki of Usui, but the soft spring mist spills over into this sekki of Keichitsu too, a reminder of the nebulousness of a segmented seasonal calendar in a country of wildly diverse climates, and of the mismatch resulting from its transition from lunar to Gregorian. The second kō that appears here, ‘First peach blossoms’, is a relic of the old lunar calendar, and the third day of the third lunar month when Hinamatsuri, the old Festival of Peaches, was celebrated sometimes fell in this season of Keichitsu instead. Nothing can ever be certain. Nothing escapes change.

The first verse of the song conjures up the kasumi mist over the mountains and a field of nanohana blossoms. In the old days canola was grown for lantern oil, as well as eaten. Once foraged and picked in the wild, small family businesses now farm nanohana along with many of the edible plants written about in the ancient Man’yōshū poems, making some of them available all year round.

As a child, I had only a vague sense of the idyllic scene we were singing about. The lyrics include old-fashioned words I’d never heard in conversation. I enjoyed harmonising with my mother, but the song didn’t move me the way it seemed to move her, and it was only recently, when I studied the lyrics online that I understood the poetic images they conjure up. I also discovered it had a second verse.

Satowa no hokage mo, mori no iro mo

Tanaka no komichi o tadoru hito mo

Kawazu no nakune mo, kane no oto mo

Sanagara kasumeru oborozukiyo

The firelight from the village, the colours of the forest

The people walking along the narrow lanes between rice paddies

Even the frog’s chorus and the sound of the temple bell

All of them seem misted with the light of the hazy moon

Reading these lyrics, I was surprised to find myself overwhelmed with emotion. It wasn’t as if I’d grown up in a mountain village and walked home from school down rice paddy lanes, but the song evokes a Japanese sensibility that’s deeply familiar to me all the same.

After my mother died I missed singing with her, but a few years ago I asked my cousin Asako to sing my mother’s lines and recorded our duet on my phone. Sometimes I play it back and sing along with her clear, bell-like voice, opening up the portal of my imagination to travel back to the old Tokyo apartment I grew up in. I stand here in a land my mother never visited, a place she couldn’t have imagined me uprooting my life in London for, and sing, revelling in the nostalgia of an imagined Japanese landscape in spring.

OHITASHI

Cooled, blanched spinach in a seasoned dashi dressing

Serves 4 as a small side dish

INGREDIENTS

1 bunch spinach

300mL dashi

1 tsp mirin

3 tsp shōyu

Pinch salt

1/3 cup katsubushi (dried bonito) flakes to garnish; replace with roasted sesame seeds to make vegan

METHOD

Wash spinach and blanch in boiling water. Drain and refresh in cold water, squeezing out excess moisture. Line up the blanched stalks into a bunch on a chopping board, cut into 4cm lengths and arrange in small serving bowls.

Mix together the dashi, mirin, shōyu and salt and pour over the top. Garnish with a mound of katsubushi flakes or a scattering of sesame seeds.

AEMONO

Dressed blanched vegetables, served at room temperature

All recipes below serve 4 as a small side dish

I’ve suggested vegetables that go best with each of the dressings below, but there are no rules. Try different dressing and vegetable combinations and see which you like best.

GOMA-AE

Vegetables with sesame dressing

INGREDIENTS

350g spinach

or

250g green beans, broccoli or broccolini

Sesame dressing

5 tbsp white sesame seeds

1 tbsp shōyu

2 tbsp bonito or konbu dashi

METHOD

Wash your choice of vegetable, trimming tough stalks, removing stems and ‘threads’ from the green beans, or cutting broccoli or broccolini into bite-sized pieces.

Set a potful of water to boil, then blanch the vegetables until they’re tender and bright green, but still have some bite. Refresh in cold water, then drain, making sure to squeeze out excess water if you’re using spinach.

Toast the sesame seeds in a dry pan over low heat until golden, stirring constantly to prevent burning. Set aside one teaspoonful as a garnish, then grind the rest with a mortar and pestle, adding in the shōyu and the dashi and blending well.

Mix the dressing into the vegetables just before serving, garnishing with the reserved sesame seeds.

KARASHIAE

Vegetables with yellow mustard dressing

This dressing is typically used with nanohana (canola or mustard) greens, but it also goes well with broccolini or Chinese greens such as gai lan or choy sum. It’s best made with Japanese yellow mustard, which you can find in good Asian supermarkets, but if you can’t find any, hot English mustard will do. Don’t use any other kind – it won’t taste the same.

INGREDIENTS

150g mustard greens, gai lan or choy sum

or

250g broccolini or broccoli, or green beans

Mustard dressing

2 tbsp bonito or konbu dashi

2 tbsp shōyu

2 tbsp Japanese mustard (or hot English mustard)

METHOD

Prepare your greens, trimming and removing tough stalks and, if using broccolini or broccoli, cut into bite-sized pieces. Blanch in boiling water until tender and bright green, refresh in cold water, then drain, squeezing out any excess water.

Blend the dashi, shōyu and mustard, taking care to eliminate any lumps of mustard. Mix with the vegetables, making sure to coat thoroughly, and serve.

MISOAE

Vegetables with miso dressing

INGREDIENTS

150g mustard greens, snow peas, gai lan or choy sum

or

250g broccolini, broccoli or green beans

Miso dressing

2 tbsp white miso paste

1 tbsp Japanese rice wine vinegar (I prefer Mizkan brand)

2 tsp caster sugar

2cm fresh ginger, peeled and finely grated

METHOD

Prepare your greens, trimming and removing tough stalks and, if using broccolini or broccoli, cut into bite-sized pieces. Blanch in boiling water until tender and bright green, refresh in cold water, then drain, squeezing out any excess water.

Thoroughly blend the miso paste, vinegar, sugar and grated ginger. Mix into the vegetables, making sure they’re evenly coated, and serve.

DASHI

Stock

DASHI MADE WITH DRIED BONITO FLAKES

Makes 2 cups

You can buy packets of katsubushi bonito flakes in most Asian supermarkets. Once you’ve made up the stock, you can freeze it and use it as needed.

Alternatively, you can use pre-prepared powdered dashi, called dashi no moto. Packets sold for export usually have instructions printed on the back in English.

INGREDIENTS

2 cups water

½ cup katsubushi flakes

METHOD

Bring the water to boil, then add the katsubushi flakes.

As soon as the mixture returns to the boil, turn off the heat and let it sit until the flakes have all sunk to the bottom.

Strain through a sieve lined with muslin, discarding the flakes (they’re good fodder for the compost bin).

KONBU DASHI

Makes 2 cups
Vegan-friendly

You can find good-quality dried konbu (kelp seaweed) in Asian food stores. There are a few different types, so make sure you buy the thick konbu specifically used for dashi, and not the thin, seasoned variety that’s eaten as a snack. Reserve the konbu after you’ve made the dashi, as you can use it to make konbu no tsukudani.

INGREDIENTS

2 cups water

20g dried konbu

METHOD

Wipe the konbu with a dry cloth and cut into pieces about 7cm long. Put the water in a pan and add the konbu pieces, allowing them to soak in the cold water for 30 minutes.

Set the pan over a low heat, watching carefully for the first tiny bubbles that appear when it’s on the verge of simmering. Don’t let it boil; as soon as you see those bubbles, remove the pan from the heat and take out the konbu. Don’t throw the konbu away, as it can be shredded and added to rice, noodles, salads or steamed rice, or used to make tsukudani.

SHITAKE MUSHROOM DASHI

Makes 8 cups
Vegan-friendly

INGREDIENTS

8 cups water

200g dried shītake mushrooms

METHOD

Put the dried shītake mushrooms in a large airtight container, add the water and cover with a plate small enough to fit inside. This will keep them submerged. Put the lid on and leave the container in the fridge overnight.

In the morning, remove the shītake mushrooms and strain the soaking water through a sieve lined with muslin or a piece of paper towel to remove any grit. The dashi is now ready to use.

雀始巣

21–25 March

Suzume hajimete sukū

Sparrows start to nest

櫻始開

26–30 March

Sakura hajimete saku

First cherry blossoms

雷乃発声

31 March – 4 April

Kaminari sunawachi koe o hassu

Thunder grows distant

The arrival of spring equinox is announced by a fresh softness blowing in on the breeze; by birds busy building nests in preparation for their chicks and by Kaminari-sama, the Shintō deity of thunder and lightning, slinking away for a rest after months of boisterous activity, taking his booming taiko drums with him.

It’s announced by the arrival in the shops of a type of dango dumpling called botamochi, named after the botan – tree peony – that blooms in spring and is mentioned in Kokū, the sekki of late April. They sell in their thousands at this time of year. It’s made of mochi (sticky pounded rice) covered in a layer of anko paste, like the ohagi sold during autumn equinox. There’s always something to look forward to in Japan, the pleasure of eating seasonal foods heightened by the knowledge that they won’t be available for long.

Writing about my native culture comes with a degree of responsibility. I can never be an ambassador for all Japanese culture, culinary or otherwise, and what I write about here can’t be representative of every Japanese person’s experience; no individual can represent an entire nation. I was born and raised in a city whose natives would seem as alien to a remote Hokkaido villager as a Sydneysider might to someone in Alice Springs, or a Londoner to someone in the Outer Hebrides. My mother’s family belongs to a metropolitan, educated, samurai-turned-merchant class that sits a bubble apart from those who live and labour in remote, rural areas, from those who don’t enjoy the same privileges.

The immediacy of the feeling that stirs whenever I revisit memories of my Tokyo childhood makes me forget that over four decades have passed since then; the Shōwa-era city I grew up in is embraced by younger generations as a retro-nostalgic concept: fun, but about as current as a pre-remote-control analogue TV. Society changed as one generation was succeeded by the next, as it tends to do everywhere, and I remember, long ago, my mother repeating the line familiar to many people who’ve reached a certain age: Young people these days, followed by a sigh.

Still, there’s a core essence to the Japanese way of being: the emphasis on cooperation and consideration of others; an awareness that each person is part of a whole, and the need for ‘wa’ – harmony within that whole, whether it be family, neighbourhood, workplace, city or country. Shame is a powerful societal motivator, prompting people to adhere to behavioural norms that promote harmonious ways of living that are crucial for survival in big cities like Tokyo, where almost 14 million people are crammed into just over 2000 square kilometres of land.

Ever since I can remember, there were people in the crowds wearing white gauze masks, not to protect themselves, but to prevent others from catching their colds. Not doing so seemed shocking in a city where people are packed – literally – onto crowded commuter trains each morning. I remember being taken aback by the complaints of an American expat I once met who worked in Tokyo for a year. They hated, they said, the train announcements asking people to stand back to allow passengers off trains at stations, or reminding passengers not to leave any belongings behind. I won’t be told what to do, they said. People in Tokyo seem so passive. I imagine the daily commute would have been hell for this person; the only way to tolerate the extreme congestion is to let go of any resistance and go with the flow in a Zen-like state of calm, walking on the left side of a station concourse or street with everyone else so that you – and all around you – don’t waste energy fighting against it. When I worked as an intern at a Ginza art gallery in the early 90s, I found my daily rush-hour commute surprisingly stress-free despite neatly uniformed station attendants pushing hard against our backs with white-gloved hands so they could squeeze as many of us as possible into the train carriages, politely tucking in protruding elbows and bags so the doors could slide closed behind us and the train depart on time – always, always on time.

The Tokyo train announcements seem unnecessary for the most part, as people comply anyway, knowing how much easier it is to get to work when they aren’t fighting each other for space. Things are changing with younger generations, but you can still watch a train pull into a station where the mass of people on the platform have arranged themselves in queues on either side of the doors, and waiting patiently until everyone who needs to get off is out before heading deep into the carriage to allow as many people as possible behind them to get on. When the train stops, passengers squish up against each other to allow fellow travellers off, and everyone tolerates this because they understand the necessity. Anyone who doesn’t behave this way seems shockingly disruptive, even insane.

Try whipping out your mobile phone and talking while you’re on a train, then look up to catch your fellow passengers sneaking disapproving looks at you. The protocol of no mobile phone use on trains to maintain a peaceful atmosphere is sacrosanct – texting is okay, but conversations on your mobile, especially loud ones, are a huge no-no.

There are parts of Japan where these rules seem less important, typically where there’s more space, in smaller towns and villages in rural areas, or in places like Okinawa in the south, where the ethnically distinct Uchinanchu population is more relaxed about societal norms that belong to the colonising culture, where community is deeply valued, but without quite as much judgement or rigidity. But wherever you go, there’s a level of courtesy in public interactions that seems unwavering.

As with so many things, there can be a troubling side to this compliance. Those who struggle to conform due to being neurally or otherwise atypical; those who long for a less conventional way of living but who feel constrained by expectations of duty to family, workplace and community; those who are troubled in some way or down on their luck; and even Japanese children educated overseas who return home to resume their schooling – all can find it difficult to fit in in a country where fitting in is often a matter of survival. Mental health issues are talked about in hushed tones, and suicide is all too common.

Until 1945, the Emperor was considered divine, a descendant of the Shintō goddess Amaterasu, towards whom many of his people felt the greatest sense of duty. It’s likely why some conscripted troops obeyed orders against their will during the Second World War, committing atrocities against humans of other nations for fear of mortal punishment or reprisals against their families or, at the very least, the enduring shame of non-compliance. Those who spoke out against the war, or called for trade unions to protect workers from exploitation in the years afterwards were ostracised, even exiled from their own communities.

If there’s one thing that unites Japanese people in delight and appreciation, it’s the food and events that attend the seasons. It’s hard to find a phenomenon more widely celebrated throughout the country, besides New Year, than cherry blossom season. Sakura – which is actually not the blossom of the cherry tree, but of a native species of plum – is such an icon of Japanese culture that when the word ‘hana’, meaning ‘flower’, is used in haiku, it always means cherry blossom, and the word ‘hanami’, literally translated as ‘flower-seeing’, the practice of viewing sakura.

The tradition of hanami began in the early 8th century, as a way to honour the kami spirit deities that were thought to dwell in the trees. Offerings of food and saké were made and consumed by parties who sat beneath the branches while composing poems inspired by the exquisite and transient beauty of the flowers. Coming at the start of the rice-planting season, it was also a way to honour the gods in the hope of a good rice harvest later in the year. Hanami was once practised only by the nobles of the Imperial Court, but it wasn’t long before the samurai classes also took up the tradition. By the start of the Edo period in the 17th century, hanami was popular with commoners, too. It’s such an important and short-lived phenomenon – usually lasting less than a fortnight – that there’s even a cherry-blossom forecast, the sakurazensen, along with the weather, which is watched religiously so people don’t miss out on the fleeting, different stages of the blossom.

There are over seventy sakura-related words, an entire terminology dedicated to its brief flowering season. The first glimpse of blossom is known as hatsuzakura – first cherry blossom; the fully opened flowers are called hanagasumi, meaning ‘flower mist’ (gasumi, or kasumi, is the same word for spring’s ‘misty haze’ in the song ‘Oborozukiyo’). Hanaakari – ‘flower light’ – is the name for the luminous glow of the blooms when they’re open en masse. The sight of blossoms in the early morning when they shimmer with dew is known as asazakura – morning cherry blossom. Hanafubuki means ‘flower snowstorm’, a perfect description for the heart-stopping sight of the air filled with a blizzard of delicate pale pink petals. Adazakura describes the ephemeral nature of the blossoms: how easily they fall. The phrase ‘Mikka minama no sakura’ expresses the transience of the phenomenon, meaning ‘cherry blossoms seen and gone in just three days’.

The budding, blooming and falling of sakura symbolise the fleeting nature of human life, a memento mori that acts as a reminder to embrace even the briefest moments of beauty while in this world: to live a richer, more mindful life knowing that, as all things must, it will come to an end. The title of Makoto Shinkai’s 2007 anime movie 5 Centimetres Per Second refers to the gentle speed at which sakura petals fall, and the bittersweet ending of the film reflects the way sakura, like people who love one another, blossom close together for just a short while, only to drift apart when they fall. Ultimately it carries the message that dwelling in the past, and on what has been lost, stifles the life yet to be lived – that letting go of the past, while painful, is liberating.

Cherry blossom time brings an explosion of pale-pink-petalled decorations in streets and shops, and sakura-themed food and drink starts appearing in shops, fast-food stores, cafes and restaurants. The blossoms have a delicate floral flavour, and they’re usually salted and preserved along with the leaves. There’s sakurameshi – rice steamed with salted cherry blossom petals; cherry blossom tea, which isn’t actually tea but a delicately savoury konbu-seaweed-infused broth flavoured with salted sakura blossoms which unfurl in your cup as you drink; and soft, dusky pink traditional wagashi sweets called sakuramochi.

Wagashi are little works of confectionery art that reflect the motifs, emotions and visceral, wordless feelings that come with each season. There are wagashi for every season: delicate translucent wagashi with carp-shaped sweets swimming inside them for summer; wagashi shaped like baskets of mushrooms for autumn; and, of course, pink sakura-flavoured mochi wagashi for spring. Deliciously infused with the grassy bass note of the salt-pickled sakura leaves they’re wrapped in, sakuramochi comes in two styles: the Kanto style eaten in Tokyo, one of my favourite wagashi varieties, is a small, flattened round of smooth, sweet anko red bean paste enclosed in a soft fold of pink, sakura-flavoured mochi; further south, the Kansai style of sakuramochi is round with the anko inside a pale pink mochi textured by rice grains left whole.

There’s also sakuramanju, sakura-flavoured anko steamed inside a light flour-based bun, and hanamidango, three soft chewy balls of sweetened mochi on a bamboo skewer, each about an inch in diameter, one pink and sakura or strawberry flavoured; one white and subtly, plainly sweet; and one moss-green, flavoured either with mugwort or green tea. Even though hanamidango are most often eaten during sakura season, they’re available throughout the year, too, along with another of my favourites, mitarashidango, which also takes the form of three mochi balls on a skewer, except all three are white and the whole confection is covered in a moreishly gooey, golden brown, sweet-salty shōyu glaze.

Hanamidango is such an iconic snack that it even has its own emoji. If my mother were still alive I’d be signing off messages to her with it; one of her nicknames for me was Kyādango. Everybody called me Kyā, or Kyā-chan, as a shortened form of ‘Kyasarin’ (the Japanese pronunciation of Katherine). My mother appended ‘dango’ as a term of affection. Years ago, she bought some stickers for me – you’ve been able to make your own instant customised stickers in Japan for decades – printed with photos of hanamidango. Since nobody calls me Kyādango anymore, they feel obsolete, but I still hang on to them. They’re still sticky.

Sakura-themed food isn’t limited to traditional Japanese treats. European-inspired patisserie is glorious during hanami season: gorgeously decorated, fine-textured gateaux, pastries and biscuits of every kind, never oversweet and always mouth-wateringly flavoursome – from cloud-light sponge cakes to friands, from tartlets to langues de chat biscuits – all pale pink and infused with sakura essence; such perfect, tiny works of art that it breaks your heart a little to eat them. You’ll also find sakura-flavoured ice-creams, milkshakes and pretty, blossom-themed cocktails in bars, while Dunkin’ Donuts, Mr Donut and Krispy Kreme advertise limited spring-edition sakura-flavoured offerings. You can even buy pale-pink, sakura-flavoured KitKats which go hand in hand with exam time, academic success and the start of the school year in April. I like to think of the many Japanese-themed varieties of KitKat – sakura, matcha, black sesame, hōji tea – as hafu snacks, delicious fusions of the well-loved British chocolate bar and traditional Japanese flavours. I have to be careful not to overindulge in them out of misplaced solidarity.

~

The first soft green and pink sakura buds on their branches open to a glorious mass of pale pink flowers so dense, so luminous they give off an otherworldly glow even at night, when they’re further illuminated by hundreds of paper lanterns strung among the trees as people celebrate beneath them. In Ueno Park, one of the best-known and busiest places to go for hanami in Tokyo, tarps and picnic blankets are laid out by families, groups of friends and office workers to reserve the best spots even before the buds open. On our slow migration to Australia my husband and I spent two months in Japan, arriving in March at the start of sakura season; as we travelled, the sequence of blooms followed us across the country, blessing us with extended hanami pleasure. One evening during our month’s stay in Tokyo, we walked through Ueno Park, the darkness aglow with white blossoms and red lanterns, every inch of ground beneath the thousand trees occupied by groups of people eating, drinking, talking and singing, sometimes even dancing, in a celebration of spring that grew more spirited as the evening wore on and more flagons of hanamizake were emptied. We walked past food stalls lining the avenues, mouth-watering smells, sights and sounds overwhelming our senses. Yakitori chicken skewers sizzled over charcoal braziers; plump, tiny globes of takoyaki (octopus dumplings) were flipped at lightning speeds to brown evenly in their cast-iron moulds; okonomiyaki, yakisoba noodles and other delicious treats offered an overabundance of choice, alongside the array of picnic and snack foods brought by different hanami parties. Although we didn’t have an opportunity that night to sit under the trees and join in with the hanami celebrations, I felt as drunk as the revellers with pleasure, though I felt a pang of melancholy, knowing I wouldn’t get the chance to enjoy the sight again for a long time.

~

The packed earth banks of the Imperial Palace moat near my family home and shop are lined with gnarled old sakura trees, and the sight of them in full bloom always makes my heart beat faster. As a family, we never held hanami parties; all that night-time carousing is more of an adult pastime, something I might have enjoyed with friends or work colleagues if I’d remained in Japan. But every year my mother and I still went to see the sakura around the Imperial Palace during the day with my Obā-chan, who adored them. She was a sakurabito, a person with a deep and special love for the blossoms. Even as Obā-chan grew more frail, gradually losing her battle with the kidney disease she’d suffered from for decades, my mother and I would shuffle alongside her, each of us taking an arm for support and sharing in her pleasure as we meandered beneath the bright clouds of flowers. She’d croon with joy at their beauty every year as if seeing them for the first time. Towards the end of her life she grew increasingly stooped and thin, grey from dialysis and fragile, like a small bird.

Ubazakura means ‘old woman cherry blossom’. It’s used to describe the faded beauty of a woman long after her youth is gone. My grandmother’s youthful beauty may have gone, but her dignity and warm heart shone out the same as ever. I have a photograph of her from this time, standing against a delicate haze of sakura blossom, as ephemeral and as beautiful as the petals that would soon be falling in a hanafubuki snowstorm.

TSUBUSHI-AN

‘Crushed’ azuki bean paste

Makes 500g

Anko (azuki or red bean paste) is used as an ingredient in many Japanese sweets and desserts, but it’s great eaten with vanilla ice-cream, yoghurt or even spread on toast. You can buy tinned ready-made anko (also known as ‘an’) from Asian food stores, but making it from scratch is cheaper and tastier. There are two types: smooth koshi-an, which has been pressed through a fine sieve, and tsubushi-an, which retains some texture. I’ve provided the recipe for the tsubushi-an version here. Note that the azuki beans will need to be soaked overnight before cooking.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup (200g) dried azuki beans

1 cup (200g) caster sugar

Pinch salt

METHOD

Wash azuki beans, place in a large pan with plenty of water and set over high heat, bringing to a rolling boil. Remove from heat, drain and discard water, keeping the beans in the pan. Add 750mL fresh water and soak overnight.

Keep the water and the beans in the pan after soaking, discarding any beans floating on the surface of the water first. Set the pan over high heat until the water comes to a rolling boil. Turn the heat to low and simmer for an hour or until the beans are very soft, keeping the pan half-covered and stirring from time to time with a wooden spoon and adding more water as necessary. The water should be almost completely absorbed by the time the beans are ready.

Add the sugar and stir in with the wooden spoon in a back-and-forth, rather than circular, motion, as this helps to keep the anko glossy. Keep stirring until almost all the beans are crushed, squashing the mixture with the back of the spoon. Stir in the salt and mix thoroughly before allowing the anko to cool for serving.

YAKITORI

Grilled chicken on skewers

Serves 4

Yakitori literally means ‘grilled chicken’ and is a collective name for this style of cooking. It’s always grilled over charcoal in a hibachi grill, with dainty, bite-sized pieces on short, thin bamboo skewers about 15cm long.

A traditional yakitori restaurant will have more than bite-sized skewered chicken on its menu. There’s usually tsukune, minced chicken balls served with thickened, glossy yakitori sauce; chicken gizzards, livers or hearts simply salted and chargrilled; small pieces of crispy chicken skin; and chicken skewered with bite-sized chunks of thick Japanese spring onions. You can also get skewered, salted and chargrilled shītake mushrooms, ginkgo nuts, quail eggs and small Japanese green peppers.

This recipe is for the basic, but utterly delicious, classic yakitori; it’s the sauce that makes it especially good. It’s perfect for a barbecue. If you’re using the grill in an electric oven, cut the pieces a little bigger as they’ll take longer to cook and you don’t want the chicken to dry out.

You’ll need 15–20 bamboo skewers, depending on size. A good tip is to soak the skewers in water overnight so they don’t burn so easily while over the heat.

INGREDIENTS

8 chicken thighs, boned (skin can be on or off)

Yakitori sauce

5 tbsp shōyu

4 tbsp saké

1 tbsp mirin

1 tbsp caster sugar

shichimi-tōgarashi (seven-spice seasoning) to taste (optional)

METHOD

Mix the ingredients for the yakitori sauce in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes, or until the sauce has thickened a little.

Cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces about 2.5cm and thread onto the skewers. Using a pastry brush, coat each skewer with the yakitori sauce and place over white-hot charcoal (avoid direct flames) or under a grill set to high heat. Turn the skewers frequently, taking care not to let them burn, and brush the sauce over the chicken each time until thoroughly cooked through. Serve with a sprinkling of shichimi-tōgarashi seasoning if desired (available in the Japanese food section of most Asian supermarkets).

玄鳥至

5–9 April

Tsubame kitaru

Swallows return

鴻雁北

10–14 April

Kōgan kaeru

Wild geese fly north

虹始見

15–19 April

Niji hajimete arawaru

First rainbows appear

I’ve come to write in solitude in a small shack owned by friends on the edge of the sea in South Australia. It’s a wild, solitary spot along a remote stretch of the coastline of Guuranda, renamed by English settlers as the Yorke Peninsula. These are the lands of the Narungga nation, of the nomadic Dhilba clan – one of four on the peninsula – who were intimate with every element of the environment. I think of how much they must have loved this particular place, alive with their stories, spirits and ancestors, a landscape with which they’re timelessly entwined, though they no longer live along this particular stretch of coastline.

During my breaks I step outside to watch the changing moods of sea and sky and the comings and goings of birds, some of them familiar from the British coastline: oystercatchers, terns, lapwings, shearwaters, cormorants. Tiny fairy wrens of startling blue, a gathering of raucous peach-breasted galahs and two huge pelicans flying slow and low over my head like aircraft carriers one afternoon with a loud swoosh, swoosh remind me I’m in Australia. Swallows flash past at impossible speeds with their rose-blush breasts, blue-sheen feathers and go-faster tails, zigzagging low to catch insects that flit up from the mounds of seagrass. Their arrival is a sign of coming spring here, too. The swallow is one of sixty-six bird species listed in the Japan–Australia Migratory Birds Agreement, a treaty that ensures their safe migration between the two countries. I marvel at how such small birds are able to fly enormous distances to touch the shores of countries where I’ve left parts of myself behind.

I’ve brought provisions to sustain me: rice, salt-cured fillets of salmon, ramen, shiso pickles and pantry ingredients like shōyu, nori, miso, dashi and cooking saké. I’ve even brought nattō, the slimy, pungent fermented soybeans beloved in Japan, but which few non-Japanese can tolerate. Usually eaten at breakfast, nattō is bursting with probiotics, good for gut health, like so many other Japanese foods, and rich with protein. It’s my comfort food. I dollop some on fresh-steamed rice mixed with egg, shōyu and finely chopped spring onion for lunch and wonder if anyone has ever eaten nattō in this spot before, wonder how many Japanese people might have visited this isolated stretch of coastline.

I was weaned on soft-boiled udon noodles, okayu rice porridge and spoonfuls of nourishing, silvery, semi-dried shirasu, the tiny fry of sardines, which my mother rinsed with hot water to soften and warm, and to wash off the salt. She was a discerning cook, and prepared food with a fierce, ritualistic focus. Like the rest of her family, she had a refined palate and knew what good food meant.

The family shop, in the belly of Tokyo beside a busy road, has a good reputation. Until the early 70s, the shopfront was on the ground floor of a traditional two-storey wooden family home with tatami mat floors. Its weathered wood-and-glass doors slid open with a comforting rattle I still remember: gara-gara-gara. There’s a black-and-white photo of my six-year-old self standing in front of them, sucking on an old-fashioned kurozatō black sugar lollipop given to me by the wizened old man beside me in exchange for a few coins. He’s a wandering musician with a long white wispy beard, and a biwa, a Japanese lute, slung around his neck by its strap along with a sign promising songs and sweets for money.

My mother says my grandfather, Ryūichi, never allowed those sliding doors to be closed during opening hours, even when it was freezing outside. Customers shouldn’t have to trouble themselves, he’d say. Okyaku-sama wa kami-sama. The customer is a god. I wonder if he knew his mischievous sons made up cheeky names for some of their regulars. Ever the prankster, my Ōkī Oji-chan once called quietly to my mother as she sat in the shop’s back kitchen: What’s the round-bellied animal the Oshō-san fights with at Shōjōji temple? And she’d yelled: TANUKI! as loudly as she could, not realising that the customer who’d earned that nickname from her brothers was in the shop, a man with an uncanny resemblance to the Japanese raccoon dog, traditionally depicted as a pot-bellied, saké-guzzling, scavenging mischief-maker.

I never knew my grandfather. He died before my mother and father met. I have a sepia photograph of him dressed in a dapper suit with a waistcoat, tie and trilby hat. My grandmother, Yachiyo, who came from the south and was beautiful, would have taken the picture. He stands with one hand in his pocket, looking debonair and confident, head cocked to one side. His mouth is solemn, but I see smiling eyes behind his round, metal-rimmed spectacles. He’s unusually tall for a Japanese man, especially for a time when people didn’t eat much meat. Like him, I’m tall and short-sighted. I recognise his features from that photograph whenever I look in the mirror.

My mother told me my grandfather would never have allowed her to marry a foreigner. I fretted at how close I came to not existing, at how I owed my life to his death. She told me what a tough disciplinarian he was when she was growing up, cold and sometimes cruel.

Would Ojī-chan have hated me, then? I’d ask her.

No, she’d say, he’d have adored you as much as your fully Japanese cousins.

My grandparents had two sons and two daughters. My grandfather named my uncle, the first son, and my mother, the youngest daughter, after the shop. The shop is called Ariakeya, after the Ariake Sea off the southern island where my grandmother was born. In kanji characters, Ariake is written 有明.

有 – ari – means ‘becoming, happen, possess, existence’. It symbolises the Buddhist term bhava, a Sanskrit word that means worldly existence, coming into being. There are multiple verbalisations of this character, as there are for all 50,000-plus kanji. My uncle’s name is Yūichi, written 有一 , meaning ‘one who becomes’.

明 – ake – a single kanji combined from those for sun and moon, means ‘bright, light, wisdom, clarity’. My mother’s name was Akiko, 明子, meaning ‘child of light’.

The two kanji combined, 有明 – ariake – means ‘dawn; coming of the light’.

In the early 70s, my uncle had the old tsukudani shop demolished and built an eight-storey building the colour of old bronze with more window than wall. Modern as it was, the kitchen at the back of the shop still had its Shintō kamidana shelf high above the doorway leading through to the shop floor, where offerings of water, rice and citrus fruit were made to Inari Ōkami, one of the most important Shintō deities. The metal structure of the new building meant it wouldn’t burn the way swathes of Tokyo did during the Great Kanto earthquake in 1902, or the napalm bombings in 1945. Its flexible foundations allow it to move with the earth instead of against it when it quakes, which is often. I remember when earthquakes came, the top floor swayed wildly, making my heart hammer with terror, but my uncle always reassured me that it swayed to keep us all safe, that it was this flexibility that stopped the building from collapsing on top of us.

My mother and my uncle seemed to me like male and female manifestations of the same life force. Out of the four siblings, they looked the most alike. Driven by imagination and curiosity, both observed and named the world around them in unusual ways. My mother pointed out small details in the day-to-day that most people miss: a pool of spilled milk that looked like a cow; a dinosaur skeleton in a museum seeming to quiver a little when someone sneezed loudly nearby; fallen cherry blossom petals in the dirt looking like a map of the world.

My mother and my uncle were raconteurs, drawing on a trove of family stories they told again and again, which I found riveting or funny no matter how often they were repeated. When the two of them got going, I’d sometimes end up rolling around on the tatami, clutching my stomach that ached from laughing too hard.

I loved it when we sat together around Obā-chan’s low table, talking and eating. They made the room feel as though it was filling up with light.

When I was older, my uncle took me and my cousins to eat at the kind of place that has no sign outside, where there’s no menu and seating for just a handful of people at a counter inside. The itamae chefs often greeted my uncle with respect when we walked in. If it was the first time I’d eaten there, they sometimes expressed surprise at this foreign-looking kid’s enthusiasm for such rare and uniquely Japanese food. I always felt proud when my uncle told them I was an ‘uchi no ko’, a child of the family. Sometimes he’d tell them stories about how my washoku obsession started young.

I had just started to walk. One day I crawled unnoticed onto the raised wooden floor behind the counter of the tsukudani shop while my grandmother and uncle were busy with customers. I toddled over to the pale wood and glass cabinets where two dozen antique blue-and-white dishes displayed dark, glistening, gooey mounds of expensive tsukudani and somehow managed to slide one of the glass doors open a little way with my fat little fingers. The sound made everyone whirl round and my grandmother and uncle exclaimed in horror, too late to stop me as I reached in to grab a giant sticky fistful of hazé (goby fish) tsukudani and, wobbling in front of the customers in my nappies, stuffed the lot into my mouth.

We often had large family gatherings in Japanese restaurants, hiring a private ozashiki room with a tatami mat floor and a long, low chabudai table we sat around on zabuton floor cushions. On one such occasion, someone noticed I was missing. I couldn’t have gone far; I was about three years old, and the sliding doors had remained closed. It didn’t take long before I was discovered huddled under the table, a giant communal bowl of sliced yellow takuan pickle nestled in my lap, loudly crunching one slice after another with my little baby teeth.

Asked what I was doing, I didn’t miss a beat. I’m eating yerō-no-mono, I said, indignant at being interrupted. The yellow things.

I still couldn’t speak English properly, but I couldn’t pronounce ‘takuan’, either. For the longest time, takuan continued to be referred to in our family as ‘yerō-no-mono’.

The family shop became a sleek chrome-and-glass store with a reputation that still attracts gourmet-magazine journalists and TV crews making food documentaries about Tokyo. My uncle, aunt and two cousins lived on the eighth floor above it, my grandmother on the seventh. My father, mother and I lived in an apartment on the thirteenth floor of a fifteen-storey building a short drive away.

My parents were often out in the evenings at dinner parties, or away for weekends. When I turned eight, they no longer felt a babysitter was necessary; evidence, I felt, of how grown up I was. I’d stay up late watching TV, and once terrified myself so much after watching a scary movie that I rang the phone number my parents left for emergencies and got into a world of trouble for it. One happy consequence of proving I couldn’t be trusted to put myself to bed on time was that I ended up staying with my Obā-chan more often. I especially loved it when my parents went away on long weekends and I could stay for more than one night.

On days I knew I’d be staying overnight with Obā-chan I boiled with excitement all day, like a kettle with no off-switch. As soon as the final school bell rang, I’d hurry to the bus stop in my uniform, book bag bumping on my hip. At the other end of the short bus ride I’d jump off and walk to the shop, where I’d stand outside waiting until there were no customers inside so I could rush in to bow greetings to my uncle and aunt. They’d ring up to my grandmother to tell her I’d arrived, and I’d ride the lift to the seventh floor, bouncing on my toes, willing it to go faster. Then the doors would slide open and there she’d be, my Obā-chan, tiny, bird-like, waiting for me at her open door. By the time I was ten, I was almost as tall as she was. We never hugged or kissed as is usual in most Caucasian families, but I never doubted her love for a second. Yoku kita ne, Kyā-chan, she’d say, her face bright. Good that you came.

I’d kick off my shoes, so excited I’d forget to line them up neatly, and step up onto the tatami floor of her tidy little apartment. Obā-chan would be preparing my after-school snack, most likely a big bowl of the mild, crunchy home-made cucumber pickle she knew I loved. I’d wonder what we’d be eating for supper, hoping Obā-chan would switch on her tiny TV soon so we could watch our favourite jidaigeki samurai drama, Mitokōmon, before I did my homework. I’d sit on my zabuton on the tatami and tuck my knees under the low table. Obā-chan would emerge from her tiny galley kitchen, ducking her head under the cotton noren curtain hanging from the doorway, carrying – yes! – a huge bowl of cucumber tsukemono pickle. She’d drizzle shōyu over the top, hand me a little fork and switch on the TV. As the show began I’d start singing along to ‘Ā jinsei ni namida ari’ – ‘Ah, there are tears in life’ – the bracing theme tune, which I still know by heart:

Jinsei, raku arya ku mo aru sa

Namida no ato ni wa niji mo deru

Aruite yukunda shikkari tō

Jibun no michi o fumishimete

Jinsei, yūki ga hitsuyōda

Kujikerya dareka ga mae ni yuku …

In life, there’s joy as well as pain

After tears, rainbows appear

Stay strong and keep on walking

Firmly along your own path

To live life, you need courage

If you lose heart, you’ll be overtaken …

Although I hadn’t lived long enough to realise the significance of those words, my enthusiasm as I belted out the song made Obā-chan chuckle in her soft, feathery way. Her warm presence and the sweet, grassy smell of the golden tatami always made me feel like I was home.

KONBU NO TSUKUDANI

Kelp condiment simmered in shōyu and mirin

This is a great way to use up the konbu used to make dashi. Save your used konbu in an airtight bag in the freezer until you have enough to make tsukudani.

Served at room temperature, konbu no tsukudani is delicious with a bowl of freshly steamed rice; it’s salty, so you only need a little. There are two types: the shredded variety, which is mixed with katsubushi flakes and sesame seeds, or the simple, square-cut kind in the recipe I’ve given here. Using good-quality konbu is important as it will be tastier and softer. If the reconstituted konbu you’re using is especially tough, add a teaspoon of Japanese rice vinegar to the rest of the ingredients while simmering, which should help to soften it.

INGREDIENTS

80g konbu left over from making dashi*

50mL tamari shōyu

2 tbsp mirin

2 tbsp cooking saké

2 tbsp caster sugar

*If you don’t have any used konbu, you can use 25g dried konbu, wiping it with a clean, damp cloth before soaking it overnight in water in the fridge.

METHOD

Cut the konbu into 2cm squares. Place in a saucepan, add the rest of the ingredients and set over high heat until it comes to the boil.

Reduce the heat to low and simmer for about 20–30 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the liquid has cooked off and the konbu is dark, sticky and glossy.

Allow to cool and store in an airtight container in the fridge where it will keep for up to two weeks. It can also be kept in the freezer for 2–3 months.

SHITAKE NO TSUKUDANI

Shītake mushroom condiment simmered in shōyu and mirin

INGREDIENTS

10–12 fresh shītake mushrooms, depending on size

100mL water

4 tbsp cooking saké

2 tbsp mirin

1 tbsp caster sugar

2 tbsp tamari shōyu

METHOD

Place the shītake mushrooms, water, saké and mirin in a small pan over high heat. As soon as it begins to boil, turn the heat down and simmer for about a minute until the alcohol has cooked off, then stir in the sugar. Once the sugar has dissolved and the mushrooms start to take on a soft, glossy look, add the shōyu, continuing to simmer gently and stirring continuously to make sure the mixture doesn’t burn. Once the liquid has reduced to a glaze and is bubbling at the bottom of the pan, turn off the heat and allow to cool. Store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to two weeks.

葭始生

20–24 April

Ashi hajimete shōzu

First reeds sprout

霜止出苗

25–29 April

Shimo yamite nae izuru

Last frost, rice seedlings grow

牡丹華

30 April – 4 May

Botan hana saku

Peonies bloom

Each spring, on the sixteenth day of the third lunar month, ancient kami descend from the mountain forests to watch over the newly planted rice until it’s safely harvested, after which they return to their mountain realm. An amorphous blend of agricultural gods and ancestral spirits, they transform from yama-no-kami – mountain gods – to ta-no-kami – gods of the rice paddies. In some rural regions in the south, small ta-no-kami stone statues with round, smiling faces dot roadsides and paddy fields, wielding shamoji rice spatulas in one hand and rice bowls in the other, like royalty holding orbs and sceptres. They wear cloaks, which aren’t especially unusual, but their hats look like oversized pancakes flopped low over their stone heads. Are the hats shaped that way to offer protection from the elements? Surely the ta-no-kami have no need of that, accustomed as they are to the outdoors.

The answer is in the rear view. From the back, the statues look like phalluses. An ancient symbol of fertility in cultures across the world, phalluses have been worshipped in the Shintō religion since the prehistoric Jōmon era. Each spring, some southern prefectures hold phallus-worshipping festivals, like the Hōnenmatsuri in the quiet suburb of Komaki near Nagoya. About sixty men, all forty-two, an age believed to be unlucky for men, parade through the streets carrying a portable shrine on their shoulders that houses a 400-kilogram, two-metre-long penis carved from the trunk of a single cypress tree. This family-friendly matsuri draws huge crowds who cheer on the procession and pay their respects at the 1500-year-old Tagata Jinja shrine, dedicated to Mitoshi-no-Kami, a deity of grain crops, fertility and renewal. Festival-goers rub the shrine’s array of phallic statues for luck and blessings.

As with any matsuri, there’s plenty of food on offer from the street stalls, except here they’re mostly penis-shaped: anko-filled dorayaki cakes, lollipops, batter-fried sausages and chocolate-dipped bananas. Other stalls sell phallic souvenirs and talismans. Foreign visitors express surprise that such a conservative nation should be at ease with this phallic extravaganza, but to the people of Aichi Prefecture it’s always been a part of life. As joyful and raucous as these festivals are, they’re still sacred – a way of keeping the kami onside so that abundant rice crops and plentiful babies will ensure the continued survival of future generations.

The ritual offering of jūroku dango – sixteen dumplings – to the ta-no-kami on this sixteenth day of the third lunar month isn’t as common as it once was, though some farmers still practise the tradition in the north. The appeal for divine intervention, whether through dumplings or oversized phalluses, isn’t surprising given the precariousness of rice farming in a country prone to extremes of climate and to earthquakes; even when the greatest care is taken to nurture the delicate green shoots until they’re ready to plant, even when they’re lovingly transplanted and tended over the months ahead, all can be undone by a mighty earthquake cracking the earthen berms, causing the irrigating water to flood out, or by savage typhoons that destroy near-ripe crops before harvest.

~

The eighty-eighth day after the first day of Risshun, the first sekki of spring, is known as Hachiju-hachi-ya, or ‘eighty-eight nights’. Falling around the second or third of May, it’s the day the first tender buds of green tea are harvested, arriving in the shops not long after and selling out quickly as there’s quite a fanfare around its arrival. The tea is a vibrant jade green, mellow and fresh-tasting, and some believe drinking Hachiju-hachi-ya tea ensures good health for the year to come.

Hachiju-hachi-ya is also the time rice farmers transplant the young rice shoots they’ve propagated in the nursery into the mud and water of the paddies. Rituals and offerings to the ta-no-kami mark the importance of this undertaking. In the old days, the entire village worked together to transplant the seedlings by hand, since there was only a small window of time to do it while the delicate shoots were fresh. Rice is one of the most labour-intensive crops in the world to grow. It’s said the cooperative, communal nature of Japanese society grew from the necessity of working together in this way so there’d be enough rice for the year ahead – or, in the case of tenant farmers during the feudal era, enough for their wealthy landlords. It was a brutal way of life for tenant farmers back then; a poor crop would lead to indebtedness to their landlords and such poverty that children sometimes had to be given away as servant-slaves to rich families so they wouldn’t starve, even though they were often cruelly treated.

Rice farmers now use small, hand-driven machines that enable one person to transplant thousands of shoots into several paddies in a day, but back then it took twenty to thirty people bending double, barefoot and shin-deep in the water, to plant out one paddy with neat lines of seedlings. They sang rousing taue-no-uta rice-planting songs as they worked to keep their spirits and energy high, planting seedlings in time to the drums and flute that accompanied them. Even though this method of working faded as machinery took over, these and other workers’ songs are still sung and danced to during festivals in spring, summer and at harvest time. I danced along to some of these songs myself at the summer matsuri in the family neighbourhood; the rhythm and energy are impossible to resist.

You can get a feel for what a rice-planting day in the 16th century might have looked like in the final scene of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece, Seven Samurai. Filmed outside in a real rice paddy, instead of in a studio as was usual at the time, the scene shows villagers planting out rice shoots in time to drums, bells and flute as they sing their taue-no-uta. I may have been raised in thoroughly urban Tokyo, but whenever I watch this scene it gives me goosebumps all the same.

Appreciation for the labours of rice-growing farmers and for the sacredness of their crop was instilled in me from the moment I progressed from the soft okayu rice porridge my mother made for me as an infant to the solid, grown-up version.

My first conscious memory of eating rice is of how it felt in the mouth, each grain toothsome and with just the right amount of give and stickiness. The flavour was subtle, yet so delicious that sometimes I liked to eat it on its own with a sprinkling of salt. I went through a phase – to my mother’s alarm – of telling people this is what I loved to eat most when asked about my favourite food, a common question posed to children in food-obsessed Japan. They’ll think I’m not feeding you properly! she’d scold afterwards. But something about the simplicity and purity of a mouthful of good quality rice and salt soothed my soul as well as satisfying my hunger.

My mother sometimes sent me to the friendly rice merchant at the bottom of our road with her tomato-coloured enamel okome pot to get it filled with Koshihikari rice, the best grade. His old darkened-wood shop sat squeezed next to the greengrocer’s at the foot of the new expressway bridge, one of a handful of old wooden buildings left crouching in the shadows of the high-rises and gleaming chrome shopfronts that had sprung up on bomb-wrecked sites since the war. He’d come out with his long, traditional merchant’s indigo-coloured apron inscribed with 米, the kanji for ‘kome’ – uncooked rice – tied around his waist, and greet me with a pat on the head and praise for helping my mother. He’d pull on his white thick-woven cotton gloves, take the okome pot from me and wedge it under a metal chute before pulling a lever to release the grains, pacing the flow exactly right so he never lost a grain.

The rice merchant’s shop has disappeared from my old neighbourhood, along with the sentō public baths I used to go to with Obā-chan and the children’s dagashiya sweet and snack store across the road. His was one of hundreds of okomeya that disappeared from Tokyo’s streets over the last few decades, taking with them the sense of local community I grew up with.

According to statistics gathered by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, annual consumption of rice in 1962 was just over 118 kilograms per person. In 2019, it had more than halved to 51 kilograms, though this still equates to around two and a half average-sized bowls of rice per person per day. A survey carried out by the ministry found that young people in particular were avoiding rice in the evenings to adhere to a low-carb diet for weight maintenance, and many responded that they wanted to try a wider variety of non-Japanese foods. There’s been a corresponding growth in the consumption of bread, meat and dairy products and western-style fast food, as well as in obesity, especially in children and the male population, though this is still lower than in many western countries. While traditional ichijū-sansai home cooking was once the foundation of a good Japanese breakfast, it was already becoming less common when I was young. Instead, people were choosing bread and cereal, which are quicker and easier to prepare and clear up, emancipating women from the hours of labour needed to prepare a traditional breakfast each morning. My mother always preferred her Japanese-style toast, while my favourite start to the day was ochazuke: hot green tea poured over leftover rice made umami-delicious with a sprinkling of Nagatanien’s savoury ochazukenori seasoning.

I loved watching my mother prepare rice. She’d scoop a cupful from her bucket, level it with her finger – Always measure the rice and water exactly, she’d explain – and pour it into the metal pot from her electric suihanki (rice cooker). She’d splash a little fresh water on the grains and massage them with her fingers inside the pot, swishing the wet rice around and around with a rhythmic, soothing shhh – shhh – shhh, a white-noise sound that still transports me back to her kitchen whenever I hear it. Be gentle with the grains, she’d say, and don’t swirl them for too long, or you’ll damage them and they won’t be as nice to eat.

After about fifteen seconds of massaging, she’d swirl the pot a final time to level the rice inside before pouring out the milky-white water, tilting the pot into the sink just so, so she wouldn’t lose a single grain. She’d been doing it this way ever since she was old enough to help my grandmother, her body remembering the exact angle of tilt she could get away with before the steep slope of rice inside cascaded out in an avalanche. When I first started helping her rinse the rice, my mother would lay a zaru – a traditional round, flat sieve – in the sink so I wouldn’t lose any down the drain.

She’d repeat this rinsing process four or five times more until the water ran clear, then measure out more for the rice to cook in: precisely one cup of water plus 20 per cent or a fifth of a cup extra for each level cupful of rice. It’s the exact amount needed to steam the rice so it absorbs all the water, resulting in plump, springy, moist grains. Even a tablespoon more or less leads to soggy and textureless or tough, dry rice.

Swirling the pot a final time to make sure the rice was level under the water so it would steam evenly, my mother would place it inside the suihanki and leave it for at least twenty minutes in summer or half an hour in winter, allowing the rice to absorb some of the water before it cooked. Once the steamer was switched on, I was strictly forbidden from opening the lid to look inside. My mother would repeat the old rice-cooking rhyme she’d learned as a child:

Hajime choro choro naka pappa

Akago naitemo futa toruna

Cook slowly to start, then boil on high heat

Never open the lid, even if the baby bleats

Almost every household in Japan owns a suihanki. The first, most basic model was invented in 1945, a simple pot with an electric coil but no automatic shut-off; by 1956, the first fully automated version was invented by Toshiba and was sold in the hundreds of thousands. It saved the nation’s women from having to get up before dawn each morning to get the rice ready in time for breakfast; now it could be rinsed and soaked the night before and a timer set so it would be ready in the morning. Suihanki were basic contraptions when I was a child, but over the decades they’ve become more sophisticated, the Japanese love of new technology and convenience leading to sleek designer models that can be programmed to steam the rice precisely according to variety of rice. Some can even cook it according to individual preferences for grain firmness, some using infrared or electromagnetic technology to steam the rice as evenly as possible. Once the rice is steamed, a modern suihanki will keep it safely hot and deliciously moist so it’s ready to serve whenever it’s needed.

When I started university, my mother gave me a small, simple suihanki to cook the Calrose Japanese rice you could buy in England. She began filling a washi-covered notebook with her recipes, illustrated with line drawings, so I could re-create them in my digs. In it she included the method for cooking rice without the aid of a suihanki. My mother insisted I should know how to cook rice in a saucepan, appalled that younger generations no longer knew how to cook rice the old-fashioned way. Since I’ve always owned a suihanki, I never needed to. But when I discovered recently that using a traditional donabe rice pot – something I never even saw my grandmother use – made the rice especially moist and toothsome, I decided to order one, choosing a Banko earthenware pot made in Mie Prefecture. It’s glazed a matte brown-black, except for a narrow margin at the base which is left au naturel, and has two lids to minimise the escape of steam. It has capacity for five gō (a standard cup measure) of rice. My mother always encouraged me to make more rice than I’d need for one meal, then put away the rest in the fridge or freezer for reheating later, as rice tastes better when it’s cooked in larger quantities.

The donabe needs an open flame, perfect for the gas cookers I prefer, and has to be watched over, unlike the suihanki, so that the flame is at an appropriate level for each stage of cooking – but the perfect rice it results in is worth it. There’s also the added bonus of the crisp, golden okoge at the bottom of the pot, literally ‘the scorched bits’, even though the rice is toasted rather than burned. It comes away from the pot in flat pieces, like a jagged, thin senbei rice cracker. You never get this crunchy treat in a suihanki cooker. Crisp and fragrant with a sweet-nutty-roasted smell – known as ‘kōbashi’, one of the many untranslatable Japanese taste-words – it’s often served at the end of a tea ceremony, accompanied by pickles and hot water. You can still make okoge using a frying pan if you don’t own a donabe, though somehow it doesn’t seem as special. Sprinkled with a little shōyu, topped with a smidgeon of tsukudani, or eaten as a topping for ochazuke, it is a delicious, versatile snack: a simple, life-affirming pleasure.

A word on reheating rice: if you don’t eat your entire suihanki-full of rice in one day, put it in the fridge as soon as it’s cool enough and, ideally, eat it within 48 hours. My mother often gave dire warnings of the terrible food poisoning that can result from eating too-old rice, or if you’ve failed to refrigerate or heat it through properly. Most people in Japan use microwaves to reheat leftover rice – likely the most frequent use for one. There’s even a colloquial verb for ‘reheating with a microwave’: chin! (not pronounced like the protuberance under your mouth, but with a long ‘i’ like the ‘ea’ in ‘meat’ and an almost silent ‘n’). One of many wonderful onomatopoeic Japanese words, it represents the pinging sound the microwave makes when it’s done. As in, ‘Tonight I’m going to chin! some leftover rice for my dinner.’

If, like me, you don’t have a microwave, you can steam leftover rice in a pan. You can use a sieve or colander if you don’t have a steaming basket, and line it with wax-free baking paper so the rice doesn’t stick. I like to prick a few holes in the paper with a skewer to even out the distribution of steam, before setting it over a pan of gently simmering water, making sure the sieve or colander isn’t touching the water. Sit a lid loosely over the top and steam until the rice is piping hot all the way through.

There are lots of other ways you can use up leftover rice; ochazuke is great for breakfast, a light meal or snack. If the rice has been refrigerated it’s still best to give it a second or two in the microwave to soften the grains, as they become unpleasantly hard and dry in the fridge, or flush it through with boiling water, which is what I do. You then add your topping before pouring green tea over the top. Ochazuke toppings are usually salty to balance out the subtle tastes of green tea and rice, so tsukudani of any kind or pickles work well. Some toppings are quite luxurious, like tai(red sea bream) or – one of my favourites – unagi (eel) tsukudani from the family shop. You might find these fancy ochazuke served in restaurants, likely using fresh-steamed rice rather than leftovers.

My favourite topping that’s easy to source in Australia is shiojaké, the salt-cured salmon my mother taught me to make. If I have a little of the fish left over, I’ll perch a few flakes on top of some rice in my ochawan, add a pickle or two and pour hōji tea over the top. It’s such a popular ochazuke topping that you can even buy it freeze-dried in most Japanese supermarkets, one of several varieties of ochazukenori made by Nagatanien. Still sold in the same traditional green, red, yellow and black striped packets I grew up with, which always come with a little card illustrated with a Hiroshige woodblock print, the ochazukenori mixture is made up of tiny sticks of rice crackers, nori seaweed, powdered green tea and additional toppings like the salmon, freeze-dried nuggets of umeboshi sour plum, or nose-tinglingly spicy wasabi. It might have a few additives you’d avoid if you made it fresh, but it’s still one of the easiest, healthiest fast foods I can think of. I ate a bowlful for breakfast most days.

STEAMED JAPANESE RICE

Serves 4

It’s a simple ingredient list, but quality, precision and care taken with the cooking method are key. Make sure you buy the best quality uruchimai rice, like Koshihikari or Akitakomachi, which you can find in most Asian supermarkets. Uruchimai is often sold in supermarkets as ‘sushi rice’, which is okay to use, though it won’t be the finest quality rice. You will not get the same result with basmati, long-grain, arborio or any other kind of rice. Make sure you don’t buy sweet sticky rice, known as ‘mochi-gome’; it’s extremely glutinous, and is mostly used to make Japanese sweets.

Quantities below should be enough for four hungry people, but adjust as required. Rice cooker cups like the one I use are usually 180mL, but you can use any size, as long as you use the same one to measure out both rice and water. A cup of uncooked rice equates to about two mounded ochawan rice bowls’ worth of cooked rice.

Some Japanese rice is sold as ‘musenmai’ (no-wash rice), but I still like to give it a rinse first. You can use the rinsing water for your plants, or for parboiling daikon radish – the rice water sweetens the daikon, helping to remove its bitterness, and it keeps it looking white.

The water quantity can be adjusted according to preference or age of the rice. If you’re using newly harvested rice, known as ‘shinmai’, or, if you prefer a firmer bite to your rice, stick to a 1:1.1 ratio. If your rice has been on the shelf for a while, or if you like a softer bite to your rice, go for a 1:1.2 ratio.

If you’re not using an electric rice cooker, use a heavy-bottomed pan with a tight-fitting lid.

INGREDIENTS

2 cups best quality Japanese uruchimai rice (e.g. Koshihikari or Akitakomachi)

2 cups water, plus 10–20% extra

METHOD

Measure out the rice grains exactly, using a finger or a knife to level the cup. Decant rice into a fine sieve or the pot from your rice cooker, ready for rinsing.

Run a little water into the grains and gently turn and massage a few times with one hand, taking care not to break any grains. Run more water into the rice, swirl around a few times and drain. Don’t leave the rice in the cloudy rinse water for too long, as the rice will start to reabsorb it.

Repeat this rinsing and draining process about three to four times until the water runs clear, then drain away as much of the water as possible. If you’ve used a sieve, decant all the grains into your cooking pot or rice cooker.

Add exactly 2 cups of filtered water, plus another 10–20%. With my 180mL cup, this means 396–432mL of water to my 360mL of rice but, like most rice-cooker cups, it’s marked with the 10% and 20% measures for convenience.

Leave the rice to soak for at least 30 minutes. This is very important! After soaking, if you’re using an electric rice cooker, switch it on and let it work its magic.

If you’re using a stovetop, set the pot over medium heat and wait until it boils. If possible, avoid removing the lid to check, as this will let precious cooking steam and flavour escape. You should be able to hear when it starts boiling.

Turn the heat down low and leave for 12–14 minutes until all the water has been absorbed. If you need to check this, you can take a peek near the end of cooking time, but not before. Do it quickly to avoid letting too much steam escape.

Remove the pan from the heat, keeping the lid on to steam for another 10–15 minutes.

Fluff the rice gently with a rice spatula and serve.

SHIOJAKÉ

Grilled semi-cured salmon

This way of preparing washoku-style salmon was popular amongst Japanese expats in London in the 80s, as it was easy to find the ingredients and even easier to make. The salt extracts the excess moisture from the fish, firming up the flesh, reducing the fishy odour and concentrating the flavour and colour. My mother made up batches and froze them ready for when they were needed.

INGREDIENTS

100g salmon fillet per person, skin on (with scales removed)

1 tbsp sea salt

METHOD

Rinse the salmon and pat dry with paper towel. Sprinkle every part of the fillet with the salt, including the skin, and set to cure for 24–48 hours, depending on how salty you like things. My mother used a zaru (traditional flat, round sieve) set on newspaper to absorb as much water from the salmon as possible. A rack set on a plate will work well, too; the main thing is to allow the salmon to cure without it sitting in the liquid that will drain from it.

The salmon is best left in the fridge uncovered while it cures so air can circulate around it (when we were in England, my mother used to cure it on a cold day by leaving it outside, covered with a food net, or indoors near an electric fan. If you prefer to cover it while it’s in the fridge, see if you can fit the whole thing inside a large Tupperware container. The salt minimises the fishy smell, so odour permeating other food in the fridge shouldn’t be an issue.

Once cured, thoroughly wipe off the excess salt with damp paper towel, or rinse it quickly under cold running water, but either way, make sure you dry the fish very well with paper towel before grilling.

Preheat grill to medium high. Set a piece of foil or silicone roasting sheet on a baking tray. If you use foil, oil it very well as the skin tends to stick. Place the salmon skin-side down on the foil and grill until you can see that more than half of the salmon has turned opaque, then flip over to crisp up the skin. It burns easily, so keep an eye on it. If an area looks like it’s browning too fast, fold a piece of the foil over it. Once all of the skin has crisped up, remove from the heat and serve.

蛙始鳴

5–9 May

Kawazu hajimete naku

Frogs start singing

蚯蚓出

10–14 May

Mimizu izuru

Worms surface

竹笋生

15–20 May

Takenoko shōzu

Bamboo shoots sprout

The arrival of summer is welcomed by large, colourful koinobori – carp-shaped streamers – fluttering in the sky above the rooftops to mark Tango no Sekku, Boys’ Day, on the fifth day of the fifth month. Together with Momo no Sekku (Festival of Peaches) on the third day of the third month, celebrated as Hinamatsuri, it’s one of the five ancient sekku, or seasonal festivals, observed by the Imperial Court since the 9th century. The other three are Nanakusa no Sekku (Festival of Seven Herbs) on the first day of the first month; Tanabata (the Star Festival) on the seventh day of the seventh month; and Kiku no Sekku (Festival of Chrysanthemums), which takes place around the time of the autumn harvest on the ninth day of the ninth month.

In 1948 Tango no Sekku was renamed Kodomo no Hi (Children’s Day) to make it gender inclusive, but it’s still predominantly a day for families to celebrate with their sons, a counterpart to Hinamatsuri. Flying koinobori – literally translated as ‘carp climbing’ – is a tradition that originated in feudal times, when shogun lords hoisted carp streamers to celebrate the birth of a son. It soon became a popular practice among commoners, too. The carp iconography is based on an old Chinese legend about the Dragon’s Gate, which stood at the top of a steep and powerful waterfall on a mythical mountain. Only the strongest and bravest of carp could leap up the waterfall and over the gate, whereupon it was transformed into a mighty dragon. Koi streamers were flown for a boy’s birth in the hope that he’d grow as strong and brave as the carp that leapt through the Dragon’s Gate.

The streamers, usually made of cloth and shaped like windsocks, are flown one below another from a pole topped by a pair of windmills, called yaguruma. Sometimes there’s a fukinagashi streamer of long multicoloured ribbons between the koi and the yaguruma, which represents the dragon. Traditionally, the magoi – the largest, black koi at the top – represented the father of the family. The next largest, a red koi, was for the eldest son. Koi for any more sons in the family were smaller still, usually coloured green, orange or purple. Since the day was renamed Kodomo no Hi, the red koi beneath the magoi have come to represent the mother, and the smaller koi beneath, the children in the family regardless of gender.

All the same, I grew up conscious that it was really a day for boys, even though I sang along with everyone else to the koinobori song, which mentions the mother and daughter koi streamers, and enjoyed the traditional Tango no Sekku treats – sweet mochi dumplings filled with anko and wrapped in pickled oak leaves, Kintarōame sweets or chimaki, narrow, pointed cones of bamboo leaf stuffed with a special sweet rice and a choice of sweet or savoury filling. My cousins and I would fold origami kabuto, or samurai helmets, out of newspaper to wear, though the real kabuto displayed inside the house was still seen as something for boys.

Some families display samurai dolls, or dolls of boy heroes from old folk tales, so the sons might grow up just as strong and brave. There’s Momotaro, born from a peach and found floating down a river by the elderly, childless couple who became his parents. Kind-hearted, strong and brave, he walked all the way to a mythical island to slay a gang of oni that was terrorising the land, recruiting the help of a dog, a monkey and a pheasant along the way by offering them kibidango dumplings. Oni are a kind of ogre, one of Japanese folklore’s impressive collection of yōkai, or mythical monsters. They’re depicted as giant humanoid demons with red, pink or blue-grey skin, three fingers and toes – sometimes even three eyes – and two short, pointed horns poking out of their short, tight-curled hair. They use their superhuman strength to commit cruel and vengeful acts, their weapon of choice a heavy wooden club studded with nails, and they go naked except for a loincloth made of tigerskin.

There’s also the iconic and hugely popular Kintarō – Golden Boy – after whom the sweets we enjoyed at Kodomo no Hi were named. Raised in the mountains by a witch, with animals his only friends, Kintaro was so supernaturally strong as a child he could rip apart giant boulders with his bare hands and sumo wrestle black bears. He had many adventures, wearing only a red diamond-shaped harakake or bib over his stomach, adorned with 金, the kanji for ‘kin’, or gold. Supposedly based on a real Heian-era samurai, as with many other real-life heroes of history, Kintaro’s bravery and strength were likely inflated over time as stories about him were told over and over again.

Kodomo no Hi is also the final day of Golden Week, the busiest holiday period after New Year and the summer Obon festival. It’s a combination of four national holidays: Shōwa Day, which marks the former Emperor Hirohito’s birthday; Midori no Hi – Greenery Day – which celebrates nature; Kenpō Kinenbi, which marks the new constitution introduced after the Second World War; and of course Kodomo No Hi.

Train stations heave with holidaying crowds. Shinkansen bullet trains, which travel at speeds of up to 320 kilometres per hour on a highly efficient rail network, make it relatively quick and easy to travel huge distances, and with so many different landscapes, cultures, dialects and, importantly, regional cuisines on offer, travelling in Japan can feel like going on an overseas holiday.

Japan’s craggy terrain and 6852 islands create distinct microclimates that give rise to highly localised ingredients and recipes, and which often become a destination in themselves. Local specialties of any kind, food and otherwise, are called meibutsu, and each regional tourist board works hard to promote their particular meibutsu, which are often featured in food programs and in magazines. Mention to a colleague you’ll be travelling to Kyūshū, for example, and they’ll insist you try the famous kurobuta pork shabu-shabu hot pot there; or if you’re off to Kyoto, the yuba tofu skins. Meibutsu foods are also a focus for the obligatory omiage – souvenirs – that travellers bring home for family, friends and colleagues, beautifully packaged and sold everywhere in the locality, even in train station kiosks. They sometimes even become the regional mascot, like Wasapy, the wasabi-root-shaped mascot for the town of Okutama, or Misotarō, whose head is a barrel of miso, the meibutsu of Taketoyo.

People travel great distances in pursuit of a meibutsu food. My uncle, a true gourmet, was no exception. One year we drove over a hundred kilometres into the mountains to sample ayu, a freshwater fish that comes into season in early summer, at an open-air restaurant built of wood beside a narrow, fast-flowing mountain stream. Like wild salmon, ayu spawn in unpolluted, freshwater streams, feeding only on moss. They journey out to sea, where they spend most of their adult lives fattening up on algae, then return to the streams to lay their eggs before dying. Named ‘sweetfish’ in English due to their subtle, sweet-scented, watermelon-like flavour, they’re tender and delicious.

That early summer day, I walked through mountain meadows full of late spring flowers with my aunt, uncle and cousins to work up an appetite. At the restaurant we sat upstairs in the warm breeze at a table with a breathtaking view of the mountains, tucking in to dish after dish of ayu served different ways: raw, delicate slices of sashimi; moist, pale mouthfuls in a clear osuimono broth, fresh with mitsuba microgreens; fresh-fried and tender in tempura batter as light as a cloud; mixed with mashed potato, moulded into croquettes and crisp-fried in panko breadcrumbs; and in mazegohan, mixed rice, deeply savoury from the ayu broth used to steam the rice. Then, the gloriousness of the whole ayu, sparkling with sea salt and golden from its roasting over the white heat of the two enormous charcoal hibachi downstairs. Skewered on green bamboo with a bend in their bodies, they arrived at our table looking as if they were still swimming upstream.

Food – discussing it, eating it – is a force in Japanese daily life. You’ll hear people talking about it on television, on radio, in day-to-day conversations; towns and cities bristle with every kind of food business: stand-up ramen or oden street carts; sushiya, izakaya and yakitori bars; tempura, shabu-shabu and unagi restaurants; soba noodle or tonkatsu shops; open-air food markets; shaved-iced cafes; wagashi sweet shops; senbei rice-cracker sellers, tofu shops. Most Japanese food businesses specialise in one thing, whether it’s making and selling tofu, fish cakes, senbei or tsukudani, or serving just one type of washoku cuisine. These specific culinary traditions are long established in the families that run these businesses, the skills to make that one particular thing refined, honed and passed down from generation to generation.

Eating out is a fairly standard part of food culture in Japan. There are plenty of cheap places to eat, especially in the cities and bigger towns, and a countless number in Tokyo. Growing up there in the 70s and 80s, I had the luck to eat out at all sorts of establishments, from cheap and cheerful soba shops to gourmet, high-end kaiseki restaurants, mostly with my uncle, my mother and her friends, my grandmother or my mother’s older sister. Eating out in Tokyo wasn’t the fancy – and frequently disappointing – occasion that it was in England back in the 70s.

When we weren’t preparing or eating food, we were thinking about it. I grew up as obsessed as my mother with cooking programs, quiz shows dedicated entirely to food, and food travel programs with presenters sampling dishes in countries all over the world or locally within Japan, long before such shows become ubiquitous on British, American and Australian television.

Even today, Japanese news reporters will announce the start of the brief matsutake mushroom season, herald the arrival in shops of Hachiju-hachi-ya gyokurō tea or the newly harvested rice in September, and report on the ritual pounding of rice cakes in preparation for the new year. Game shows ask contestants to place bets on the order in which they predict a Japanese celebrity will eat the multiple dishes of a traditional meal laid on the table in front of them. I listen to radio interviews with authors, actors, politicians and philosophers that focus entirely on their take on food: their favourite places and foods to eat, the specialties of the area they grew up in, their most-loved recipes, what they eat in a typical day. City department stores have huge, entire floors dedicated to an encyclopaedic range of foods.

It’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t spent any length of time in Japan just how deeply felt the food culture is there. The feeling is expressed in the way a well-known Japanese itamae chef sharing his simple cucumber pickle recipe on YouTube devours the results with a bowlful of hot white rice in rapturous silence, then looks up at the camera, face beaming as he munches, and declares, as many others do – myself included – when eating some delicious washoku morsel or other: Ahhh, how glad I am to have been born Japanese!

The basic structure of a home-cooked Japanese meal is called ichijū-sansai, which means ‘one soup, three vegetables’, though the three dishes, called okazu, usually include fish, egg and other animal proteins. Rice is such a given that it’s not even included in this formula. The soup is usually either misoshiru or clear osuimono broth, containing plenty of ‘gu’ – morsels chosen from a huge variety of ingredients depending on locality, season and the other foods served in the meal.

Misoshiru – miso soup (the word ‘miso’ used on its own means the paste) – is probably the most commonly eaten soup in a home-cooked family washoku meal. Highly nutritious, it’s easy to make and there are endless choices when it comes to gu. There’s the ubiquitous, basic and most economic combo of small cubes of soft, silken tofu, finely sliced spring onion and wakame seaweed, but you can also add thinly cut vegetables such as daikon, carrot, eggplant, pumpkin or greens; one of the many varieties of Japanese mushrooms such as shītake, seasonal matsutake, slimy nameko or enoki; or meat, fish or shellfish such as asari (cockles), full of umami and one of my favourite gu of all.

My mother had her favourite gu combinations, most often for misoshiru she made during the colder months. Combo No. 1: thinly sliced aburaage – golden, light-as-a-cloud, flat rectangles of deep-fried tofu – matchstick-thin slivers of daikon or mooli radish and finely chopped spring onion. Combo No. 2, for when it was freezing cold outside: child’s-bite-sized chunks of tender carrot, daikon, potato and tofu, slivers of aburaage (deep-fried tofu pockets) and two or three thin slices of pork topped with a generous pinch of finely chopped spring onion. This second combo was a dish known as ‘tonjiru’ – pork soup. Venturing into okazu territory, it never needed much else to go with it apart from a bowl of rice and a few pickles, unless you wanted to throw in an extra side of greens. It’s filling and rich, and as with certain other rich winter dishes, it’s good with a sprinkling of shichimi-tōgarashi seasoning – seven-flavour chilli pepper, which you can buy from most Asian or Japanese food shops.

Shichimi-tōgarashi can have more than seven ingredients, though it always contains red pepper flakes, plus any combination of black and white sesame seeds, dried citrus peel – often yuzu, a Japanese citrus, or orange – cracked hemp seeds and sanshō, a highly fragrant pepper made from the seeds of the Japanese prickly-ash that can make your tongue go numb if eaten in large amounts. I still use the small black and orange-crimson tin dispenser that came with the first lot of shichimi-tōgarashi my mother bought after she was married. It’s been refilled countless times and is a little scratched and dented now it’s over half a century old, but I get such pleasure from using it.

Miso is one of the cornerstones of Japanese cooking; it’s used in all kinds of dishes, including desserts, and not just for soup. A hugely versatile ingredient, it also works well in western cooking and baking, and is great for marinades, dressings and kakushiaji – ‘hidden flavouring’ in soups and casseroles. Made from cooked soybeans, salt and optional ingredients such as barley, seaweed, buckwheat or millet, it’s fermented over months, sometimes years, using kōji, bacterial culture usually made from rice. There are hundreds of different types of miso according to region, all with different flavour profiles, from mild and sweet to salty and pungent, varying in the way beer does depending on where and how it’s brewed. Ranging in colour from dark chestnut brown or dark red to pale honey, the best kind is made by artisan families who’ve perfected the art over hundreds of years. It’s harder to find these finer grades of miso in Japanese supermarkets in Australia or the UK; what you find in your average Asian supermarket is tasty enough, but unremarkable when you’ve been lucky enough to enjoy the really good stuff. Powdered instant miso is, in my view, for emergencies only – if you want convenience, the tiny packages of pre-mixed miso, dashi and a few snips of seaweed taste better. But if you want to reduce packaging waste it’s best to buy the standard 500-gram pack of paste and make it from scratch.

There are three main types: shiromiso – white miso, which is pale, and tastes sweet and mild; akamiso – red miso, the strongest, darkest, most pungent variety; and yellow shinshumiso, which sits between the two. All are pretty salty, so in recent times, reduced-salt varieties of shinshumiso have become available. The miso is chosen according to the purpose – misoshiru with asari (cockles) works best with Edomiso, a red variety, while the flavour of soft simmered daikon pairs beautifully with sweetened white shiromiso. My mother always had an enamel container in the fridge of a darker variety of shinshumiso, which goes well with anything. Kept at the right temperature, miso keeps almost indefinitely this way, as long as it isn’t allowed to dry out.

Osuimono, the other option for soup, means ‘sippable food’. It’s a clear, delicate broth made of dried bonito dashi stock seasoned with shōyu, mirin, saké and salt, and is a little fancier, needing more work if it’s to be made properly, the real deal usually reserved for guests or special occasions. The gu has nowhere to hide in the clear soup, so the selection needs to look colourful, fresh, aesthetically pleasing and not too big or small. You might use a cutter to make a seasonal shape – a maple leaf in autumn, say, or a sakura blossom in spring – out of one or two paper-thin slices of a vegetable, like fresh lotus root, daikon or carrot, and combine that with a small sprig of a seasonal microgreen, a soft-boiled quail’s egg, a pink-rimmed, semi-circular slice of kamaboko fish cake or a tiny piece of fish or shellfish.

Another gu option is ofu, feather-light wheat gluten puffs sold dried in different shapes, which soften into silky mouthfuls and absorb the flavour of the miso or stock when added to either type of soup as a plant-based protein. There are hundreds of varieties of ofu according to region; some, best suited to misoshiru, are uncoloured and shaped into simple rounds or donuts; others are decorative and shaped like flowers, temari (traditional toy balls wrapped in multicoloured silk thread), or other decorative objects, and these are best displayed in an owanful of clear osuimono soup.

The minimum three okazu dishes of an ichijūsansai meal usually include some form of animal or plant-based protein, and a variety of plant foods prepared a hundred different ways. The choice is endless – greens sautéed, or blanched, squeezed dry and chilled and drizzled with miso, black sesame, white sesame or mustard dressings; vegetables, many of which will be unfamiliar in Australia or Europe, like gobo (burdock root) or holey lotus root, or yamakake: super-sticky, slimy, grated raw mountain yam, with a dash of shōyu and a dab of wasabi.

There are dishes like the much-loved nikujaga – ‘meat potato’ – bite-sized pieces of potato slow-simmered into rich umami goodness with thin slices of beef. You might have silken tofu cold in summer, with grated ginger, chopped spring onion and a drizzle of shōyu over the top, or served hot in cooler weather, simmered in dashi broth or a garlicky, Chinese-inspired, chicken-stock-based glaze, and eaten with a spoon. There’s a bewildering choice of fish: marinated in miso, or saké lees, or salted and semi-cured, then grilled; sun-dried himono fish grilled to umami perfection; oily fish like mackerel stewed in miso or dashi.

Then there are the many foreign-influenced okazu: pan-fried gyōza dumplings (potstickers) filled with pork and dipped in vinegared soy sauce; golden puffs of deep-fried korokke (croquettes) made with mashed potato and meat or fish, crisp on the outside, soft and molten hot on the inside, served with a drizzle of Burudoggu (Bulldog brand) sauce, which tastes like a mixture of HP and tomato sauce; sometimes a simple okazu of frankfurters, or a fried egg, or Japanese dashi-flavoured omelette. Home cooks are continuously inventive, coming up with new combinations like hanpen (fish cake) toasted with cheese sandwiched in the middle, or pasta enveloped in a sauce of umeboshi paste and butter, or mentaiko (the spicy cod roe meibutsu of Kyushu in the south) topped with nattō and slivers of nori seaweed. There’s so much choice that you could probably get through a year’s worth of okazu without repeating anything.

The prepared dishes are laid out on the table in a precise way: rice bowl to the left, within easy reaching distance, soup directly to the right, and chopsticks laid just in front, parallel with the edge of the table. Whether or not they’re on a chopstick rest, they should be lined up together, not crossed or split apart at an angle as some ‘Japanese-style’ food photo shoots in the west show them, a big no-no. The okazu are arranged around the rice or soup for aesthetic balance and ease of eating; the biggest dish, like a piece of grilled fish, is placed on the right, behind your bowl of misoshiru or osuimono, with smaller dishes arranged to the left, and even smaller dishes for pickles placed next to the rice bowl. If there’s a hearty main okazu, it might be served in a larger, communal dish so family members can help themselves. There’ll often be a communal pickle or tsukudani jar, too, and a selection of shop-bought condiments, from yuzukoshō – citrus chilli pepper paste – to neriume, a salty, tangy paste made with pickled umeboshi plums, bonito shavings and small slivers of seaweed. There’s a huge choice of dry furikake condiments to sprinkle over your rice, made of various blends of ingredients like flaked seaweed, sesame, salt and freeze-dried egg, shītake, salmon or ume. The suihanki will often be on the table next to the family’s ochawan, stacked ready for helpings of rice. Each family member has their own ochawan for their personal use, in a style and design of their choosing.

I have a vague recollection that one of my earliest ochawan had a Snoopy motif; young children can choose from bowls decorated with manga characters, or child-pleasing patterns of bunny rabbits or teddy bears in friendly colours. But once my mother bought a pair of hand-thrown, hand-painted ochawan when I was ten years old – mine hand-painted with slender stripes of deep-ocean blue and dark red, hers patterned with delicate, dotted spirals of soft grey-blue – I never used any other. I still use mine; hers is tucked away in a cupboard. I love them both so much they made it into my first novel.

There are some basic rules of etiquette. Always pick up your ochawan when you’re eating from it; same goes for your owan. Sip directly from the side of the owan while you hold back the gu with your chopsticks – never use a spoon. Using a spoon just looks weird and comical. Whenever she saw someone drinking misoshiru with a spoon in a Japanese restaurant in London, my mother said that it made the misoshiru look like it didn’t taste very good.

There are ways of eating that enhance the taste of the food. Slurping ochazuke or ramen and other noodles is a major part of the eating experience, and an acquired skill. Noodles are lifted to the mouth with chopsticks, then sucked in with air, which cools the noodles and enhances the flavour as they’re vacuumed into the mouth. It removes the need for clumsy chopstick handling of long strands of noodles, and makes them easier and quicker to eat, a necessity when eating at a stand-up noodle stall with limited seats. How loud to slurp can be a thorny subject, especially for women. It’s acceptable for men to slurp as loudly as they like, but a woman is expected to tone it down. I rarely complied. There was a degree of conflict at home over whether or not to slurp – my father couldn’t quite get over his resistance to a way of eating that’s bad manners in England. On holiday in the Lake District one year, my poor father was laid up with gout on the living room sofa, where he ate his sandwich lunch, while my mother and I ate ramen in the kitchen, slurping away until we heard him shout: Stop sniffing! He must have thought we both had terrible colds. By the time I went back to Tokyo and ate noodles with my uncle, I’d grown so used to eating without making any noise that when I started eating, slurpless, he said: Mazusō ni taberu na, Kyā! – You’re eating it as if it tastes horrible!

More rules: don’t drench your food with shōyu, especially not the rice served during your kaiseki meal, or sushi. Don’t kill the flavour of traditional washoku by drinking wine with it, unless at a fusion kaiseki restaurant where the food is designed to go with it. Stick to green tea, unless you’re eating ramen, in which case it’s always water. Alcohol is usually drunk before or after a meal. Don’t leave any rice in your ochawan if you can possibly help it. Always hold your chopsticks in one hand – never hold one in each hand. I’ve seen tourists do this, using them as if they were a knife and fork, oblivious to Japanese diners’ amused expressions. Don’t use them to beat a rhythm on your crockery. Jigoku ni hibiku wa yo! my mother used to cry if I ever did this – It’ll reverberate to hell! – with the implication that some terrifying hell-guarding deity would rise up and inflict some terrible punishment on me for attempting a Ringo Starr on my rice bowl. Never blow your nose at the table – in fact, never, ever blow your nose in public, full stop. People consider this so revolting, you might as well wipe your bottom in public. It’s one of the reasons you’ll hear people sniffing without restraint in Japan, something my father found extremely irritating. My mother sniffed, too. She’d dab her nose with a neatly folded tissue, but I hardly ever saw her blow her nose.

Finally, two of the most important rules on the long list of no-nos regarding chopstick use: never pass a morsel of food with your chopsticks directly into a pair of chopsticks held by someone else. Put the morsel you’re sharing into one of their bowls or plates instead. And for the love of Amaterasu, never, ever stick your chopsticks vertically into your bowl of rice.

The word ‘itadakimasu’ is spoken before eating any meal, and ‘gochisōsama’ when finished. Literally meaning ‘I will receive’ and ‘that was a feast’, they’re expressions of deepest gratitude to the person who cooked it, to the farmers and fishermen who sourced it, to nature that provided it. Not saying these words before and after eating feels as unnatural as taking leave of a loved one without saying goodbye.

KYURI NO TSUKEMONO

Crunchy cucumber pickle

Credit for this delicious recipe goes to Tokyo tempura restaurant owner and chef Abe Kōichi, who shares it on his YouTube channel, Makanai Challenge! It works best with Japanese cucumbers, which are firm, flavoursome, seedless and less watery than other varieties. Lebanese cucumbers are a good alternative, although the seeded middle will disintegrate. They’re still crunchy and delicious, perfect eaten with a bowl of freshly steamed rice.

INGREDIENTS

14 cucumbers

Generous handful of sea salt

50g fresh ginger

3 dried taka no tsume chillies*

180mL Japanese rice vinegar

360mL shōyu

120g caster sugar

360mL saké

8g white sesame seeds, toasted

*Taka no tsume (‘ hawk claws’ – named for their curved shape and size) is a medium-hot variety of chilli pepper grown in Japan, usually used dried. Its deep, dark shade contrasts with the bright red of dried chilli used in other cuisines. You can find taka no tsume chillies in most Asian supermarkets.

METHOD

Set the taka no tsume to soak in a small bowl of water for 30 minutes.

Wash cucumbers and cut off the ends. Slice into 2.5cm lengths and place in a large bowl. Scatter the salt over the cucumber pieces, and then use your fingers to ‘massage’ in the salt. Tip into a large colander and leave to drain for 30 minutes.

Scrape the skin off the ginger with a teaspoon and cut into very thin slices. Stack the slices together, then cut into 2cm matchsticks. Chop the taka no tsume as finely as you can.

Spread the salted cucumber slices out on a clean tea towel, lay another tea towel on top and roll them up, squeezing as much of the liquid out of the cucumbers as you can.

Place the rice vinegar, shōyu, sugar and saké in a pan and add the cucumber. Set the pan over medium-high heat and bring to a simmer, but only for a moment or two – you want to heat the cucumbers through, not cook them. Transfer them with a slotted spoon from the pan into a colander and leave to cool and drain, keeping the liquid in the pan.

Turn the heat to medium-high again and simmer the liquid in the pan until reduced by half, then remove from the heat and allow to cool completely.

Place the cucumbers in a bowl and strain the cooled, reduced liquid into the bowl. Add the ginger, chilli and toasted sesame seeds and mix well.

Place the cucumbers and the liquid into a container, making sure the cucumbers are fully submerged in the liquid. Abe-san covers his with cling film in a shallow Tupperware container; I use one of those reusable, sealable silicone bags that stands up, keeping the cucumber submerged in the liquid. Leave in the fridge for 2–3 days before eating. It will keep in the fridge for a week or two, if you can resist eating them all before then.

MISOSHIRU

Basic miso soup

Serves 5

The ‘gu’ ingredients here are the classic combination of tofu, wakame seaweed and spring onion. There are countless alternatives for gu: sliced aburaage (deep-fried tofu pockets available in the freezer section of most Asian food stores; flush the excess oil out of them first with boiling water), finely sliced shītake mushrooms, shop-bought ofu (feather-light dried wheat-gluten shapes, often decorative; just drop them into the miso while cooking and they’ll turn into silky little mouthfuls), shredded Chinese cabbage, trimmed bean sprouts, baby spinach, cockles and microgreens.

INGREDIENTS

1 tbsp dehydrated ‘fueru wakame’ seaweed*

800mL dashi*

4 tbsp miso paste

100g silken Japanese tofu

1 spring onion, chopped

* Widely available in Japanese and Asian food stores. Easily rehydrated in cold water. A small amount will rehydrate to surprisingly large quantities, hence its name, which means ‘increasing wakame’.

METHOD

Place the fueru wakame in a small bowl of water and allow to rehydrate for 10–15 minutes. Meanwhile, place the dashi in a saucepan over low heat. Put the miso in a small bowl and, once the dashi is hot, add a ladleful to the miso paste and whisk until any lumps are dissolved (my mother, like many Japanese cooks, put the miso paste in the ladle, added a little of the dashi to it and blended with cooking chopsticks while holding it over the pan). You can also buy special sieves shaped like a ladle to put the paste in while holding it in the dashi to blend it.

If blending the miso in a separate bowl, slowly pour the mixture into the pan, stirring as you go, and bring to a gentle simmer. Take care not to let the miso boil; since it’s a fermented product rich in probiotics, boiling it destroys its nutritional value as well as its flavour.

Cut the tofu into 1.5cm cubes and slide them into the pot gently to avoid breakages. Add the reconstituted wakame and spring onions and continue to heat through. Ladle into bowls and serve. In Japan, misoshiru is served in an owan bowl made of lightweight wood or lacquer (or plastic made to look like wood or lacquer) – never in bowls made of porcelain or other earthenware, and it’s drunk straight from the bowl, and not with a spoon. You can use your chopsticks to slide the gu ingredients into your mouth while drinking from a bowl.

蚕起食桑

21–25 May

Kaiko okite kuwa o hamu

Silkworms start feeding on mulberry leaves

紅花栄

26–30 May

Benibana sakau

Safflowers bloom

麦秋至

31 May – 5 June

Mugi no toki itaru

Wheat ripens and is harvested

Many rice farmers grow other crops, like wheat, to make ends meet. Early summer is the start of tsuyu, the rainy season, which lasts around six weeks. It begins in the second week of May in the south, and finishes at the end of July in the north; the wheat needs to be harvested in a hurry before it gets wet.

For a nation whose soul is so entwined with rice, there’s an astonishing and delicious array of western-influenced, wheat-based goods in Japan, and when I was growing up most of it was nothing like the sort of thing you’d find in an English or Australian bakery. The Japanese word for bread, ‘pan’, is derived from the French equivalent, ‘pain’, and is applied to so much more than the standard loaf. There’s karēpan, deep-fried donut buns filled with Japanese curry, for example – and melonpan, which is a sweetened bread dough baked inside a thin, crispy biscuit crust. It doesn’t contain any melon; the name comes from the resemblance of the crackled crust on the rounded bun to the skin of a cantaloupe, and the dough is sometimes also coloured pale green. There’s anpan, a sweet bread bun filled with the ubiquitous anko bean paste, or kurīmupan – ‘cream bread’ – filled with delicate vanilla crème pâtissière, plus a hundred other varieties of sweet and savoury bread products.

Back then, wholegrain breads or brown rice weren’t seen as the tasty, healthy option they are now, but as a mark of coarseness and poverty, a leftover, perhaps, from war days. The whiter the rice the better the quality, and the same went for bread. A typical loaf of bread was – and still is – a perfect cuboid of fluffy, cloud-soft, slightly sweet white bread with a tender, honey-gold crust, called shokupan. It’s known as ‘milk bread’ in English because of the milk and butter that’s added to the dough. It has to be cut into thick slices before being toasted to get the full tōsuto (toast) experience. Very, very thick slices. Toasting slices 5 centimetres thick isn’t an issue, since everyone in Japan uses ōbun tōsutā (toaster ovens) to do the job, not the pop-up toasters you find in Britain and Australia. If you order toast in a standard Japanese cafe, you’ll get a slice the thickness of four regular slices of bread, the white bread toasted crispy golden and cut into triangles to reveal the delicious fluffy, soft centre inside, and served with neat, rectangular pats of golden Hokkaido butter. My mother loved to eat toast like this for breakfast, smeared with a little jam. But there are lots of unusual topping options for toast, too – miso paste, umeboshi paste, even nattō or furikake.

If you can switch off any prejudices you might have against processed wheat goods, Japanese toast is moreishly tasty with a mouth-watering texture and is worth every non-fibrous, unwholesome bite.

My father loved this excess of bread – one of his favourite snacks was bread slathered with butter and honey, and when he was living alone for a while in Tokyo after my mother died, he survived primarily, he said, on a diet of bread, buns and pastries from his favourite bakery, a habit he has reined in since then. He wasn’t particularly enamoured of my mother’s Japanese-style home cooking, although he enjoyed the foods that were typically served in restaurants, like wagyu beef shabu-shabu, sukiyaki stew, teppanyaki or sushi. When he was at home, my mother cooked western-style evening meals, some of which she’d learned to cook at a class taught by Cordon Bleu chefs at the Tokyo Hilton.

My parents often entertained my father’s business guests at home, and my mother had a repertoire of European recipes: cold vichyssoise soup as a starter, beef stroganoff with cream and sherry served with tagliatelle for a main course, and coffee jelly with thick cream and prunes soaked in Armagnac, or bavarois neapolitaine, with its layers of coffee, strawberry and vanilla mousse, for dessert. Everything she cooked at home was delicious, except for hamburgers, which she simply couldn’t get her head around; with the mince packed tight into patties, she was fearful of parasites or bacteria and would incinerate them in the pan, resulting in dry, blackened, inedible frisbees. Not accustomed to culinary failure, she would brood over it for the rest of the evening and into the next morning, and eventually stopped making them despite my father’s requests, sticking to the many other dishes she was good at instead.

Sometimes I’d go to meet my father, who worked for a shipping company, for lunch at his office in the Tokyo World Trade Centre, which at 152 metres and forty floors high was the tallest skyscraper in Tokyo when it was built in 1970. The city was especially safe in those days, and still is, relative to many other cities that size, and like other children I’d travel alone on the Tokyo buses and subway. I felt very grown-up in my best clothes, getting the train by myself to Hamamatsuchō and making my way to the building’s reception, where someone would call my father. I’d be whisked up at stomach-lurching speeds in the lift to his office high in the sky, and revel in the petting and cosseting from the secretaries and the telex operators who tended to the machines that continually sent and received rat-tat-tatted messages on huge spools of paper to and from ports and ships around the world. We always went to Sushiden, a sushi bar in the basement, where we’d sit at the counter, and the itamae-san was always kind to me. I guess he’ll have long been retired by now, especially since his shop is no more, demolished along with the entire building in June 2021 to make way for a more technologically up-to-date building that, at 235 metres tall, will stand 83 metres taller than the old one.

My father took me out to the Hotel New Otani some Sunday mornings for an English-style cooked breakfast so my mother could have some peace at home. It was a rare chance for a father–daughter outing between his many overseas business trips. Other times, he’d take me to Fujiya in the afternoon after book shopping at Kinokuniya, record hunting at Yamano’s in Ginza, or going to see a movie. Fujiya is an old-school American-style cake, confectionery, milkshake and dessert shop founded in 1938, which also sold light lunches. I wasn’t a sweet tooth, preferring savoury snacks, but I loved going there with my father, who almost always chose hottokēki – ‘hot cake’ – thick, fluffy American-style pancakes, which he loved best served warm and topped with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream, sliced bananas and a swirl of piped chantilly cream crowned with a glistening maraschino cherry. I always chose the Peko-chan sundae, a tall glass of ice-cream, chantilly cream, vanilla crème pâtissière and chocolate syrup, its crowning glory a Peko-chan chocolate lollipop stuck into the cream on top. When I was very young, people often remarked how much I resembled Peko-chan, the Fujiya mascot, a chubby-cheeked, wide-eyed, brown-haired little girl with a fringe and pigtails, forever licking her lips.

Whether the photographer who approached my parents and me in a rival cake shop while I was getting stuck into a pile of vanilla-custard-filled choux buns, aged two, had this resemblance in mind we’ll never know. There weren’t as many of us hafu children back then, and we were a bit of a novelty. My mother was used to strangers approaching to ask if they could take a picture of me, so when the woman politely asked if she could take a photo, my mother agreed and thought nothing more of it until we were handed an advertising leaflet for the same store while walking in Shibuya one day. There, emblazoned on the front, was my custard-covered face, looking up as I clasped a choux bun in my greedy little paws. My mother was furious that my picture was used in this way without permission or payment, and we never went back there again, although she kept the leaflet. I still have it in my mementos box, my choux-eating face forever babyish while I grow older, doing my best to resist eating such things to save myself from the dreaded middle-aged spread.

You can find bags of Milky, Fujiya’s famous slightly salty sweet milk chews, in most Japanese shops overseas, catering to the growing number of Japanese sweet fans. The chews have a comforting taste that prompted the now famous advertising slogan: ‘Milky wa Mama no aji’ – Milky tastes like Mummy – which sounds far less suspect in Japanese, referring to the warmth of a mother’s presence rather than anything eyebrow-raising.

Peko-chan, my Dorian Gray doppelganger, still grins cheekily from the front of the red Milky packaging familiar to me from the 70s. She has become such an iconic mascot that there are entire shops dedicated to Peko-chan merchandise: plushies, bento boxes, slippers, t-shirts, mirrors, dolls, pencil cases, even face masks – you name it, there’ll be one adorned with Peko-chan’s face. But search as hard as you like, there are no more Shōwa-style Peko-chan sundaes to be found in any Fujiya across the land.

~

I always enjoyed these special treats with my father, but what I loved most of all was to go with him to a sumo tournament. There are five ranking tournaments each year at the Ryōgoku Kokugikan in central Tokyo, timed according to the seasons. My father was a keen sumo fan, and a sponsor of the Kasugano sumo stable. You didn’t see many foreigners in the tournaments then, although there was one very famous Hawaiian yokozuna, champion, called Takamiyama, and there were even fewer foreigners in the audience. I don’t remember my mother coming to watch with us, for some reason, though I do have a photograph of her at a party my father arranged before I was born, gazing up somewhat adoringly at the uncharacteristically slender and extremely handsome kimono-clad Kasugano reigning champion. High-ranking sumo wrestlers were seen as an eligible catch, especially before the 90s, when the sumo world was hit by one scandal after another. With characters toughened by the hard training they endured for years as they worked their way up the ranks towards yokozuna, the sacred, spiritual nature of the sport gave them a steadiness and integrity of character that was thought to make them kind and gentle husbands. The extremely generous pay cheque probably helped, too.

These days, things have changed, not just because of the scandals, but because young women increasingly have different expectations of life, some of which don’t necessarily include getting married and having children. Young women are training hard to become sumo wrestlers themselves, although they are banned from taking part in a real tournament, competing instead in secular sports arenas with other women from around the world. Entrance to the sumo dohyō – the circular wrestling platform built of packed earth at the centre of the Kokugikan, sanctified by a Shintō shimenawa rope and purified before each bout with a scattering of sea salt – is strictly forbidden to women.

My father’s Japanese work colleagues or visiting foreign business guests often came with us to watch sumo at the Kokugikan. When she visited us in Tokyo, my English grandmother came too, although she found sitting on the floor with her legs folded too uncomfortable and was somewhat bemused at the excitement over a procession of overweight, half-naked men wrestling each other in bout after bout the whole day. My father’s sumo stable sponsorship gave us prime masuseki seating, a square of flooring just big enough for four zabuton seats and enclosed on three sides by low rails to make a sort of box. These masuseki boxes filled the lower half of the Kokugikan, below the regular, theatre-style seats that filled its upper half, and were arranged into terraced rows that descended all the way down to the sacred dohyō beneath the great four-sided purple cloth awning suspended from the high ceiling in the centre of the arena. We’d be allocated a desaki, an attendant dressed in traditional Japanese working clothes, who would show us to our box. We’d take off our shoes and fold ourselves inside the small square enclosure, place our order for drinks and snacks, and settle in to watch the opening rituals of the day’s bouts.

Sumo, along with baseball – and more recently, soccer – is one of Japan’s most beloved national sports. It’s the oldest, with its Shintō rituals, ceremonies and fighting codes originating in the 7th century. It’s always televised, and my Obā-chan, if she didn’t come with us, loved keeping the TV on for the duration of the season, cheering on her favourite wrestlers. But nothing beat the electrifying atmosphere of a packed Kokugikan.

When the announcer began calling in the higher-ranking wrestlers, the air would crackle with anticipation as these huge men circled around the ring, topknots glistening, their elaborate, heavy gold-embroidered aprons gleaming under the floodlights as they lifted them and slapped their bellies in their ritual dance. Our desaki would return to our box with trays laden with beer and iced glasses, juice, hot green tea, yakitori chicken skewers freshly roasted over charcoal, obento boxes, senbei rice crackers, dried squid and piles of green salted edamame, and I’d joyfully tuck in while cheering on Takamiyama or Chiyonofuji, my two favourite wrestlers.

Sumo wrestlers are remarkably fit and supple for their size, averaging a weight in the mid to upper hundred kilograms; the heaviest wrestler ever recorded weighed in at 296.2 kilos, and none of the top-forty heaviest wrestlers of all time weigh less than 200 kilos. Still, most can do the full splits and can keep up high intensity training for hours on end. They endure years of gruelling training, waking before dawn to hurl themselves for hours against great pillars made from tree trunks, or practising bouts with senior wrestlers who throw them down again, and again, and again. They can be surprisingly agile in the ring considering their size, quickly side-stepping an opponent lunging forward to push them over the edge.

The first wrestler to touch the dohyō with anything other than his feet, or step outside the rope, is the loser. Tactics range from brute force – the momentum of nearly 200 kilos of body weight launched from a squatting position at the starting strips, accompanied by repeated, hard forearm and hand slaps to the opponent’s chest – to nimble-footededness – the side step of a smaller wrestler whose larger opponent has hurled himself forwards in the hope of an oshidashi, a ‘push out’, causing him to crash to the ground.

Fit as they are, building bulk is an important part of being a wrestler, and as they grow older they are more prone to diabetes and cardiac diseases, along with aches and pains from injuries sustained early in their careers. They maintain their bulk by eating 7000 calories in their one meal a day, in the form of chanko nabe, a hot pot containing pork, chicken, beef, fish, potatoes, miso and rice cakes, accompanied with mountains of rice, then sleeping it off during their break. There are chanko nabe shops around the Kokugikan, but it seems to be more of a gimmick, not something people regularly eat, unless they want to go to bed every night with heartburn, or grow to the size of Ōrora, who at 296.2 kilos is the heaviest sumo wrestler ever recorded.

MELONPAN

‘Melon’ bread

Makes 8 buns

These sweet buns don’t contain any melon but are named for the look of the thin, crunchy biscuit coating that’s scored into a diamond grid pattern, which crackles as the bread dough within expands during baking, creating the look of a rockmelon. My mother used to add a tiny speck of green food colouring to the biscuit coating, as was popular in the 70s, to enhance the ‘melon’ look, but these days the buns are left their natural pale, golden yellow.

INGREDIENTS

Biscuit dough

100g caster sugar

60g unsalted butter at room temperature

1 large egg at room temperature, beaten

150g plain flour

½ tsp baking powder

Granulated sugar for sprinkling over buns before baking

Bread dough

240mL full-fat milk

1 tsp dried instant yeast

20g sugar

40g white flour

200g bread flour

½ tsp salt

60g unsalted butter at room temperature, cut into small cubes

Plain white flour for dusting

METHOD

Make the biscuit dough first by creaming together the sugar and butter with a whisk until pale and fluffy. Gradually add the beaten egg while continuing to whisk. Sift in the flour and baking powder, folding it in with a spatula until the mixture is dry enough to handle. Knead and roll into a log shape about 15cm long and wrap in cling film. Refrigerate for 1 hour.

Begin making the bread dough by warming the milk in the pan or microwave, but make sure the milk is tepid; if it’s too hot, it will kill the yeast. Pour into a mixing bowl and whisk in the yeast and sugar until frothy. If using a stand mixer, swap out the whisk for the dough hook at this point and mix in the cake and bread flours and the salt. Once everything is incorporated, set the mixer speed to medium and knead until the dough is smooth (about 5 minutes, or 10 minutes if you’re kneading by hand). Let the dough rest for 5 minutes.

Add the butter one small cube at a time, kneading in between each addition until the butter is fully blended in; this should take about 5 minutes. Cover the mixing bowl with a damp tea towel and allow the dough to rise in a warm place for 2 hours.

Once the dough has risen, lightly dust your work surface with flour and turn the dough out. Using a knife or dough scraper, divide the dough into 8 equal pieces.

Roll each piece of dough on the work surface with your hands to form a smooth ball. Cover the balls of dough with a damp tea towel and leave to rest for 10 minutes.

Remove the log of biscuit dough from the fridge and divide into 8 equal pieces. Roll each piece into a ball, then use your hand to flatten each one into a disc roughly 10cm in diameter. Lay a disc on top of a bread dough ball, carefully stretching it evenly over the bread dough so the top is almost entirely covered with the biscuit dough. Sprinkle a generous pinch of granulated sugar on top, gently pressing the sugar crystals into the dough with your hands so they stick, then use a sharp knife to cut the top of each bun into a diamond grid pattern. Place the buns on a baking tray lined with baking paper and cover with a damp towel, leaving them somewhere warm to rise for about 45 minutes. They should double in size.

Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 180°C.

Once the buns have risen, bake for about 20 minutes until the tops are turning crackled and golden. Remove from the oven and set them to cool on a rack for 30 minutes before eating. They can be frozen, though keep them separated on a tray or with baking paper while they freeze so they don’t end up stuck together.

蟷螂生

6–10 June

Kamakiri shōzu

Praying mantises hatch

腐草為螢

11–15 June

Kusaretaru kusa hotaru to naru

Rotten grass becomes fireflies

梅子黄

16–20 June

Ume no mi kibamu

Plums turn yellow

The tsuyu, or summer rains, are well underway in Tokyo by June, when the heat and humidity begin to press in. I didn’t mind it as a child; I loved the comforting white-noise roar of the sudden downpours, the earthy smell of wet loam in the local park, and the feel of warm rain on my skin as I ran from the school gates to the bus stop, having lost my umbrella yet again. It wasn’t yet as hot as it would become in July, and the air felt soft. Thinking back to that season induces a feeling of ease in me, even now. I suppose I associated tsuyu with the happy feeling that grew in my belly as the summer holiday drew closer, with its freedom from homework, and all the fun things I planned to do in the slow, sunny days that stretched out ahead.

Summer was my favourite season in Tokyo, despite the humidity and heat that intensified as the season wore on. We usually went to England for some of the summer, but I loved it when we stayed home. Colours, smells and tastes seemed magnified by the dewy heat and the city felt as if it were swelling and blooming. In the evenings, its usually reserved inhabitants seemed to relax a little in the warmth. I remember nights out with the family to eat, or to a matsuri to try our hand at kingyo tsuri – fishing for a goldfish with a ladle made of paper; luckily for the poor goldfish, you usually didn’t have a chance before the paper disintegrated. Sometimes my mother, aunt, cousin Asako and I would go to see a show, like Berusaiyu no Bara – The Rose of Versailles – a musical performed by the famous all-female theatre troupe, Takarazuka. The swashbuckling male roles were handsomely played by the highest-ranking female stars, swooned over by a fanclub of girls who fell in love with them, festooning their bedroom walls with posters and memorabilia. The troupe is known for its strict discipline, hierarchy and training, with each actress signing up for a seven-year contract that begins with intensive training; at the end of the first year they are divided into otokoyaku – male roles – and onnayaku – female roles. The otokoyaku cut their hair short and start using male forms of language, which they maintain even when offstage. It was all tremendously wholesome stuff.

After the show we’d go somewhere to eat, walking through the velvet of the night, basking in the glow of blinking neon-lit advertising hoardings and department store signs, and multi-hued backlit signs for restaurants, bars, clubs and cafes that bristled from every floor of buildings crammed into every inch of the city. Mouth-watering smells of food roasting over charcoal wafted from street stalls; somehow, you always felt hungrier at the end of a hot day. The heat heightened senses; it sharpened the feeling of being alive, and joy at the prospect of the long, languid days that stretched ahead.

My mother, aunt, two cousins and I once went to the seaside together, sleeping in one tatami room in an inn close to the beach. I don’t remember much about it, but there are photos of me and my cousins burying ourselves in the sand, of my cousin Asako and me facing each other in matching Hawaiian-style sundresses, hers red and mine blue, about to launch into a game of something, maybe pat-a-cake; of my cousin Yōsuke and me each tackling a mountain of syrup-drizzled kakigōri, a traditional shaved ice dessert. As they grew older, my cousins were increasingly burdened with homework each summer break, since they were barely midway through their school year then, and even before our childhoods ended, we stopped going on holiday together.

I played instead with school friends, or with Lisa-chan, my best friend who lived next door. Left to my own devices, I would record madcap ‘radio shows’ on my plastic orange cassette recorder, make my ‘newspaper’, and force my parents to fill in home-made library cards every time they wanted to take a book off their shelves. There’d be swimming lessons, too, and all the time in the world to read the glorious pile of books that had finally arrived from America, ordered months earlier from the school’s summer reading list.

Most of all, summer holidays meant being able to eat some of my favourite foods: mizuyōkan, palm-sized rounds of pale burgundy anko jelly; refreshing sōmen noodles, served over ice cubes with a little water and dipped into a cup of salty, umami-rich tsuyu broth with finely chopped spring onion and grated ginger; kakigōri, a pile of shaved ice in a glass bowl, studded with slippery little buttons of shiratama mochi dumplings, drizzled with a sweet matcha syrup and crowned with a ball of vanilla ice-cream. I loved tucking in to a plate of my mother’s chūka soba, a pretty, Chinese-inspired dish of pert, thin egg noodles with finely julienned strips of cucumber, chicken, ham and kinshi tamago – beaten egg cooked paper thin in a frying pan – arranged in clusters on top like the spokes of a wheel and drizzled with a light, tangy, salty-sweet dressing enriched with a little sesame oil. My favourite summer lunch at home with my mother was a meal of sōmen noodles with a side of hanpen, a fluffy-light, smooth-textured white square of puréed fish paste, quickly pan-seared with a dash of shōyu and some asazuke (lightly salt-pickled cucumber).

For some inexplicable reason, we’d always say ‘hanpen and sōmen’ with an American accent, stretching out the vowels as if we were Texans, and find this endlessly amusing in a way nobody else likely would have done. The same silly things tickled us, and we laughed often, especially the time we’d just finished digesting our ‘haaayunpaaayun and sowmaaayun’ lunch and were throwing disco moves to Van McCoy and the Soul City Symphony’s ‘Do the Hustle’ in our slips – it was so hot and humid – when the doorbell rang. My mother ran and hid, telling me to open the door, which I did, trying to keep a straight face as the bemused dry cleaner handed over a delivery of clean clothes, my mother’s giggles audible from the bedroom.

One of the highlights of summer for me was the Yotsuya-Suga Matsuri. The festival is held each year in association with Suga-jinja, the Shintō shrine in Yotsuya, where the family shop is located. The shrine was once dedicated to Inari-Ōkami, the same deity my family makes offerings to on the shop’s kamidana shelf.

Worship of O-Inari-san, as the deity is colloquially known, is thought by some Japanese scholars to date back to the late 5th century. The practice is widespread across Japan, and despite a government decree separating Shintō worship from Buddhism, most people, like my family, continue to blend the two spiritual practices. My family is Sōtō Zen Buddhist through my grandfather’s line, but my grandmother’s family in the rural south practises Shintō, and my mother’s late cousin, Bōya, was a Shintō priest who would regularly officiate at rice-planting and harvesting ceremonies, interceding with the ta-no-kami in his white robes and tall black headpiece.

The kanji for ‘Inari’ means ‘carrier of rice sheaves’, and the god is considered the protector of rice and rice farmers, and therefore also the guardian of saké, rice wine. In times past, women hoping for a healthy pregnancy would make special offerings at Inari shrines, since the deity was also seen as a god of fertility. The origin of Inari-worship is unclear, but it seems the god is an amalgam of three or more deities, androgynous, and capable of taking on many different guises: a male figure carrying a bundle of rice; a goddess descending from heaven on a white fox carrying a sheaf of rice plants; a shape-shifting goddess who once turned into a giant spider to frighten a man who had committed wicked deeds, and even a dragon. O-Inari-san became a patron god for everyone, from blacksmiths, swordsmiths and feudal warrior lords to rice farmers and rice, saké and food merchants; for the people of Edo, who prayed to O-Inari-san for protection from fires; for couples struggling to conceive and those praying for good health during illness; for fishermen along the coast and even corporate giants, like Shiseido, which has its own Inari-jinja shrine atop its headquarters in Tokyo.

The majority of Shintō shrines in Japan are Inari-jinja; there are about 32,000 of them across the country. That figure only represents Inari-jinja with resident priests; there are likely hundreds of thousands of smaller shrines, most of which resemble simple shelters. They’re found sitting on top of corporate buildings, inside shops like my family’s, along roadsides and fields, in diners and restaurants, in private homes. Shrines outside will house one or more fox statues, since foxes – at least, supernatural, white ones – are considered Inari-Ōkami’s messengers.

Suga-jinja, near the family shop, used to be an Inari-jinja but was eventually rededicated to Susano’o-no-Mikoto, also called Suga Daijin, younger brother of the sun goddess Amaterasu and guardian of the neighbourhood of Yotsuya. The shrine sits perched high up on a hill, away from the traffic and hubbub below, and is approached by a steep set of stairs with red handrails. In 2016, the movie Kimi no Na Wa – Your Name – became the highest-grossing anime film of all time, outdoing any produced by Studio Ghibli of Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke fame, and the Suga-jinja steps became a pilgrimage destination for fans all over the world. The film’s famous climactic scene takes place on these stairs, and now tourists flock there, likely making these some of the most photographed steps in the world.

We would gather at the family home in Yotsuya to get ready for the matsuri procession. My mother would dress me in my yukata, often mistakenly called a kimono in the west.

A yukata is a light, affordable, comfortable unisex summer robe made from a single layer of cotton, wrapped across the torso in a similar way to a kimono, with a stiff, wide obi sash tied around the waist with an elaborate bow at the back. It’s much less formal than a kimono. The most basic ones are traditionally white, with blue or red traditional patterns, but there are multicoloured ones too, with flowers, fireworks, dragonflies or other summer iconography.

Compared to a kimono, a yukata is relatively easy to put on, though you might need help tying the obi. The kimono, with its many layers, precise folds and placements, its breast-flattening chest board that sits beneath to streamline the female body shape and its even more elaborate obi, is a much more laborious and time-consuming business. Even the accompanying footwear is much simpler with a yukata: you can wear your wooden geta, thong-style sandals, barefoot, whereas the formal zōri worn with a kimono require tabi, stiff, white foot coverings fastened at the ankle and divided at the toes, with one section for the big toe and another for the rest.

Wearing a kimono is restrictive, and very hot in summer, or so I’m told: though I longed to try one on when I was younger, my mother was reluctant. When I grew taller, she explained that kimono fabric for women was woven to a fixed width, and since one width of fabric was meant to cover the arm from the shoulder to the wrist, and I already towered over most Japanese women, she said it would look ridiculous with my sleeves at half-mast. But there were many years when I was small enough to wear one, and I would have loved, just once, to feel what it’s like to dress up in what’s effectively the national dress of Japan. I can only guess why she didn’t want me to try one on. I did, however, own a succession of yukata as I grew older, although by the time I was eleven, I was so tall that I had to wear a man’s yukata patterned in blue and white, which I paired with a red obi and dark wooden geta with red fabric straps. I still own them, though I can’t remember the last time I wore them.

A yukata is only for summer, though you’ll be given one to wear whatever time of year when you visit a ryokan (hot spring inn). It’s worn to sleep, eat, go to the baths, and relax in; you’ll usually be provided with a fresh yukata to wear every day, a pair of geta for your feet for the times you need to step outside (many ryokan have outdoor springs), as well as a padded cotton jacket called a hanten to wear over your yukata if it’s winter.

I loved wearing my summer yukata, though the tight toe straps on my wooden geta were often uncomfortable. When I was younger, my mother attached an elastic strap to the back of my tiny geta to keep them on; it was easy for them to fall off if you were running, or skipping. As I grew older, I had to learn to walk in them with finesse, which required taking small, pigeon-toed steps. This was more than a case of aesthetics; if you took too big a stride, the yukata would gape open at the bottom, working its way loose up towards the obi that held you together, or worse still, it wouldn’t open up at all, wrapping around your legs instead so you’d trip over. To stride about with big steps, toes turned outwards, was considered ‘hinganai’ – without delicacy. If my mother caught me doing it, she’d tell me I was walking like a seedy old man.

There’s something about the physical restraint even of the yukata that turns me into someone else; my movements become smaller, quieter, more in keeping with traditional Japanese femininity. My posture improves, I sit with my knees together, I tilt my head at a submissive angle, and even the pitch of my voice changes, becoming quieter and softer. It’s not a conscious transformation, but even if I’m not wearing a yukata, whenever I go home, I take on a different form, like a shapeshifter, always trying to do the impossible and fit in.

Before the Yotsuya-Suga Matsuri began, there’d be a lot of hanging around in front of the family shop, where the procession usually started. The path it would follow was cordoned off from the traffic, along one side of the busy six-lane road. Everyone started gathering early – the omikoshi (portable shrine) bearers, the children, mothers, aunts, grandparents – everyone chattering away. Sightseers would begin to gather on the pavements. All of us kids would be dressed up – the girls and younger boys usually in yukata and the older boys, the strongest of whom might be helping the men carry the omikoshi, in a light cotton happi jacket, white shorts and white, two-toed tabi-style slippers with thick, flexible soles that allowed for grip and nimble footwork.

The omikoshi bearers also wore a thin white cotton tenugui cloth twisted into a rope to make a headband, called a hachimaki, tied around their foreheads to keep the sweat out of their eyes. The hachimaki symbolises a feeling of fortification and determination, of steeling yourself for whatever arduous task lies ahead; it’s thought they were first worn by samurai under hard battle helmets for comfort. Flat cotton hachimaki patterned in blue or white, or decorated with kanji characters and sometimes with a red circle, the rising sun in the centre of the Japanese flag, are worn by kendo, karate and other martial arts fighters for similar reasons, to keep sweat from their eyes and as a physical reminder of the determination they need. They’re sometimes worn by food vendors at markets, and by itamae chefs, too. They can be worn by anyone about to embark on an arduous undertaking, like sitting the annual university exams, or carrying an enormous half-tonne omikoshi down a city street.

The elaborately carved wooden omikoshi looks like a miniature shrine, complete with an elegantly swooped gilt roof and a chamber inside, set upon two or four long parallel carrying poles. It’s meant to transport the kami, to great fanfare, from the neighbourhood shrine through the streets of the districts it serves. The whole thing is lifted onto the shoulders of a large team of bearers, mostly men, though occasionally women share the load, too, and depending on the kami, the omikoshi is heaved up and down or from side to side, the bearers stepping forwards, sometimes even backwards, to keep the kami entertained.

My uncle was a respected member of the neighbourhood committee and usually helped to organise the event, coming up with the annual design for the neighbourhood blue-and-white happi worn by the bearers. One year, when my cousin Asako was a teenager, she dressed in the happi, white shorts and tabi like the boys, with her hair slicked back in a bun and a hachimaki around her forehead, and joined the team of omikoshi bearers. She’s a couple of years older than me, and I thought her unbelievably cool at this moment, taking on the serious task of carrying the sacred omikoshi, and wished I could do the same.

Besides the omikoshi, there was a cart for the giant taiko drum that would beat the rhythm for the procession and stir up everyone’s spirits, with two thick, twisted ropes attached. The drummer, also wearing hachimaki, happi, shorts and tabi, would stand ready with his drumsticks as we children took up our positions at regular intervals along the ropes in front of him.

One of the neighbourhood uncles would be there to get everyone ready and guide the procession. His main role was coordinator and cheerleader; he’d usher everyone into place near the omikoshi or the drum cart, make sure the procession left on time, and would lead the call and response of kakegoe (cries of encouragement) once the procession began. Kakegoe are heard in art forms such as kabuki, noh theatre or formal traditional music. Most take the form of a high-pitched, yodel-like ‘Yoooooo!’, with a vocal lift, punctuated at the end by a single slap of a kotsuzumi shoulder drum, or a clack of wooden clappers. Kakegoe are also heard at the sumo; apart from shouting ‘Ganbarē∼!’ (‘Give it your all!’) followed by their favourite wrestler’s name, the crowds shout ‘yoisho!’ each time the wrestlers stamp the ground before the bouts. ‘Yoisho’ is a useful expression, used anywhere, by anyone, for anything that requires strength or extra effort: picking up something heavy, or even getting up out of a chair if you’re a bit tired or creaky. When she was older, Obā-chan said it each time she got up off her zabuton floor cushion. At matsuri, there are different calls according to the region; in Tokyo, the kakegoe is most often ‘Wasshoi!’

~

Once he saw everyone was ready, the neighbourhood uncle would give the signal, and you’d feel the thrill run through the crowd. The omikoshi was hoisted onto strong shoulders, the bearers’ grimaces reflecting its enormous weight, and we children picked up the heavy, thick ropes, rough against our hands. When the uncle leading the procession lifted his megaphone to his lips and cried, Sōre! (Here we go!), we’d begin to pull, and the drum cart would slowly begin to roll, the drummer steadying himself as it jolted forward, jerky at first, before momentum smoothed out its progress. He’d raise his sticks high above his head and beat into the heart of the taiko with all his might for the first BOOM! BOOM! followed by a ‘chakchakchak’ that he’d strike along its wooden edge before beating the heart of the taiko again, cycling the rhythm over and over: BOOM! BOOM! chakchakchak, BOOM! BOOM! chack chack chack. The leader at the front would cry out, ‘WASSHOI!’ and all of us would echo it in return, so there’d be a steady rhythm of ‘WASSHOI! Wasshoi! WASSHOI! Wasshoi!’ to lend strength to the omikoshi bearers, who’d begin to heave their heavy burden up and down on their shoulders as they jogged along in time to the beat of the drum.

We’d proceed along the side of the wide road, twenty, thirty men carrying the enormous omikoshi as traffic zoomed past, people from the neighbourhood fanning the bearers and calling out kakigoe (rhythmic cries of encouragement withno specific meaning), we children following behind, even the tiny ones who could barely reach the rope, all dressed in yukata, our multicoloured obi bobbing along like giant butterflies. Mothers with cameras would encourage their little ones, and the whole neighbourhood would be turned out to watch alongside the tourists lining the pavements.

I would walk along proudly in the midst of the mayhem, a strange feeling of joy that almost felt like tears rising in my chest, and for a moment I’d feel as if I truly belonged.

HIYASHI CHUKA

Chilled Chinese-style egg noodles with a tangy dressing

Serves 4

INGREDIENTS

4 packets of fresh ramen noodles (about 150g per packet)

Toppings

1 cup kinshi tamago, cut into 0.5cm strips*

4 slices lean ham, cut into 0.5cm strips

2 Lebanese cucumbers cut into long, thin strips

8 crabsticks, pulled apart into strips

1 ½ tbsp white sesame seeds, toasted

Hiyashi chūka dressing

120mL shōyu

65g caster sugar

60mL Japanese rice vinegar

2 ½ tbsp sesame oil

2 ½ tbsp water

1 tsp fresh grated ginger

METHOD

Mix the ingredients for the dressing and set aside. It can be made a day ahead and kept in the fridge until needed. Prepare all the toppings.

Set a large pan of water to boil and cook the ramen noodles according to packet instructions, loosening before you put them into the water. Once cooked, tip into a sieve and rinse well with cool water, then drain thoroughly before dividing between four plates.

Arrange each topping over the noodles from the centre outwards like segments in a pie chart. Keep each set of toppings together for colourful effect.

Pour over the dressing just before serving.

乃東枯

21–26 June

Natsukarekusa karuru

Self-heal withers

菖蒲華

27 June – 1 July

Ayame hana saku

Irises bloom

半夏生

2–6 July

Hange shōzu

Crow-dipper sprouts

As June makes way for July, the heat and humidity continue to intensify. Sometimes the snow melted off the top of Fuji-san, leaving the deity-mountain looking oddly naked. I found the transition from the hot, sticky air of the streets to the chill of air-conditioning at home, in shops or public transport stimulating when I was younger, but my mother avoided going out on the hottest days, the humidity sapping her energy, especially as her heart condition worsened, and once I was an adult, I’d feel myself wilt, too.

The first kō of this sekki reflects this intense, damp heat. The self-heal, Prunella vulgaris, withers. It’s a medicinal plant with simple lobed leaves and purple, lavender-like sepals that I don’t remember seeing in its native Japan or England, but have seen here in Australia, where it’s become an invasive weed.

Also known as heal-all, self-heal is sometimes described as a ‘Eurasian’ herb, a description I used for myself before its Orwellian connotations made me choose ‘hafu’ instead.

In contrast to self-heal, the iris, which the second kō reminds us blooms at this time of year, is well-behaved, and beloved by gardeners around the world, including my Australian neighbour across the street who grows them around his frog pond. There are about three hundred species worldwide, three of them native to Japan. Two grow around water, and the third, the ayame, prefers dry land.

In hanakotoba, the Japanese language of flowers, irises symbolise happy news, loyalty and bravery. Before the Gregorian calendar was adopted, Tango no Sekku – Boys’ Day – fell on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, around the seventh day of June. The 10th-century poet and author of the Heian court, Sei Shōnagon, wrote in her Pillow Book: ‘There is nothing to equal the Festival of the Fifth Month, when the scents of the iris and sagebrush mingle so charmingly.’ Back then, boys bathed with the sword-like iris leaves for luck; it was thought to give them the courage of a samurai warrior.

Today, irises are an icon of early summer in Japan, appearing in paintings, woodblock prints and haiku; in decorative patterns on everything from kimono fabric to crockery to wagashi sweets. They were my mother’s favourite flower, and we’d go to admire the masses of deep purple, violet and white that bloomed in June in the Meiji-jingu gardens with my aunt, her older sister, making a day of it with some delicious lunch or other afterwards.

When my English grandmother came to stay for a few months in Tokyo, she loved visiting Japanese gardens with us, from the austere, raked-gravel distillations of nature found in Zen monasteries, to the floral extravaganzas in Tokyo’s public parks. She and my mother grew closer each time she visited – the first time in Tokyo, the next when my parents lived in Singapore and I was at boarding school. With my father out at work during the day, my mother gave a great deal of thought to which activities my grandmother might enjoy the most, and gardens of all kinds were high on the list. Ever after, the irises growing in my grandmother’s prize-winning garden in the Lake District always reminded her, she said, of my mother.

Each summer my parents and I usually spent a few weeks in England on ‘home leave’ so we could visit my father’s family; those holidays were idyllic, too, especially when the weather was good. My grandparents lived in an early-17th-century, whitewashed farmhouse with a grey slate roof near Hawkshead, the Cumbrian village where poet William Wordsworth went to primary school. The main, two-storey building had dark flagstones on the ground floor and centuries-old timber floorboards on the upper level that sloped so much that a ball placed at one end could roll down to the other. An ancient, crooked newel staircase connected the two, made of solid blocks of dark timber so worn from generations of inhabitants treading them that there was a rope to hold on to as you went up or down. The walls were at least two and a half feet thick to keep out the harsh cold of winter, and the door frames that were the right height for people four hundred years earlier were already too low for me as an adolescent; I regularly cracked my head on the lintels, standing up too soon as I crouched to go through the deep doorways.

My grandparents bought the farm, together with its paddocks and dry-stone-walled pastures, for a song when they retired in the early 70s: a big, ramshackle, no-longer-working property with two barns, a cottage where felt hats used to be made, and the farmhouse building with its four bedrooms, dining room, two cosy rooms for sitting in, larder and kitchen with a dirt floor that chickens once scratched about in. My uncles got together and renovated the farmhouse and its outbuildings, and landscaped the garden. They neatened the stream that babbled past Hatter’s Cottage at the bottom of the garden, where the water was once used to steam the felt hats into shape.

My grandfather Eric didn’t get the years he deserved to enjoy this bucolic new life, dying suddenly of a heart attack just a few years after he retired, when I was five years old. I remember him as a quiet, gentle man with thick-rimmed, rectangular black spectacles, bushy white eyebrows and a white moustache, and a pipe that seemed to be permanently affixed between his lips. When we went out to walk among the fells, he wore a deerstalker or flat cap, and a tweed country suit with waistcoat, jacket and breeches. He was always well turned out, as people of that generation often were. Whenever I come across the sweet, leathery scent of pipe tobacco or of fresh-cut grass, I’m reminded of him even all these years later; the sense of smell is the oldest, after all, tapping directly into the deepest, most ancient parts of the brain to trigger a sense of something deeply familiar before it can be attached to a memory of a person or a place, before the words form that might describe it. He used to drive a ride-on mower around the farmhouse paddock to mow it, and I’d entertain myself by chasing after him, laughing like a mad thing.

I remember asking him what the English word was for the stuff he put in his pipe, and giggling when he answered ‘tobacco’. I thought he knew the Japanese word for it – ‘tabako’ – and was teasing me, and I only found out later, to my astonishment, that they were the same word, the way the Japanese word for bread, ‘pan’, was the same as the French. It dawned on me that there might be a few faint threads of connection between my two disparate cultures after all.

My English grandmother, Dorothy Lila, was a force of nature, a brisk, intelligent, handsome and outgoing woman with seemingly endless energy and a jolly sense of humour. I never saw her look tired; she grabbed life by the lapels, and thoroughly enjoyed shaking every moment out of it. She took her dogs for two long walks each day, and was always busy with one community activity or another: Meals on Wheels, amateur dramatics, the church committee, bridge club, the WI – the Women’s Institute, the equivalent of the CWA in Australia – and the Wednesday Club, which organised activities for ‘the old dears’, almost all of whom were younger than she was, but with a fraction of her energy. She was an ardent admirer of the Girl Guides Association, taking its motto, ‘Always Be Prepared’, as her life philosophy. She almost always wore navy and white: practical, she said, because ‘everything goes together marvellously’. She brushed her long, ivory-coloured hair a hundred vigorous strokes each morning before twisting it up in an elegant chignon, and wore earrings, foundation, rouge and lipstick whether or not she was going out or receiving visitors. ‘It’s all out of a box, dear,’ she’d say, whenever people admired her beauty. Sometimes she’d let me or my cousins brush the knots out of her hair for her, and she’d pretend to grimace in pain, pulling funny faces that made us giggle.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, she and my aunt Vivian were evacuated from Barcelona, where my grandfather worked for an insurance company that insured the sherry that was exported to a thirsty Britain. He would follow later, in what, according to family accounts, was a hazardous journey. My grandmother ended up on the front page of the Hoylake & West Kirby Advertiser beneath the headline ‘EVACUEES FROM SPAIN ARRIVE HOME’, walking down the gangplank of the SS City of Hong Kong carrying my infant aunt. In the photo, she looked as elegant as ever, contrasting in my mind with the story she loved to tell about her arrival in the Port of Barcelona for the first time, when, halfway down the gangplank and carrying a younger Vivian in her arms, the elastic snapped in the waist of her elaborate knickers, causing them to descend around her ankles. With no hands free to retrieve them, she shuffled with as much dignity as she could muster the rest of the way down to the quayside, where, she’d chuckle, the Spanish dockers were vocal in expressing their appreciation.

The farmhouse was a paradise for me and my cousins during summer and Christmas holidays. One barn had been converted into a light-filled sitting room that housed my grandmother’s baby grand piano, which I loved to play. The other barn had been left as my grandparents had found it, with a rickety ladder leading up to a hayloft where the resident barn owl deposited compacted bony pellets of semi-digested mice. We once found a swallow’s nest with a silver lining under the eaves; my grandmother always left the hair from her brush on her bedroom windowsill for the birds to find; her hair would have kept many a nestling warm on cold spring nights. The untouched barn housed my grandfather’s old Huffy, along with other fascinating things like an ancient Silver Cross perambulator we’d take turns to push each other along the garden paths in, legs dangling over the edge and giggling. We played in the paddock with its glass greenhouse, made ‘rose petal perfume’ in buckets with a mess of petals and water from the hose, swung off the enormous rope swing one of the uncles had attached to an old oak tree perched on a hill in one of the fields. We rollerskated along the garden paths and played pooh-sticks on the little slate bridge my uncles built over the beck beside Hatter’s Cottage.

I remember jumping off the high steps that led up to the coffin door on the second floor of the cottage, so named because the deceased could easily be loaded onto a horse-drawn hearse that way. I was scared, but I didn’t want to be called chicken by my cousins, so I took a deep breath and jumped, landing so my chin came down hard on one of my knees, knocking out a front baby tooth. I was thrilled to discover the Tooth Fairy was a seasoned international traveller, able to leave a 100-yen coin under my pillow in Tokyo after my first tooth fell out, and 50 pence under my pillow in England for this one shortly afterwards.

I noticed how different I felt inside when I was with my English family in this quintessentially English countryside; I was too young to verbalise it then, but I was already recognising the need to adapt my perspective in subtle ways so I could make sense of such a different world, and a different way of thinking, as if I were becoming two separate people.

In an era famous for terrible food, my grandmother excelled at traditional English cooking. She cooked a perfect, tender, moist roast, and her gravy, always made with proper stock and with a smidgeon of her secret ingredient – Marmite – was the best I’ve ever tasted, especially when eaten the next day with leftover buttery mashed potato. Her shepherd’s pie, Lancashire hotpot, smoked haddock pie and other classics were so delicious they gained my mother’s thorough approval. There was a large cold-pantry in the utility room next to the kitchen, its shelves laden with home-made jams and jellies, chutneys and marmalades, brown paper sacks of earth-encrusted potatoes, that week’s leftover roast covered in foil and jars of Christmas fruit mincemeat in jars, maturing in preparation for that year’s Christmas mince pies. Her crabapple and rose petal jelly was one of her best preserves, the faint perfume of roses counterbalancing the gentle tartness of crabapples in a clear pink jelly that glowed like a jewel and tasted divine on hot buttered toast. She’d send me out to the garden to gather fresh petals from her prize-winning roses for it, and to pick the crabapples off the tree on the front lawn.

She always had a delicious pot of soup on the go. Having experienced food shortages and rationing during the Second World War like many of her generation, she wasted nothing. All her leftovers, as long as they were savoury – cooked carrots, leftover steak and kidney pie, roast potatoes, bread sauce, the last bits of meat off a roast, leftover stock – went into her Kenwood liquidiser so they could be added to the everlasting soup pot. I ate endless bowls of this soup with crusty bread whenever I stayed with her; it was always subtly different, and always tasty. She’d serve it as a starter whenever she entertained guests in winter. It was so good that sometimes they’d ask what was in it, and she’d have to reply: ‘I haven’t the faintest idea, my dear!’

My grandmother also had an extensive repertoire of cakes and biscuits, including the best shortbread biscuits I’ve ever had the privilege of eating, Anzac biscuits from a trusted recipe in her WI biscuit recipe book, and her sticky gingerbread loaf, made darkly rich and gloriously gooey by the addition of treacle. Her Victoria sponge cake was a triumph, moist and fluffy, with a filling of home-made jam and whipped double cream, the top dusted with a delicate layer of sifted icing sugar. The secret, she showed me, was a tablespoonful of just-boiled water added to the cake batter in the Kenwood mixing bowl at the last minute before whisking it in at high speed.

When we were taught how to make Victoria sponge cake in our ‘domestic science’ classes at boarding school, we were instructed to fold the cake mixture slowly and gently before scraping it into the cake tin for baking. Doing anything else, we were warned, would result in a disastrously flat, disappointing cake. When I boiled the kettle, added the water and cranked up the mixer to high speed, I was hauled before the class as an example; my classmates were told they’d see the consequences of my not paying attention to the instructions. I still remember the thrill of quiet victory when my cake came out of the oven and left my teacher speechless: it was the fluffiest and best risen of the lot, news I related to my grandmother with pride.

During half-term or on the two weekends we were released from boarding school during the thirteen-week terms, I would go to the farm to stay with my grandmother. I loved going with her to Hawkshead village at the bottom of the hill, with its narrow cobbled streets and crooked, centuries-old whitewashed houses with Lakeland slate roofs. Everybody knew everyone else and it was quiet, back then. The small old shops have since been replaced by souvenir gift shops, tea rooms and a tourist centre with a giant carpark to accommodate the tourists that now arrive by the coachload. The locals go to the convenient mega-supermarket on the village outskirts where you can get everything in one go. But back then, my grandmother got most of her supplies from the village, with its old-fashioned greengrocer’s, newsagent’s, chemist and bakery, though she’d go to Mrs Threlkeld’s farm on the other side of the valley for her eggs, and the milkman delivered milk to her doorstep every morning; two glass bottles of full-cream with gold foil tops and, sometimes, locally made yoghurt. My grandmother left out two small empty yoghurt pots for the milkman to cover the tops of the bottles; the blue tits and robins in her garden had learned how to peck through the foil to get to the thick layer of cream that sat on top of the unhomogenised milk, and had taught their offspring to do the same.

Mr Dewhurst the butcher, who had a shop in Ambleside a twenty-minute drive away, also had a shop-in-a-van. He came to the farmhouse gate once a week and my grandmother always bought something from him: a thick, round coil of Cumberland sausage, a shoulder of lamb or a fat marrow bone for the dogs to gnaw on before they took it off to the fields to bury it somewhere forever. I loved looking inside Mr Dewhurst’s little van, with its cold cabinet for the meat and shelves stacked high with tins and boxes of groceries his customers might want, but I loved going to his shop in Ambleside even more. He always gave me a chewy Quality Street toffee when I came in, the round, flat one in the gold wrapper. When I was very young, my mother used to give me that same toffee from a big tin someone had given my parents if I let her wash my hair without resisting. It was a special reward, as most of the time she avoided giving me sugary things to eat. Washing my hair back then, according to my mother, was an epic struggle. When I was a toddler and couldn’t speak English yet, I was sent to stay with my aunt Viv and three cousins in Surrey for the first time; my Obā-chan was unwell, and it was easier for my mother not to have to look after me, too. I have no memory of it, but my aunt later told my mother there’d been an incident involving Ribena syrup and my hair, that I hadn’t been able to understand her, and she hadn’t been able to understand my Japanese toddler-babble. I’d developed some kind of hair-washing phobia, but what eventually cured it were those delicious, chewy toffees.

Every night, even when she was alone, my grandmother laid the table for breakfast the next morning in the ‘snug’, a cosy little room with a small round drop-leaf table of honey-coloured oak and a fireplace, next to the kitchen where she had her meals when she was alone, or with me. She’d put out a clean tablecloth, set it with silverware, a side plate, bowl and a napkin enclosed in a silver ring engraved with her initials in an elegant cursive: DLD. Jam and honey, butter dish and toast rack sat in the middle with the fruit bowl and always with a small vase of flowers from her garden. It was a ritual she continued after she was widowed, a way of continuing to steer a steady course through her remarkable life. She was always prepared, even for breakfast.

Whenever I stayed with her, the capacity of my stomach, shrunken by the poor offerings of food at school, was continually tested. The day usually began with a bowl of porridge dolloped with a spoonful of double cream and a light scattering of muscovado sugar, followed by toast with butter and marmalade, and sometimes even sausages, eggs and bacon, and rounded off with a piece of fruit. After a busy morning, we’d have a light lunch of something like a slice of quiche and salad. When Pot Noodles were finally introduced in Britain, I persuaded my grandmother to buy me one for lunch, thinking they’d be like the delicious Nissin Cup Noodles that had been available in Japan since 1971. It was the reason for the only argument we ever had. When I put the kettle on to boil and peeled back the foil lid of the Pot Noodle in preparation, she insisted I empty the thing into a saucepan so I could cook it on the stove, convinced the plastic pot would melt as soon as I poured in the boiling water. Frustrated at being unable to make her understand, I made my case in that relentless way of prepubsecent girls when they’re convinced they’re right. She gave in, eventually, and I had my victory, but it was a hollow one. The noodles had the texture of soggy strips of cardboard, and the flavour was bland and one-dimensional. I didn’t share this with my grandmother, of course, and pretended it was as tasty as my favourite seafood-flavoured Nissin Cup Noodle back home, but I never asked her to buy me another.

In the afternoon, we always went for an energetic walk somewhere with the dogs – the Lake District offers endless scenic walks – and when we came back to the farmhouse, she’d light the fire in the sitting room next door to the snug if it was cold, which it was most of the time, and we’d have afternoon tea.

As she did for breakfast, my grandmother had a ritual, laying a tray with cups and saucers, cake plates and cake forks, a tea strainer, a pot of sugar, and a jug of milk and some napkins. There’d be a cake, or home-made biscuits, or some other delicious confection she’d baked for my visit. The tea she made was a perfect accompaniment, the smoky fragrance of her signature blend – two scoops of Darjeeling to one scoop of Lapsang Souchong – balancing out the sweetness of the cake. When I make this tea myself, the scent places me right back in her sitting room. I see it again now, with its soft, claret-coloured velvet curtains; its old flagstone floors made cosy with Persian carpets; the old brass coal bucket glowing beside the fire; the centuries-old partition of dark timber dividing the space from the dining room; and the chunky, dark oak Lakeland court cupboard in the corner, ornately hand-carved with mysterious initials and the mid-17th-century date when it was built. As I drink the tea, it’s almost as if I can smell the woodfire again: an olfactory hallucination triggered by the associated memory.

The final meal of the day was usually a roast with all the trimmings, concluded by a hearty pudding of some kind: rhubarb, gooseberry or apple crumble blanketed with hot custard; creamy, unctuous rice pudding; and, when it was warmer, summer pudding, the juices from the fresh berries staining the white bread they were packed inside in glorious shades of crimson, purple and magenta, served with double cream. My grandmother was so active that, despite these hearty meals, she was always trim. Even after two energetic walks in the day, I’d end up so full that I struggled to fall asleep. I’d work my way through the bookshelf in my bedroom, which was once occupied by my youngest uncle, reading about Sir Frances Chichester’s adventures on the Gipsy Moth as he sailed solo around the world, of young Lakeland children in Swallows and Amazons, or about James Dixon’s hapless – and somewhat inappropriate for an eleven-year-old – love affairs in Lucky Jim.

After my grandmother was left hemiplegic following a stroke, the farmhouse had to be sold. A golden era had come to an end, and it broke all our hearts. But Dorothy Lila continued to live with all her might from her nursing home armchair for the remaining twelve years of her life. She dispensed wise advice to her young nurse carers, who grew as close to her as her own grandchildren; she read Cervantes in Spanish, and flirted with the doctors. She was cheerful to the end. When she finally decided it was time to move on from this earth, it was three months to the day after my mother died.

DOROTHY LILA’S GINGERBREAD

INGREDIENTS

170g plain flour

170g wholemeal flour

2 tsp ground ginger

2 tsp mixed spice

Small pinch of cayenne pepper

Pinch of salt

1 heaped tsp bicarbonate of soda

340g golden syrup (or 170g golden syrup and 170g treacle to make a darker, richer cake)

110g caster sugar

170g unsalted butter

1 tbsp orange marmalade

2 eggs

220mL full-fat milk

Flaked almonds or sliced preserved ginger to decorate (optional)

METHOD

Grease a deep 20cm-square cake tin and line with baking paper. Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Sift both flours into a large bowl with the spices, salt and bicarbonate of soda, and mix well. Return any bits of bran left in the sieve from the wholemeal flour into the bowl.

Warm the syrup, caster sugar, butter and marmalade in a saucepan over low heat until melted.

In a separate bowl (or using a stand mixer), beat the eggs until combined, then whisk in the milk. Make a well in the flour mixture and pour the egg and milk mixture in together with the marmalade mixture and combine to make a smooth batter.

Tip the cake batter into the prepared cake tin, adding either flaked almonds or crystallised ginger to garnish (or both) and bake for 45–60 minutes. Make sure the cake doesn’t bake for too long, as it will dry out. Test by pressing the top gently – if it springs back, it’s done. Alternatively you can poke a skewer into the middle and if it comes out clean, it should be done.

Leave to cool and eat on its own or slathered with butter.

温風至

7–11 July

Atsukaze itaru

Warm winds blow

蓮始開

12–16 July

Hasu hajimete hiraku

First lotus blossoms

鷹乃学習

17–22 July

Taka sunawachi waza o narau

Hawks learn to fly

If you look up at northern hemisphere skies around 9 o’clock on the night of the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, which usually falls in August, you’ll see Vega and Altair glowing beside one another directly overhead. They’re two stars in an asterism called the Summer Triangle, and on this night they come into direct opposition to the sun and shine at their brightest. It’s marked by Tanabatasai, the Star Festival, one of the five seasonal festivals marked in ancient times, during the Heian era. In Tokyo, and other regions that shifted traditional lunar celebrations to align with the Gregorian calendar, it takes place on the seventh of July.

Vega and Altair represent two star-crossed lovers from an ancient legend that originated in China. The divine Princess Orihime (Vega), daughter of the sky god Tentei, sat every day beside the heavenly river of stars (the Milky Way) to weave her exquisite fabrics for the gods to wear. But she was so busy weaving that she had no time to find true love, and grew despondent. Her father was sad to see her this way, so he arranged for her to meet Hikoboshi (Altair), a heavenly ox-herder.

Orihime and Hikoboshi fell in love and were so besotted with one another that Orihime stopped weaving and Hikoboshi let his oxen wander among the stars. Orihime’s father grew angry and banned them from seeing one another again, separating them by placing them on opposite banks of the river of stars. The lovers were so heartbroken they weren’t able to carry out their duties, so after consulting with the other gods, Tentei decided to allow Orihime to see Hikoboshi one night each year, as long as the two worked hard the rest of the time. But the first time they were allowed to meet again, Orihime found there was no bridge for her to cross the river of stars to see Hikoboshi. She cried so many tears that a flock of celestial magpies took pity on her, forming a bridge with their wings so the lovers could finally meet across the Milky Way. But if the two hadn’t worked hard enough during the year, the gods would send rain to make the river rise; the magpies couldn’t form their bridge and the lovers would have to wait another year before they could meet again. Any late tsuyu-season rain that falls that night is called ‘Orihime to Hikoboshi no namida’ – the tears of Orihime and Hikoboshi.

The fine weather works well for Tokyo Disneyland, which holds a Tanabata parade each summer. Minnie Mouse is dressed as Orihime, and Mickey as Hikoboshi. This clash of ancient sacred story with modern commercialism isn’t unusual for Japan; in fact, it’s not even a clash, but an easy blending of new and old. Tradition isn’t discarded, it’s simply adapted to incorporate modernity.

‘Land of contrasts’ may be a tired travel-brochure epithet, but it’s an accurate one for a country comfortable with its contradictions: conservative, nationalistic and inward-looking while embracing innovation, cutting-edge technology and urban cosmopolitanism. Shrines, unchanged for eight centuries, crouch beside two-year-old 600-metre-high skyscrapers. Rural valley landscapes glistening with rice paddies and overlooked by mountain wildernesses are punctuated by vast cities crammed to overflowing with people, traffic and high-rises that glow and flash with neon at night. A society that’s highly literary and poetic in sentiment enjoys a mainstream humour predominantly characterised by farce and slapstick. Young women dress in immaculate kimono for traditional celebrations, then head to Harajuku at the weekend in full cosplay dress and makeup. Trainee monks sit in quiet, disciplined zazen meditation at a Sōtō Buddhist temple alongside me; later I discover them headbanging to hard rock in their dormitory when I take a wrong turn on the way to the bathroom. The heart of Japan seems to beat the same way it’s always done, but the harmonies weaving around the beat continually adapt and change. It’s a song that feels as though it’s been sung for millennia, but it always sounds contemporary.

Like many other matsuri, Tanabatasai has been adapted according to different regional customs and needs; in some places, such as Sendai in northern Honshū, Tanabata also honours ta-no-kami, those familiar gods of the rice paddies. Their festival is held over three days in the first week of August, and is the largest and most famous Tanabatasai in Japan.

During Tanabata, people write their heartfelt desires, sometimes in poetic form, on tanzaku – strips of blue or green, red, yellow, purple and white paper – and tie them to the branches of sasatake (sacred bamboo), where they flutter prettily in the breeze, the whispering rustle of the bamboo leaves carrying their wishes up to the heavens. Young women traditionally prayed to be endowed with fine needlework skills, and young men, skilled calligraphy brushwork, but these days they can include any wish at all, though most focus on academic success, or artistic skills, good health, prosperity or luck in love.

Tanzaku are one of the nanatsu kazari – seven decorations – which symbolise different auspicious objects or outcomes. Fukinagashi, the long, multicoloured streamers that adorn the koi carp decorations for Kodomo no Hi, hang down from decorative kusudama globes in the streets, here representing Orihime’s celestial fabric. The other decorations, usually made of washi paper and shaped into origami, are sometimes tied onto bamboo branches along with the tanzaku: orizuru (origami cranes) symbolise good health and longevity; kinchaku (traditional drawstring money pouches) represent wise use of money and prosperity; kamigoromo (paper kimono) represent the divine robes Orihime made with her fabric; toami (fishing nets) embody hopes for bountiful harvests of fish and food; and kuzukago (wastepaper baskets) represent cleanliness, and a reminder not to be wasteful.

In 2005, at 4.49pm on the seventh day of July, the Tanabata festivities in Japan would have been underway since morning, and the food vendors lining the streets would have been busy restocking in preparation for the evening’s celebrations. In two hours’ time it would be sunset, and once the night crickets had welcomed the evening in with their hypnotic, ringing songs, there’d be the joy of heading out into the soft night air dressed in a cool yukata, uchiwa fan in hand, and walking with family or friends along rows of lantern-lit food stalls, drawn by so many wonderful smells that deciding which single delicious thing to eat next almost felt impossible. The goal would be to try as many different things as possible before you became too full to eat anything else, best achieved by sharing, though sometimes if something tasted exceptionally good, any attempts by others to do so would be batted away in mock outrage. Get your own!

On the other side of the planet, in London, it was Thursday morning and I was running half an hour late for work in the city. I usually made sure I was at my desk by a quarter past eight, but on this morning, my Circle Line train pulled into Liverpool Street tube station just before a quarter to nine. Citypoint, the thirty-five-floor skyscraper where I worked in the European communications department for a Japanese logistics company, was a short walk away. To my relief, I made it to my desk just before nine o’clock.

I was lucky enough to have a desk next to the floor-to-ceiling windows on the seventeenth floor. I never tired of the magnificent east-facing city view, which looked out beyond Canary Wharf and the Docklands towards the Essex estuary. Beyond that lay the English Channel, and a Europe to which Britain still belonged, then. Far beyond that, in the same easterly direction, lay the city where I was born.

As I waited for my computer to boot up, I looked out of the window as usual to get my fill of the view before knuckling down to work. There was a huge black plume of smoke coming out of Aldgate tube station, the next stop after Liverpool Street.

Oh my god, I said to my colleagues, what’s going on at Aldgate?

Then someone said: Have a look at the BBC website. Breaking news.

The reports were confusing; there was a fire at Aldgate, maybe Liverpool Street, maybe both. Possibly a derailment. My god, I thought, I must have missed the accident by minutes. Even at the quieter end of rush hour the Tube would have been packed with commuters, and if the fire was so bad that we could see smoke coming out of the exits from deep underground, then casualties from the accident would have been unavoidable. Horrified, we got out of our seats and stood by the windows, work forgotten. There were fire engines and ambulances hurtling towards the station. Then the phones started ringing: families checking their loved ones had made it into work before they were caught up in the incident.

Panicked, confused news reports started to come through. The BBC News website crashed. Someone in the office put on the radio. It was an explosion, and not the only one; there were others, on other tube trains. We knew, then, with sickening certainty: it was no accident. The bomb that exploded on the Circle Line train at Aldgate was the first of several, all of which went off in quick succession, and within fifty seconds of the first. Some reports said there’d been six bombs; others, three. Buildings in Canary Wharf were evacuated after reports that an attack there was imminent. Our own building’s emergency siren began blooping, making me jump, and a voice came over the PA system. Shelter in place. Do not use the lifts or attempt to leave the building. Lower blinds on all windows immediately and move as far away from them as possible. A bomb disposal unit is currently in operation near the Citypoint entrance.

I could see a white van, its rear doors open, parked directly below us on the large pedestrian square in front of the main entrance. Only a short while ago the square had been busy with people sitting in the sun at tables outside cafes, people hurrying to work, but now there wasn’t a soul in sight. A bomb disposal robot was jerking slowly on its two oversized black tyres towards the van like something out of a dystopian nightmare, its white body glinting in the summer sun, its long metallic arm angling forwards with its huge claw. I couldn’t look away, as if I were in a trance. It didn’t seem real. Someone shouted at me: For god’s sake, Katherine, get away from the window!

Some colleagues started trying to ring loved ones in case the worst happened, but there was no signal; the phone network was overwhelmed with tens of thousands of people doing the same, and had been shut down to ensure emergency communications could continue to get through. All was quiet in our normally noisy open-plan office. It really is possible to feel collective fear. It was sharp, palpable in the air.

The bomb in the white van turned out to be a false alarm. But an hour after the first blast, another bomb was detonated on a double-decker bus in Russell Square, three and a half kilometres away. There’d be no more work that day; everyone had to find a way to get home, or find a place to stay. Most of the London Underground system had been shut down and bus services suspended. A handful of brave cab drivers ventured to the city to help people home, some of them reportedly refusing to take a fare. I was lucky enough to live in central London; some colleagues lived as far away as Kent, commuting almost two hours each way every day. It would still take me nearly two hours to get home, on foot – there was no other choice.

The normally busy streets were deserted, looking like the set of a post-apocalyptic movie, and all the shops in the city were closed, save one: a sportswear store. It was packed with women like me, who’d come to work wearing the obligatory high heels. We were all buying trainers so we could walk home, trudging, shocked, with thousands of others along the wide city roads that were usually clogged with traffic. We were told we could work from home the next day if we wanted to. I was one of many who refused to give in to fear. I had to take a different route; the Circle Line would remain closed for another month. For the first time, I could take my pick of seats; the tube carriage was nearly empty.

In Tokyo, we went about our daily lives not knowing if the next tremor would herald a catastrophic, tsunami-triggering quake. In London, we went about our business each day regardless of the threat of terrorist attacks. We were hyper-vigilant for unattended bags in public spaces, but I doubt I was alone in thinking that if my number was going to come up one day, there wasn’t much I could do about it. Life had to go on, so you put it to the back of your mind; it had been that way for decades.

In 1982 two IRA bombs exploded in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park on a sunny July day, killing and maiming people and horses; in 1992, another blew up the Baltic Exchange building a ten-minute walk away from the office where I was working – luckily, without casualties. In 1999, a Neo-Nazi extremist set off three nail bombs: one in South London’s Brixton Market, another in Brick Lane in the East End, targeting West Indian and Bangladeshi Londoners with the aim of triggering a race war. The third nail bomb exploded a week later in the popular Admiral Duncan pub in Soho’s busy Compton Street, targeting London’s LGBTQI+ community. It was a warm Friday evening in spring, and the pub and streets outside were packed with people drinking, celebrating the start of a long Bank Holiday weekend. There were many fatalities and devastating, life-altering injuries. But that terrorist underestimated the solidarity and defiant resilience of Londoners, seen during the Second World War, when Nazi bombers dropped 12,000 metric tonnes of explosives on London over the course of five months.

Each time, Londoners banded together, picked up the pieces and continued with their lives. Many more terrorist plots in ensuing years were foiled before they could be executed, and while aware that another attack could come at any time, Londoners and other city-dwellers across the country had to trust that the police force’s counterterrorism unit would keep everyone as safe as possible.

~

That July day in 2005, fired up with fury beyond reason or morality, deadly rucksacks on their backs and dressed in the standard casual clothing of young men across the land, four British-born men travelled to London from Luton, forty minutes from London by train, leaving behind pregnant wives, children and families to carry out their coordinated attacks and die in the process. They thought their actions would avenge the deaths of millions killed since 1798 in the name of British imperialism in the Middle Eastern countries their parents and grandparents had fled, hoping to make better lives for themselves in Britain.

Fifty-six people died that day, including the bombers. Seven hundred people were injured, some with life-changing injuries. Adelaide-born Gill Hicks was the last person to be rescued from the largest explosion, on the Piccadilly Line train. She was so badly injured she wasn’t expected to survive, but survive she did, though she lost both her legs. She became a motivational speaker, and founded the non-profit organisation Making A Difference (MAD) For Peace, its mission to end extremist violence through community engagement. Her work earned her a Member of the Order of the British Empire in Britain; she was made a Member of the Order of Australia, and South Australian of the Year. She’s written a book about her experience with the title One Unknown, referring to the label she was given as an unidentifiable victim that day. In 2013 Hicks became a mother, describing the birth of her daughter as the ‘greatest acknowledgement of the brilliance and resilience of the human body’. In an interview with the BBC, she said: ‘We can’t ever control random acts of violence, but you can control how you react and respond.’

She has since spoken of forgiveness, of turning her back on bitterness, of profound gratitude for the unconditional love she felt from the strangers who laboured to save her life. Many of the injured spoke of the selflessness and humanity they witnessed that day, how everyone helped one another despite their injuries; of emergency services personnel comforting the injured. It’s certainly not unique to Britons, this tendency to step up selflessly to help others during such extreme events; it’ll happen anywhere, regardless of race, religion, political persuasion or gender. When Hicks goes to meet young people who have been radicalised, this is what she talks about the most: the resilience of the human spirit, and the healing power of compassion.

It was only later that it hit me: Tanabatasai was still being celebrated in Tokyo when the bombs went off in London. The only explosives in my home city would have been fireworks painting bright pictures in the sky. It was a comfort to take myself back there in my imagination, though I felt the vertiginous chasm between the different worlds I straddled grow deeper than ever.

桐始結花

23–28 July

Kiri hajimete hana o musubu

Paulownia trees produce seeds

土潤溽暑

29 July – 2 August

Tsuchi uruōte mushi atsushi

Earth is damp, air is humid

大雨時行

3–7 August

Taiu tokidoki furu

Great rains sometimes fall

The tsuyu rainy season is coming to an end by the time Tokyo’s Tanabatasai begins, though the heat and humidity continue to weigh down the air. For much of the summer, my mother had two dehumidifiers going in our apartment to stop our clothes from going mouldy. Japan is a well-watered nation, with an average annual rainfall of 1700 millimetres; in contrast, Australia gets an average of 419 millimetres each year.

Japan’s abundant rainfall creates the ideal environment for wet rice farming, for growing and producing washoku’s diverse abundance of ingredients, and supports a lush, verdant landscape that has inspired poets for over a thousand years. Washoku wouldn’t be washoku without all that rain, but sometimes there’s just too much of it coming all at once, especially if you’re a kid on summer holiday who wants to play outside.

Whenever the tsuyu got to be too much, I’d make teru-teru bōzu (‘shine-shine monk’) dolls with Lisa-chan, my friend next door, so we could hang them above our windows as a talisman to bring out the sun and dry up the rain, just as our ancestors had done. It took only a few seconds to make one out of two pieces of tissue, some string and a rubber band. We’d scrunch one tissue into a ball for the head, place it in the centre of the other, which we’d gather around the ball to hang down as the body, fasten it at the neck with the rubber band and hang it above the window with the string. If it was sunny the next day, we’d draw a pair of eyes and a smiling mouth on the doll’s face to show our appreciation. Neither of us knew where this ancient custom came from, but all of us children took it for granted as something you just did on rainy days. I doubt my mother knew the origin of the teru-teru bōzu, either; in fact, nobody seems to know for sure. Bōzu, meaning ‘bald’ or ‘shaved head’, is an irreverent term for a Buddhist monk; the best-known origin story for teru-teru bōzu is about a monk known for his ability to control the weather with his magical incantations. It’s said he was called upon by a feudal lord to stop the rain that was damaging rice crops. The monk agreed, but when he failed, his head was chopped off. There’s a lively nursery rhyme about the custom that we sometimes sang in silly voices as we made our dolls, but we never seemed to notice just how creepy the lyrics were:

Teru-teru bōzu, teru bōzu

Ashita tenki ni shite okure

Sore demo kumotte naitetara

Sonata no kubi o chon to kiruzo

Teru-teru bōzu, teru bōzu

Please make tomorrow a sunny day

But if the clouds are still crying tears of rain

I’ll chop off your head

There are rumours of other disturbing origin stories for our rainy-day pastime: one, originating in China, tells of a young girl sent out into a storm with a broom to sweep the rain from the sky, sacrificed to save her village from flood and famine. Another claims the doll isn’t a monk at all, but a mountain-dwelling, bald, humanoid yōkai (monster-spirit) called Hiyoribō, which remained invisible when it was raining or cloudy, but brought good weather and sunshine whenever it appeared. In his three-volume compendium of Japanese yōkai, the Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai, 18th-century author and scholar Toriyama Sekien described Hiyoribō as the source of teru-teru bōzu rituals practised by farmers since ancient times. Given how crucial good weather was for the good harvests that ensured survival, and the heavy rains and typhoons Japan can be subject to, it doesn’t seem inconceivable that farmers thousands of years ago might have shaped talismans in the likeness of Hiyoribō and hung them from their eaves to invoke its appearance, so that the rain would dry up and allow for a safe harvest.

Whether assisted by children hanging up teru-teru bōzu or not, Tanabatasai usually escapes the tsuyu rains, as does the important festival of Obon, which follows close on its heels. It’s a busy time of year with everyone heading home to their furusato (a nostalgic, deeply felt term for one’s hometown, literally translated as ‘old village’) in time for the festivities and for family reunions.

Summer means fireworks in Japan, with spectacular displays held across the country during Tanabata and Obon. During the Edo period (1603–1867) there were no wars, and despite numerous famines and plagues, the country enjoyed 250 years of peace and stability. Gunpowder, which was in demand in war-beset Europe, built up in stockpiles, unused – until it was repurposed for the earliest firework displays in Tokyo, transmuted into something poetic and beautiful. The word for fireworks, hanabi, comes from ‘hana’ – flower – and ‘bi’ – fire.

Ever since the first hanabi were sent up into the sky from barges on the Sumida River, they have symbolised the ephemeral nature of all things, the transient beauty felt only for a moment before it fades. The sight of them stirs such profound feelings in the Japanese heart – mine included – that hanabi have been the subject of haiku and ukiyoe woodblock prints since the time of Edo poet Bashō.

In the final week of July, the Sumidagawa Hanabi Taikai – Sumida River Firework Competition – takes place in Tokyo. It’s a tradition that began in 1733, when the city’s population was dispirited and impoverished after a period of plague and famine. The Tokugawa shogunate organised the fireworks to honour the spirits of the dead, while celebrating life and lifting the spirits of city dwellers. A tradition of rivalry between two pyrotechnic guilds, Tamaya and Kagiya, began not long after; each trying to outdo the other with their spectacular hanabi. Crowds gathered along the Sumida River would cry ‘Tamaya!’ or ‘Kagiya!’ depending on which guild’s creations they preferred. The competition drove each hanabi manufacturer to create ever more elaborate designs in different colours, one of the reasons for the exceptional quality and magic of Japanese fireworks, some of which explode to form detailed pictures, instead of patterns, in the sky. The well-known chrysanthemum-shaped firework seen across the world was devised in Japan, a fact that goes largely unrecognised.

I haven’t yet seen a single New Year’s fireworks display, either in person or on TV, not even in the biggest cities in Europe, Australia or the United States, that can equal the glorious, hours-long extravaganzas – complete with intervals – that are held each summer in Japan. We would sit with family and friends, cool in our yukata as we watched from building rooftops, cold beer and snacks in plentiful supply, oohing and aahing at each new glittering explosion. When we were at home, my mother would help me light senko hanabi, traditional hand-made sparklers suspended from flexible stems, on our balcony. I was too young to know, then, that senko hanabi – literally ‘incense fireworks’ – symbolised human life, the first burst of sparks representing childhood and youth, the slower burn in the middle representing middle age, and the final, dwindling sparks a representation of old age, before it sputters out.

During the three days of Obon, the boundaries between the realms of the living and the dead are said to grow porous, allowing the spirits of ancestors to return to visit their families, and their furusato, too. Drawing on Taoist, Buddhist and Confucian traditions, it’s a version of the Ghost Festival celebrated in China and other countries across East Asia. Feasting, fires and festivities are common to many versions of the festival; in Japan, bonfires and lanterns are lit to welcome and guide ancestral spirits home, and more bonfires are lit on the night of the third day to guide them back to the realm of the dead.

Cultures the world over have, or used to have, similar traditions to honour the departed. There’s the joyful Día de los Muertos in Mexico, Chuseok in North and South Korea, the Thursday of the Dead observed by Christians and Muslims in the Levant, the Hindu festival of Pitru Paksha, and the Roman Catholic festival of All Souls’ Day, which was once marked in Britain, and which some scholars believe to be a Christianisation of ancient Celtic harvest festivals such as Samhain. Some even believe All Souls’ Day and Samhain are the origins of the modern Halloween.

As with other Japanese festivals, the timing of Obon varies depending on which calendar is observed, and the dates can vary across regions with some starting around 13 July and others around 7 September, with other celebrations taking place in August. Tokyo, ever the modern city, celebrates Obon in July, so that Tanabatasai and Obon become one long celebration – one of the reasons why summer was my favourite time of year in Tokyo.

After special prayers and offerings are made at the butsudan (the household altar where respects are paid to the Buddha and to the ancestors), families visit ancestral graves together to clean the graves and make offerings of incense, fresh flowers, food and water. A departed loved one who enjoyed a drink and a smoke might be offered a bottle of beer and a pack of cigarettes; another who had a sweet tooth might be offered wagashi and cookies. Unless there’s been a very recent or tragic death, these ohakamairi (grave visits) are cheery affairs, an opportunity to feel close to lost loved ones again. Despite the intimations of mortality, Obon itself is a joyous late-summer celebration of life, with everyone heading out to enjoy the street food, the music and the dancing – there’s simply no Obon without dancing.

Bon odori – Bon dancing – has been around for over five hundred years. The tradition is supposed to have been started by Mokuren, one of the Buddha’s disciples, who helped his late mother’s spirit escape from the Realm of Hungry Ghosts where she’d been trapped, suffering. Rejoicing at her liberation and overcome with gratitude for all the sacrifices she’d made to raise him, Mokuren began to dance.

In the same spirit of Mokuren’s dance, people dance Bon odori, both traditional and new, to welcome and entertain the returning spirits of ancestors. The dances can be set to the beat of taiko drums, bells and traditional percussion and string instruments such as the shamisen, or in the case of newer dances, orchestral or contemporary instruments. Different regions have their own versions, though the best-known ones are danced everywhere. The choreography often reflects the activities and characteristics of the area, or sometimes even a manga character like the robot cat Doraemon; the Doraemon Bushi that was popular when I was a child imitates the cat’s clumsy movements while the song’s lyrics describe his exploits.

Sōran Bushi, a Bon odori from the northern Hokkaido coast, replicates the gestures of fishermen hauling in nets heavy with fish, accompanied by cries of ‘Yaaa dokkoisho, dokkoisho!’ – ‘Heave ho, heave ho!’ ‘Dokkoisho’ is one of the many hayashi kotoba, or kakigoe, used to cheer on participants in cultural performances and matsuri.

The Tankō Bushi from the old Miike coal mine in Kyushu mimics motions of wiping sweat from the brow, hauling bags of coal over the shoulders and shovelling. The Doraemon Ondo I danced as a kid mimics the movements of the round-headed, earless blue-and-white robot cat that was especially popular in the Shōwa era, but likely is too old-fashioned for the current generation of children, who’ll have songs about newer manga characters to dance to.

The spectacular, soul-stirring Awaodori, a famous Bon odori from the southern prefecture of Tokushima, is danced in a straight line, usually with hundreds of performers in matching traditional costumes and amigasa (a woven straw hat folded into a half-moon, worn with the fold running front to back). But most Bon odori, like the ones I took part in as a child in Tokyo, are danced in a circle around a yagura, a tall platform for musicians, singers and taiko drums. Anyone can join in; the steps are usually simple enough to pick up as you go along. Someone from the neighbourhood association announces each song on the PA system in between general banter, and at the end of the evening, prizes are sometimes awarded for the best-dressed, most enthusiastic, most graceful dancer and so on.

I loved taking part in the Bon odori hosted by the Yotsuya neighbourhood committee, but the older and taller I grew, the more visible I became. These days, you’ll see non-Japanese people at Bon odori, but back in the 70s, I was the person whose face didn’t fit. Still, I didn’t feel too uncomfortable about looking like a misfit back then, safe in the familiar surroundings of Yotsuya. Many of the people running businesses near the family shop knew who I was. My uncle was a well-respected and well-liked member of the neighbourhood committee, and they all knew that ‘Akko-chan’, my mother, had married a foreigner. Some of the older generation even remembered her from her childhood days, and because she, like my uncle, was well loved, some of that affection rubbed off on me. Even in my forties, I’d pay a visit to the small grocery shop in the narrow lane behind the tsukudani shop and be greeted fondly by the shopkeeper and his wife. They had been stricken when they heard the news that my mother had died in England, and so were delighted to see me, telling me how much of her face they saw in mine, and how much I sounded like her.

The last Bon odori I took part in was in the summer of 1978, a few months before I was dispatched to boarding school in England. After an evening of dancing, I was shocked when the compere announced that I’d won the sutekideshō – ‘how splendid’ – prize. Egged on by family and friends, I climbed the steps of the yagura to accept my award, squirming with self-consciousness at having all eyes on my gangly form, already so tall that only a man’s yukata would fit. I was so overwhelmed that I can’t remember what the prize was – possibly some towels, or a set of soaps – but I vividly recall the beaming oji-san from the neighbourhood association passing me the mic so I could make my acceptance speech over the PA system. It was the first time I learned to hide my turmoil with a confident demeanour I was far from feeling. I smiled, bowed neatly, thanked the compere, thanked the neighbourhood committee, and said I was from the house of Ariakeya. I ended with another bow and a ‘yoroshiku onegaishimasu’, a hard-to-translate phrase that’s usually used when meeting someone you’ll be working with for the first time, but which changes meaning according to context. It literally translates as ‘Please treat me favourably’, but when I said it that night, it carried a subtext of ‘Please consider buying tsukudani from our shop’. When I climbed back down from the platform to cheers and applause, my uncle was beaming. You did well! he said, and I rippled with pride.

I didn’t know, then, that I wouldn’t be back in Tokyo again for Obon after that. I still hope I might dance around the yagura again one day. I think I can remember most of the steps.

So much of the pleasure of Obon, and other matsuri, comes from its appeal to all the senses: the warm glow of hundreds of chyōchin lanterns lighting up the darkness; the colourful array of toys, masks and trinkets on offer; the soft warmth of the late-summer night air against the skin; the buzz of people talking happily, the cries of food vendors and – not least – the mouth-watering smells wafting from their stalls.

The selection of street food usually includes yakitori, skewers of chicken grilled over hot coals, and yakitōmorokoshi, seasonal corn on the cob, also grilled over coals, daubed with a thick, salty-sweet sauce made from a reduction of shōyu, mirin and sugar or with a pat of Hokkaido butter. There’s okonomiyaki, a savoury pancake made with flour, egg, crumbs of fried tempura batter, finely shredded cabbage and a choice of protein, like prawns or pork belly, and loaded with condiments that include curls of katsubushi (the dried bonito shavings used to make dashi stock), chopped spring onion, aonori seaweed flakes, Kewpie mayonnaise and a tangy okonomiyaki sauce. There’s also yakisoba, fried noodles, whipped up to order on a huge hot plate, and takoyaki, ball-shaped octopus dumplings made with flour, eggs and dashi, which vendors turn at lightning speed in their cast-iron griddle moulds.

We’d do our best to eat our way around the stalls, although there were so many delicious choices that you couldn’t possibly sample everything, and eventually, reluctantly, we’d admit defeat and head home. I’d be so tired that I’d fall asleep as soon as I was put into the back seat of the car, and remembered nothing more until I woke up, magically dressed in pyjamas and in bed the next morning, with no idea how I got there.

Thinking of my childhood memories of Obon, I wonder if I should light a lantern, or a small fire in the yard, to imagine my mother’s spirit returning to visit me. Maybe I could dance Bon odori in the garden, too, though dancing alone won’t summon the sense of belonging I felt in the community Bon odori of my childhood.

I wish I could tell my mother all the things that have changed in the world in the decades since she died, especially the good things. She’d have marvelled at how we’re now able to see and talk to each other on screen in real time, although I’d have had trouble explaining the internet to her; it had only just become available in the mid-90s, and was so slow that most of us wondered what on earth it would be good for. I’d love to show her the app on my smartphone that can snap a picture of a kanji and tell me what it means, or lets me trace a kanji with my finger as a way of looking up its definitions. If I had the right home hub set up, I could impress her by switching on a rice cooker while on the bus, simply with the tap of a button on my phone. She’d have loved all of it, would have adapted as she’d had to throughout her life as she moved from continent to continent, changing direction with swift and decisive grace.

I think about that as I watch the swallows zip back and forth above piles of seagrass washed onto the beach in front of the quiet shack on the east coast of Guuranda where I’m writing. I wish she could have seen this, too.

YAKITOMOROKOSHI

Japanese-style chargrilled corn on the cob

Serves 4

You can grill these wonderful, healthy street-food snacks on the barbecue, or in an oven grill. It’s easiest if you parboil the corncobs first to prevent the delicious, sticky basting sauce from burning if it takes too long for the corn to cook over the charcoal.

INGREDIENTS

4 fresh corncobs, husks and silk removed

1 tbsp shōyu

½ tbsp mirin

METHOD

Soak the corncobs in cold, fresh water for an hour or so. Meanwhile, combine the shōyu and mirin in a small bowl. Set a large pan of salted water over high heat and bring to the boil, then place the soaked corncobs into the water and boil for 2–3 minutes or until tender. Drain thoroughly and set aside to cool, then pat dry with paper towel once they’re cool enough to handle.

Get the charcoal white-hot in the barbecue, or set the oven grill to high.

Baste the corn with the shōyu and mirin mixture and set over the heat on a wire rack if using an oven grill, turning every few minutes, brushing with more sauce each time until charred and sticky and so that the kernels are cooked through and juicy. Wrap a large napkin around your neck and tuck in.

OKONOMIYAKI

Japanese-style egg pancake

Makes 1 okonomiyaki (serves 1)

One of the great traditional street foods that’s becoming popular in Australia and elsewhere, okonomiyaki means ‘cooked the way you like it’. Usually cooked on a teppan iron griddle, it can be made at home in a large frying pan if you don’t have a hotplate. Its batter of seasoned flour and water is more or less standard, but each region has its own variation, either in the ingredients added to the batter, or the way the okonomiyaki is constructed.

The popular Osaka version mixes most of the ingredients into the batter before cooking, typically including shredded cabbage, diced bacon, eggs, small shrimp, tenkasu (crunchy little morsels of tempura batter left over from making tempura; bags of tenkasu can be found in good Asian food stores) and shreds of light-pink pickled sushi ginger or the brighter red matchsticks of benishōga ginger. The whole thing is cooked on each side before being served topped with a mountain of katsubushi shavings, aonori (umami-rich green seaweed flakes that you can buy in Asian food stores), okonomiyaki sauce and mayonnaise.

The Hiroshima version starts off with the plain cooked pancake, and the ingredients, which typically include noodles, are layered on top with the cabbage first, then the whole towering thing is flipped (with some skill) onto an egg freshly cracked onto the griddle. Once the egg is cooked, it’s flipped over again, sometimes onto another egg.

Once cooked, okonomiyaki is served with the all-important okonomiyaki sauce and Kewpie mayonnaise (the tastiest mayonnaise you can buy, in my humble opinion). But even within the regions, there’ll be variations, with additions of mentaiko (spiced cod roe), curry powder, kimchi, grated yam or pretty much anything you can think of. Okonomiyaki lives up to its name: as long as you have the basic flour and water batter, you can add anything you like.

Okonomiyaki flour gives the best flavour and is widely available in Japanese and Asian food stores. If you can’t find any, you can make up your own (see note below). The recipe below is for the Osaka variation.

INGREDIENTS

100g okonomiyaki flour*

100mL water

¼ small white cabbage, tough stalks removed and the leaves finely shredded

2 spring onions, trimmed and chopped

Any of these additional ingredients: bacon, cooked prawns, tenkasu, squid, kimchi, lap cheong (Chinese sausage) cut into chunks, pickled sushi ginger cut into strips

1 egg, beaten

Salt and pepper to taste

Vegetable oil for cooking

½ cup katsubushi bonito flakes

Aonori green seaweed flakes (available from good Asian food stores)

Kewpie mayonnaise

Okonomiyaki sauce (widely available – Otafuku is my favourite brand)**

Sesame seeds

* If you can’t find okonomiyaki flour, make your own by blending 100g plain white flour with 1 tsp baking powder and 1 tsp dashi no moto (instant dashi powder).

** If you can’t find any ready-made okonomiyaki sauce, you can make your own by mixing 1 tbsp ketchup, 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce (or, if you have it, Bulldog sauce), 1 tsp runny honey, ½ tsp shōyu).

METHOD

If you’re including meat, fry it separately on the griddle while you cook the pancake. Mix the and okonomiyaki f lour and water together. Add in the shredded cabbage, spring onion and your choice of additional ingredients, including any fried meat, then gently fold in the egg. Overmixing will make the pancake flat and tough. The mixture will look like a mess at this point, but don’t worry. Season with salt and pepper.

Heat an oiled griddle or frying pan on high heat and tip the mixture on to form a circular shape (15–20cm in diameter). Don’t squash it down with your spatula as, again, this will make the okonomiyaki dense and tough.

Check that the pancake is cooked by lifting up one side. When it’s golden-brown underneath, carefully flip the whole lot over. Using two spatulas can be helpful. Okonomiyaki street vendors use two metal paddles that look like oversized paint scrapers to do this job. If you lose any of the ingredients as you flip the okonomiyaki over, scrape it all together and it should stay in one piece.

Once it’s cooked through and golden-brown on the other side, serve piled high with katsubushi flakes, aonori, pickled ginger, Kewpie mayonnaise, okonomiyaki sauce and sesame seeds.

涼風至

8–12 August

Suzukaze itaru

Cool winds blow

寒蝉鳴

13–17 August

Higurashi naku

Evening cicadas sing

蒙霧升降

18–22 August

Fukaki kiri matō

Thick fog descends

The sound of cicadas, ‘semi’, grows more intense as summer draws to an end. It’s hated by some, but loved by most as a nostalgic, relaxing sound of summer. As August rolls on, their cries become tinged with the melancholy of approaching autumn. Each time I hear that sound, memories of summer rise unbidden into my mind: the sound of glass fūrin – wind chimes – tinkling in the breeze, the boisterous matsuri and the dazzling hanabi displays; even the smell of katorisenko, the green mosquito-repelling incense coil that most people are unaware was invented and patented in 1895 by a Japanese businessman, whose company still produces them. Often housed inside a ceramic pig called a katoributa while it burns, this, too, is a nostalgia-inducing summer motif.

There are around thirty species of semi native to Japan; there are over 3000 found around the world. Some say summer hasn’t properly arrived until the semi begin to sing. The insects spend most of their lives underground, between two to seventeen years, depending on the species, feeding on tree root sap. When some instinct tells them it’s time, they use their powerful front claws to dig upwards through as much as two and a half metres of earth, climb up the nearest tree and attach themselves to the bark so they can emerge from their nymph exoskeletons as winged adults. Their lives above ground only last around two to three weeks, just enough time to find a mate. The male semi sing to attract the females, using their hollow abdomens as amplifiers. After mating, the female semi lays her eggs into a cut she makes in the tree bark, and then both parents die. When the tiny nymphs hatch, they drop to the ground and start burrowing down to find a spot next to a juicy tree root.

Semi are found everywhere in Japan, from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south, and each variety has a different call. Most of the ones I heard growing up in Tokyo are called minminzemi, after how they sound. Their rhythmic, cycling song starts slowly, builds up, then ends slowly again: miiiiiiiiiin-miiin-miiin-miiin-miiiiiiiiiin. There’s another, somewhat melodic one I’d hear, too, the tsuku-tsuku-bōshi-zemi, which goes: tsuku-tsuku BOoooshi, tsuku-tsuku BOoooshi, tsuku-tsuku BOoooshi for a few verses, before adding variety with a tsuku-tsuku UUUisu, tsuku-tsuku UUUisu, tsuku-tsuku UUUisu and finally bringing the cycle to a close with an elegant coda of UUiusu, UUiusu, UUiusu, UUiuusssssssssssuuuuu. Then it starts up all over again. In rural areas, the kumazemi (‘bear-semi’ – the only one named after its appearance) cries WAAASHI-WAAASHI-WAAASHI, an intense, aggressive-sounding call my mother used to imitate to hilarious effect. There’s also the aburazemi (‘oil-semi’), named after its rapidly repeated call of JII-JII-JII-JII-JII-JII which sounds like sizzling oil in a hot pan.

The deafening chorus of semi is inescapable in summer. Some people, especially non-Japanese, find them intolerable. They’re certainly loud – so loud that if a semi goes off too close to your head, you’re likely to suffer permanent hearing damage: they clock in at up to 120 decibels, louder than a steel mill, a car horn or a jet plane taking off. It’s fine for the semi, who have a mechanism that allows them to switch off their hearing when they’re singing en masse.

The phenomenon of the semibakudan – cicada-bomb – also drolly known as the semifainaru – semifinal – is terrifying. If you find a semi lying on its back on the ground, unresponsive, you may think it’s dead. You might give it a gentle prod with a stick or a toe to check: still nothing. Then, when you least expect it, it’ll rear up with a grotesque clatter of its huge wings and sharp legs, maybe hurling its 8-centimetre-long body into your face if you’re unlucky, while uttering a long, blood-curdling, deafening shriek. No matter how often it happens, whether you’re a play-it-cool teenager, a stoic old lady, a middle-aged salaryman or a cat, you’ll shriek uncontrollably in response while reeling back in horror. It’s a pretty effective defence mechanism, and a rich source of YouTube entertainment.

Despite this risk, kids love to collect them. There’s a long tradition of childhood insect-collecting in Japan, kids heading into the local parks armed with nets and insect boxes to catch butterflies, crickets, worms and beetles to take home and study. The most prized of these is the handsome kabutomushi, the Japanese rhinoceros beetle. They can be between 4 and 8 centimetres long, with a shiny, tough carapace the colour of a dark eggplant, and a Y-shaped horn that looks like those found on the samurai helmets it’s named after. Its impressive appearance has inspired monster characters from Pokémon’s Heracross to Megalon from the Godzilla series. Like the semi, it spends most of its life as a nymph underground, but lives longer once it emerges, and it’s a hell of a lot quieter. Kids taking a semi home likely won’t be allowed to keep it for too long; the racket it would make inside a typical tiny Tokyo apartment would prompt its immediate release, which is just as well for the poor semi.

Kids also collect the empty semi exoskeletons, often still attached to the tree bark where the adult insect emerged. One of my cousins, my mother’s sister’s youngest, who lived quite a distance from Tokyo, used to collect these hard, semi-transparent, gossamer-light casings; I remember the sound of them rustling in her hands. I found them beautiful and creepy at the same time. I discovered online that people sometimes stick them together and model things out of them. I’ve seen an impressive replica of Godzilla, the alien from the Alien movie franchise and a full, shoulder-length wig worn on someone’s head.

From the literature of Heian-era Japan to Shōwa-era popular culture, the semi figures large in the Japanese imagination. It’s a kigo, season word, used in haiku to symbolise late summer. One of Bashō’s famous semi haiku achieves the impossible in a few lines; a sense of quietness that holds the raucous din of the semi:

Shizukesaya

Iwa ni shimi iru

Semi no koe

Ah, quiet stillness

Deep into boulders seep the

Cries of cicada

Three hundred and fifty years after Bashō’s haiku, my favourite tokusatsu, or live action, superhero, Ultraman, did battle with the Semi Ningen, Cicada People, and the evil Baltan Seijin, Baltan Aliens, which were also modelled on a semi. The force in this seasonal icon is strong.

You’ll often hear semi in the background of anime movies. Daytime minminzemi simply invoke nostalgic feelings and the lazy heat of summer, but there’s another cicada with a sadder call. The hirugashi semi, whose name translates as ‘day-darkening’, begins its song at dusk, and sounds quite unlike the other semi. Its call is a softer, bell-like chiming that descends in a minor key, and it will often be used in a scene that’s darker, sadder – perhaps a scene of a final farewell or a death.

Paying respects each morning at the butsudan and regular ohakamairi, (visits to the family grave) throughout the year, as well as at Obon, weaves an awareness of death into the daily fabric of life. Contributing to this relative ease with death is the belief that someone who has died becomes a hotoke, a sacred and revered Bodhisattva spirit, and that bewailing the loss too long and too hard can keep them tied to the earthly world, unable to move on. It’s for this reason that when someone dies, they’re given a kaimyō, a spirit name, so that repetition of their living name at the butsudan each morning won’t keep them from their journey.

Despite death not being a taboo subject, there are some superstitions around it; the living want to spend as much time in the world as they can, after all, and avoid the loss of loved ones for as long as possible. One of these superstitions is an avoidance of the number four, 四, which can be pronounced ‘shi’, the same as for ‘death’. Japan isn’t alone in this tetraphobia; in China, Malaysia and Singapore, fourth floors in apartment blocks are called something else, number plates on buses omit the number four, and you’d never give someone a gift containing a set of four things, or say the word ‘four’ on an auspicious day or around someone who is sick.

There might be evidence that this avoidance backfires: a study published in the British Medical Journal in 2001 examined mortality statistics in Chinese and Japanese communities in America over a period of twenty-five years, and found that in California, where more accommodation is made for cultural sensitivities, and civic bodies avoid using the number four in the public arena, people were 27 per cent more likely to die of heart failure on the fourth day of the month. A strange outcome for a strategy to avoid thinking about death.

It makes me think about how when you avoid what you fear, the fear of what you’re avoiding grows stronger. A bit like those childhood monsters under the bed that grew ever more ravenous and terrifying in your imagination until you plucked up the courage to have a look, only to find some toys and a pair of Hello Kitty slippers illuminated in the torchlight.

Ohakamairi isn’t just for Obon; when someone returns to their furusato, they pay their respects at the family grave. Each time I go back to Tokyo, I visit the temple where my mother, grandparents and uncles are interred to pay my respects. I grew up hearing my family talk about my uncle Ryōji and Obā-chan as if they were still with us: ‘Ryōji will be amazed at how tall you’ve grown!’ or ‘Obā-chan will be so happy you came.’ Even when I go to do ohakamairi on my own, after I’ve collected the incense from the head monk’s wife, filled the water bucket with the family crest on it and made my way down the narrow paths to the family grave, I’ll smile, as if they can see me, and talk to them. It’s not that I believe they really can see or hear me; I guess it’s more a way of feeling I’m still connected to them. I’m sure it’s a fairly universal thing: that suspension of disbelief at a loved one’s grave that lets you feel the comfort of their presence despite their absence from the living world.

~

As I grew older and taller, strangers stopped assuming my mother and I were related. ‘Would your friend like a fork?’ servers would ask her, eyeing me sideways, and my mother and I would grin and exchange knowing glances, deciding in that one glance whether or not to play the game. Sometimes I’d pretend to be a tourist new to Tokyo, saying Arreegatoh gowzaimas! with a stilted accent; other times, I’d take up my chopsticks and eat the dishes that foreigners usually found repulsive, and which I loved. Oh, how unusual! they’d gasp. Does your friend really like to eat this very Japanese kind of thing?

Even as a small child, my food preferences seemed to create a degree of consternation. My favourite summer treat was tokoroten: square-cut agar-agar noodles in a rice vinegar and dashi-shōyu sauce with a dab of yellow mustard. It’s an old-fashioned dish, and not particularly child-friendly. The servers would bring our food to the table and step back behind the noren curtain where, when I was a bit older, I’d sometimes notice them peering at me. When I was very young, my mother would snap the ends off my disposable wooden chopsticks whenever we ate out so my little hands could manage them, to the delight of the waitresses: Mā, ojōzu desu ne! (Isn’t she good with them?) they’d coo at the sight of this Japanese-not-Japanese child deftly slurping jelly noodles with tiny broken chopsticks.

Attention often came from other diners as well as the servers; I’d feel the stares as I balanced morsels of fish, or pickle, or miso-roasted eggplant on top of my rice so I could scoop the lot into my mouth in one swift movement. Back then I happily accepted the praise as the approval I childishly hungered for; only now I realise they would not have lavished the same compliments on a child that looked ‘purely’ Japanese. Does it matter? I’m not sure it does, in the big scheme of things, but being an outsider became part of my identity before I even realised that I was one and always would be.

My mother once bought me a white t-shirt with a slogan awkwardly handwritten in katakana, the phonetic alphabet used for foreign words. It read ‘SUmimase∼n. WAtashi NihongO WAkarimase∼n’. The closest translation I can think of is Eexcoozie meee, I not spik no JAapniss. I loved walking around the city wearing it. We both thought it was hilarious.

MISO DENGAKU TWO WAYS

Dengaku is a salty-sweet, sticky miso glaze. Quick and easy, it’s traditionally eaten grilled with firm tofu or eggplant, or dolloped onto simmered daikon radish to make a delicious and healthy okazu side dish. There’s no reason why you can’t use it in other ways: coated on a piece of meaty white fish, or on chicken before grilling. I’ve given the recipes for making eggplant and tofu dengaku here.

DENGAKU GLAZE

Makes 250mL

INGREDIENTS

8 level tbsp miso paste*

4 tbsp sugar

60mL saké

60mL mirin

* You can use yellow or red miso, but bear in mind the darker red miso tends to be saltier. You can add a little water or dashi to reduce the intensity if you wish.

METHOD

Whisk all the ingredients together in a bowl. Pour into a small saucepan set over a low heat for about 5 minutes or until the mixture has thickened. Stir continuously to prevent sticking or burning, and never let it boil. Since miso is a fermented product rich in probiotics, boiling it destroys its nutritional value as well as its flavour.

Remove from the heat and allow to cool. Use as described on the following pages and store any leftover glaze in an airtight jar in the fridge for up to a month.

NASU DENGAKU

Eggplant dengaku

Serves 1

Japanese eggplants are a thinner, firmer variety than the ones you typically find in Britain or Australia, with a deep indigo skin. I’ve not yet come across any Japanese eggplants in Australia, so I choose the most slender eggplants I can find for this dish.

INGREDIENTS

One small eggplant per person

Salt

Vegetable oil for roasting

1 tbsp dengaku per eggplant, depending on the size

White sesame seeds, toasted

Chopped spring onion

METHOD

Preheat the oven to 200°C.

Remove the stems from the eggplants and cut in half lengthways. If you can only find larger eggplants, cut them into four or more thicker slabs. Score the flesh with a knife, rub a little salt into the flesh and leave in a colander, flesh side down, for 15–30 minutes to draw out any bitterness and firm up the flesh. I find it also reduces the tendency of eggplant to absorb too much oil and make the dish greasy. Rinse the salt off with water, drain, and dry thoroughly with paper towel.

Brush both sides of the eggplant with vegetable oil and place flesh-side down on a baking tray lined with a silicone baking sheet or a well-oiled sheet of foil. Bake in the oven for 20–30 minutes or until tender, depending on the size of your eggplant.

In the meantime, set your grill to medium-high heat. Remove the eggplant from the oven and lay flesh-side up on the grill tray. Spoon dengaku sauce about 0.5cm thick over the top, covering the flesh. Keep a close eye on it under the grill as it burns easily, and as soon as the eggplant begins to char and the dengaku sauce is bubbling and thickening, remove it from the grill. Scatter with toasted sesame seeds and spring onion to serve.

TOFU DENGAKU

Serves 4

INGREDIENTS

300g Japanese firm tofu

Vegetable oil for roasting

Dengaku sauce

White sesame seeds, toasted

Chopped spring onion

METHOD

Cut the tofu into rectangles about 10cm long, 4.5cm wide and 2cm thick. Dry thoroughly with paper towel. If your tofu seems excessively moist, before slicing, wrap it in a clean cloth and sandwich between two chopping boards, weighing the top down with something heavy like a large knife-sharpening stone, or a couple of cans of beans. Prop up one end of the chopping board with a rolled-up tea towel, placing the other end over the sink to allow the water to drain away. Leave for about 20 minutes, then pat dry and slice as above. Make sure you haven’t chosen silken tofu, as it’s too soft and will break apart.

Once you’ve dried the tofu pieces, cook them in a lightly oiled frying pan over medium heat until starting to turn golden, turning as needed. Remove from the pan and skewer each one with a flat bamboo skewer. Place on a grill tray lined with a piece of well-oiled foil or a silicone baking sheet and spoon over the dengaku glaze. Grill until the tofu crisps up at the edges and the dengaku sauce is bubbling and thick. Garnish with sesame seeds and spring onion before serving. Beware: dengaku fresh from the grill is hotter than the sun. Careful not to burn your tongue in your eagerness to eat it!

Note: Tofu dengaku is traditionally served on a flat green bamboo skewer, which makes it easy to eat. A regular thin skewer won’t work so well – the tofu is likely to swivel around it as you’re trying to eat it, spilling dengaku sauce down your front.

綿柎開

23–27 August

Wata no hana shibe hiraku

Cotton flowers bloom

天地始粛

28 August – 1 September

Tenchi hajimete samushi

Heaven and earth begin to cool

禾乃登

2–7 September

Kokumono sunawachi minoru

Rice ripens

Mornings and evenings grow cooler as August comes to an end, fog drifting from lakes and rivers to curl around the feet of forest trees, like soft cotton wool protecting something fragile. There weren’t too many forests around our apartment, unless you counted the nature reserve further up the road, but I remember thick milky skies and a tautness in the humid air, relieved now and then by winds carrying a cool change, heralding autumn. Later in the season, powerful typhoons would clear the last of the stuffy summer heat.

Up on the thirteenth floor of our Tokyo apartment block – or floor 12A, as it was called for the sake of the western expats in the building – the wind moaned and wailed through the aluminium frames of my wide bedroom window like a chorus in a Greek tragedy, a familiar sound I found strangely soothing. Once the full force of the typhoon hit, though, with gales flinging torrential rain, my mother would press towels against the window frames to stop the water coming through.

Typhoons with flooding rains, heavy snowfall in the north that buries houses to their eaves, tropical hurricanes that flatten trees and houses in the south; none of these are as dreaded as the next catastrophic earthquake which will come, sooner or later. Japan perches precariously on four tectonic plates that continually shift and grind together, causing up to 5000 tremors and quakes each year. Add to this 111 active volcanoes, many of which lie close to densely populated areas; fifty are monitored twenty-four hours a day for signs of increased activity. The most symbolic and famous of them all, Fuji-san, considered a sacred deity in its own right, last erupted in 1707. It sits just 100 kilometres away from Tokyo and its 37.4 million inhabitants, the largest city in the world.

It’s understandable how the Shintō religion arose at a time when there could be no other explanation for these unpredictable and destructive natural forces than the raging of the gods. The extraordinary beauty of Japan’s natural landscape, with its snow-capped mountains, inlet seas, ancient trees and rushing rivers and waterfalls, made it easy to think of these natural elements as spirited with the divine, and capable of being placated with ritual and ceremonies. Sanctified and protected with sacred shimenawa rope hung with zig-zag shide streamers, it was as if the boulders and trees were themselves kami. By offering prayers and reverence to these gods of the natural world, people could retain some feeling of control in the face of the uncontrollable.

Modern Japan, especially the big cities, grew from its repeated destruction. Tokyo’s buildings were made safer after lessons learned from major earthquakes; wooden houses vulnerable to fire were replaced with buildings of concrete and steel, their foundations built on giant ball bearings to prevent collapse during tectonic upheaval. In the countryside, concrete berms bordering rice paddies replaced traditional ones of packed earth, which could break apart in bigger quakes, allowing irrigating water to drain away and destroying crops.

~

At 11.58am on 1 September 1923, eighty-four years to the day before my husband and I were married in London, households were busy preparing the midday meal when the Great Kanto earthquake struck. Measuring 8.2 on the Richter scale, the quake was widely felt across the country, the violent tremors continuing in some places for up to ten minutes. At the time, almost all households cooked over open flames, and with most family dwellings made of timber, fires spread quickly from house to house. In Tokyo, fire ended up destroying over 45 per cent of the city, mostly in the working-class area to the east of the Sumida River. Thousands of people evacuated to the river’s bridges to escape the conflagration, but the huge crowds caused the bridges to collapse, drowning everyone on them. Another 44,000 people who took refuge beside the river fell victim to a sudden ‘dragon twist’ fire tornado; there were only 300 survivors.

On 11 March 2011, I rang family and friends in Japan as soon as I heard the news. The Tohoku earthquake measured an unimaginable 9 on the Richter scale, triggering a devastating tsunami and a nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Everyone I knew was safe, though traumatised by its magnitude and by the terrible loss of life further north. My cousin Asako told me she’d staggered up the stairs as fast as she could amid the violent swaying to get to the top floor of the building. Running outside into the streets is risky due to falling debris. Everyone knows you have a better chance of surviving a building collapse if you run to the rooftop, or into the bathroom, the smallest room in the house where the ceiling is less likely to fall in on you.

While I didn’t mind the sound of the summer typhoons, my terror of earthquakes was near phobic. It seems reasonable, normal even, that adrenalin would kick off as soon as a tremor begins – but I’d go into a blind panic. It was the thought that a gentle tremor might just be the first of many more building up to the Next Big One that got to me. My fear wasn’t helped by the release in 1973 of a two-volume novel by Komatsu Sakyo entitled Nihon Chinbotsu (Japan Sinks), immediately followed by a movie, with TV trailers showing people running from collapsing skyscrapers, train carriages being flattened by collapsing tunnels in the Tokyo underground then engulfed in tsunami waves, and familiar city roads yawning open into giant chasms that swallowed up thousands of screaming people. It was all sensationalist B-movie stuff, but it was all too easy to merge those scenes with the reality of regular earthquake drills at school, where we were instructed to dive under our desks when the alarm sounded, books over our heads.

At home, we had an earthquake survival kit stored in a cupboard; it contained batteries, torches, candles, a tiny camp stove and pan, cutlery, plates, bottles of water, bandages and other first aid items, and flimsy padded hoods that were supposed to protect you against falling masonry. Plus – of course – several packets of freeze-dried rice, which could be eked out with water and simmered over the camp stove to make okayu rice porridge. I can’t remember if my mother kept umeboshi (salted Japanese plums) in the kit. They can keep for years in an airtight jar, and are the classic accompaniment for okayu. One wrinkled, golden-pink orb of umeboshi delivers just the right amount of umami-salty, mouth-puckering tartness to a bowlful of bland, soothing okayu to stimulate the appetite. Umegayu, the name for this umeboshi-okayu combo, is easy to digest and comes with a range of other health benefits; my mother always made it for me whenever I was sick. These days you can buy freeze-dried portions of umegayu in special packs that come with their own spoon, and which keep for five years. Reconstituted in fifteen minutes with boiling water, or in an hour with cold water, it’s the perfect, soothing food for appetite-sapping, stressful emergency situations.

I developed a technique that helped me escape the terror of an earthquake: I pretended it wasn’t happening. Earthquakes are very loud: buildings grind and groan as they sway; there’s the clinking, sometimes smashing, of crockery in cupboards; cutlery and glasses rattling in drawers; the sound of doors banging open and closed. So I’d block my ears, and sing loudly for good measure. The unnatural feeling of the ground rippling like liquid, the violent shaking that threatened to throw you off balance was monstrous; sometimes the floor would even shunt upwards with an odd heave before slamming back and forth. My friend Lisa-chan told me that the sudden rise and dip before the sideways shaking was the sign of a really big one on the way. So I’d jump up and down on the spot as quickly as I could so I couldn’t feel what the floor was doing. The sight of lampshades, bookshelves, sofas and curtains shaking from side to side, of tables shuffling in tiny steps across the carpet, was terrifying. During the biggest quake I experienced as a child, my mother opened our metal front door to avoid it becoming jammed closed and preventing escape if the door frame happened to twist out of shape. I remember looking out to see the long corridor leading to the lifts twisting and rippling like a snake. After that, I’d close my eyes during an earthquake, too.

By jumping up and down, singing with my fingers in my ears and closing my eyes tightly as soon as I felt the slightest hint of a tremor, I’d manage to block out the ordeal. The only problem was, my strategy was a little too effective and after a suitable length of jumping and singing, I’d have to crack open one eye to look at my mother and yell, ears still blocked, ‘Is it still going?’ She’d nod, soberly. I’d jump a while longer, crack open one eye again enquiringly, and my mother would shake her head. More jumping, singing, then I’d ask again. She’d shake her head again. I’d keep going until I thought, surely if this earthquake were so bad, something would have collapsed in the building by now. When I plucked up the courage to stop, open my eyes and unplug my ears, I would hear my mother chuckling at my antics, delighted with her prank, having turned a five-second tremor into a quake that lasted minutes.

OKAYU

Rice porridge

Serves 1

Although okayu is sometimes offered as a breakfast choice in Japanese inns and is eaten by infants and the elderly, it’s most often a food eaten for comfort and healing during or after sickness. It’s easy to digest, especially when eaten with umeboshi (salted, pickled Japanese plums): the perfect restorative food for people recovering from upset stomachs. Often served to Buddhist monks in monasteries, it’s also an economical and suitably austere dish that’s unlikely to excite the senses. Of course, you can eat it even if you’re not a Buddhist monk, when you’re perfectly healthy, and at any age. You can add flaked shiojaké, tsukudani, Fujikko, pickles or ready-made furikake seasonings. You can even whisk up an egg and drizzle it over the okayu just before serving to make a delicious egg-drop okayu.

INGREDIENTS

¼ cup uncooked uruchimai rice

1 cup water or dashi

METHOD

Rinse the rice, then place in a small, heavy saucepan with a lid, or, if you can find one, a traditional earthenware donabe pot. You can also use a rice cooker, though you’ll need to make double or more of the above quantities, depending on the size of your rice cooker.

Soak the rice for 30 minutes in water, then drain. Add the cup of water or dashi. Set the pan over a high heat, and, as soon as it boils, reduce the heat to its lowest setting, remove the lid and stir gently to make sure the rice hasn’t stuck to the bottom. Cover the pan again. If the water starts to boil over, leave a small gap between the lid and the pan to allow steam to escape.

Simmer for 20–25 minutes until the mixture has thickened, then remove from the heat and cover the pan, setting aside for a further 10–15 minutes before serving to allow the liquid to absorb. The rice grains will have plumped and lengthened, the water turned starchy white, opaque and thick. You can add salt, egg or other seasonings and ingredients at this point.

The quantity of water can be adjusted if you want a thinner or thicker okayu.

UMEBOSHI

Salty pickled Japanese plums

Salty-sour umeboshi are made with a stone fruit native to Japan, ume, which is probably closer to an unripe apricot than a western plum. You can buy umeboshi of varying quality in Japanese shops in Australia; the very best are expensive, but if you like them, it’s worth paying extra for that flavour. The very salty, sour kind can keep almost indefinitely if stored carefully, though salt crystals may begin to form in the flesh after a year or so. You’ll find a mellower, sweeter variety in the refrigerated sections of most Asian food stores. This type uses less salt for pickling, and is usually umami-enriched with dashi, preventing the involuntary mouth-puckering that the traditional variety can trigger. It means it won’t keep for as long, though, and will need to be stored in the fridge.

If you can get your hands on some green, unripe apricots, you can try your hand at making your own at home, using the recipe below. It’s best to prepare these apricots in early spring so that they’re ready when the weather becomes warm and dry.

Whether homemade or shop-bought, you can eat the umeboshi as it is with hot rice, but you can also remove the stone and mash up the flesh with a dribble of shōyu and a good pinch of katsubushi flakes to make a paste that’s delicious with rice, mixed into okayu or eaten as a topping for ochazuke (rice with green tea). You can even blend it with a little melted butter or some olive oil in a pan and use it to sauce freshly cooked spaghetti, topping it with finely shredded nori and toasted sesame seeds to make a fusion Japanese-Italian dish.

INGREDIENTS

1kg unripe apricots that are just about to turn orange, stone left in

1 cup fine sea salt

1 cup shōchū (Japanese distilled potato liquor) or vodka

Bunch of red shiso (perilla leaves)*

½ cup caster sugar

* These might be tricky to find, but you might have some luck in good Asian food stores; if you’re keen, try growing your own from seed. They’re available to buy in Australia, sometimes by the name of beefsteak plant.

METHOD

Wash the apricots, taking care not to bruise or break the skin, and dry with a clean tea towel.

Mix ¾ cup of sea salt with ½ cup of the shōchū or vodka in a large bowl and add the apricots, mixing carefully and thoroughly. Put into a wide pickling jar with a lid. Weigh down with a pickling weight or use a small plate or saucer that easily fits inside the jar and place a muslin bag of ceramic baking beans or pebbles on top. Close the lid of the jar and leave for about three days; you’ll see liquid draining into the bottom of the jar.

Wash the shiso leaves and dry thoroughly. Once dry, remove the stalks and put the leaves into a bowl with ¼ cup salt. Massage the salt into the leaves, which will darken, release moisture and shrink down to a fraction of their initial volume. Drain the liquid away.

Remove one cup of the liquid draining off the apricots and add to the shiso leaves, massaging again. Put the shiso and liquid into the jar with the apricots, spreading the withered leaves evenly over the top of the fruit. Reseal the jar and store in a cool, dark place for 2–3 months.

Choose a clear, sunny day to sun-dry the apricots. In the morning, remove them from the liquid in the jar, reserving the liquid, and spread out across a clean mesh or on trays in the sun, covering them with a net to protect them from birds and insects. Allow them to dry out all day. Do the same with the shiso leaves, squeezing the excess liquid out of them first. When the sun goes down, return the apricots and shiso leaves to the liquid in the jar. Do the same for the next 2–3 days to get the best quality umeboshi that keeps well, though you can get away with one day if you don’t have time.

When returning the plums to the liquid in the jar for the final time, add another ½ cup of shōchū or vodka along with ½ cup of caster sugar. Arrange the shiso leaves on top of the fruit, but there’s no longer any need to weigh them down.

Seal the jar and store in a cool, dark and dry place for at least another month before eating. They’ll keep indefinitely if kept sealed in the jar with the liquid and shiso leaves.

草露白

8–12 September

Kusa no tsuyu shiroshi

Dew glistens white on grass

鶺鴒鳴

13–17 September

Sekirei naku

Wagtails sing

玄鳥去

18–22 September

Tsubame saru

Swallows leave

September is traditionally the time of Tsukimi – the viewing of the full harvest moon. Although you’ll see motifs of rabbits, full moons and drooping heads of autumn rice everywhere in shops and in commercials at this time of year, there is no specific ceremony attached to harvest moon viewing that I can remember. I wonder whether the lack of any particularly delicious association has anything to do with that. Spherical white moon dumplings are arranged in a pyramid as a symbolic offering at Tsukimi, but they’re more for show than for eating as they’re not particularly tasty.

The real highlight of the sekki is harvest time. The abundance of produce coming into season includes a huge range of citrus fruits, including yuzu, kabosu and other types local to Japan; pumpkins and squashes of different shades and sizes; hazé, or goby, the fat little bottom-dwelling fish with a large head and suction cups on its fins that went into my favourite tsukudani.

Hazé is a Tokyo specialty, and until recently was found in vast numbers in Tokyo Bay. They were plentiful in the Imperial Palace moat, too, and when my cousin and I were kids, my uncle would take us there to fish for them. I don’t remember managing to catch any, but it was always a fun family outing. Firm, juicy and richly flavoured, the tiny fish is eaten whole, head and all; the bones are soft enough to lend a delicious crunch that melts in the mouth. It’s a great source of calcium, and can be served fried as karaage or tempura. The smaller ones are reserved for tsukudani, the variety I helped myself to so enthusiastically in the family shop when I was a toddler.

Surume ika, flying squid, are harvested at night off the shores of Hokkaido at this time of year. The squid is sweet and tender when prepared raw as sashimi, or grilled, the flesh scored in a criss-cross pattern with a sharp knife to prevent it from curling up as it cooks, and, once golden, drizzled with shōyu and eaten with a bowl of hot rice. Nothing is wasted; the entrails are eaten too, salted, packed into jars and preserved to make shiokara, one of those weird delicacies Japanese people love to test out on foreigners. More often than not the pink, gloopy, extremely pungent and salty concoction elicits at least a grimace, sometimes just from the jar being opened.

Most surume ika is preserved by drying, then shredded, seasoned and sold as otsumami – ‘little pinches’ – to serve with beer or saké, though it can be eaten at any time as a healthy snack. You’ll find bags of it in most Asian supermarkets overseas. I ate a lot of it as a child, preferring savoury snacks to sweet. I think it has fallen out of fashion now, though I was surprised to learn recently that Japanese people eat more squid than they do tuna or salmon.

Iwashi (sardines) come into season at this time, too. They were once called umi no kome – rice of the sea – and because of their strong taste and ubiquitousness were considered too crass for the mouths of the aristocracy. Iwashi taste good with earthy autumn vegetables like gobō, burdock root, but I prefer the refreshing way my mother cooked them, which cuts through the somewhat cloying richness. Quickly panfried then flushed with shōyu, saké and a squeeze of lemon or yuzu, served with a mound of zingy, fine-grated daikon over hot steamed rice, it’s a quick and healthy meal using a relatively sustainable species of fish: the best kind of fast food.

Yaoya no Obasan – Vegetable-selling Auntie – was a regular visitor to my grandmother’s apartment, a tenugui cloth wrapped around her head and sensibly clad in the traditional pantaloons and jacket worn in farming communities. She was a farmer’s wife, an energetic, ruddy-cheeked woman in her sixties with a gold front tooth, who always looked as though she’d just stepped out of the fields after digging up the vegetables. She’d travel into the city on the train every week, her produce in a giant wicker basket strapped to her back. My grandmother had been buying vegetables from her since my mother was a child. Obā-chan was a stickler for quality, and Yaoya no Obasan never failed to deliver produce that was flavourful, crisp and fresh.

I loved it when she came to see my Obā-chan while I was visiting. She always seemed to be laughing and smiling, and her enthusiasm was infectious. I brought extra cucumbers because your Obā-chan told me you’d be visiting, she’d say. Aside from the small, slender, almost-black Japanese eggplants, Japanese cucumber – kyūri – was, and still is, my favourite vegetable. I’ve never had any luck finding them in Australian or British shops; they’re full of flavour, firm and crunchy without the excess wateriness of a continental-style cucumber. (‘This doesn’t taste of anything!’ my mother used to remark whenever she ate the British version.) I believe Japanese cucumber seeds are available in Australia now; I’m looking forward to planting out an entire wicking bed full of them as soon as I can.

Lebanese cucumbers are the closest approximation available in Australia, and although they’re still a little too watery, they make a good asazuke (‘shallow pickle’), or nukazuke (rice-bran fermented pickle), as do daikon radishes, Chinese cabbage and eggplant, which Yaoya no Obasan had in plentiful supply. Her eggplants were especially tasty.

My mother used to tell the story of the time my two uncles played a prank on her, when they were cheeky young schoolboys; they tied an eggplant to a long piece of string and attached it to her basket alongside a hand-written sign saying, ‘Oishii onasu wa ikaga desuka?’ Would you care for some delicious eggplant? I like to imagine my grandfather scolding them with the great line: ‘Kono boke nasu!’ (You dopey eggplant!) It chimes, somehow, with the old Aussie phrase ‘Ya flamin’ galah!’

My mother had many tasty ways to prepare eggplant; my favourite was nasu no miso ni, eggplant stewed in miso. Using the firm Japanese eggplants is best, as they won’t disintegrate the way the larger, fluffier European varieties do, but I use whatever eggplants I can find to make nasu no miso ni, and it tastes just as good when eaten with – yes, you guessed it – a bowl of freshly steamed hot rice.

The feeling I used to get in September before starting the new school year at Tokyo International was one of bubbly joy; I couldn’t wait to go back to school and see my friends. Lessons were taught in a progressive style in deskless classrooms; we took our shoes off before we entered the large carpeted room on the top floor of the school building and sat on large floor cushions to read and study, though there were communal tables in the corners where you could sit if you wanted to. There were many subjects I loved and which the teacher always made me look forward to learning next – even maths, which I grew to hate once I went to boarding school.

Then there was the excitement of my bento box lunch; I loved not knowing what my mother had put in it until I unwrapped the little furoshiki cloth I carried it in and peeled off the lid. There’d be rice in the main section of the bento box, and the little compartments around it would be filled with an assortment of okazu: some kind of pickle, perhaps a slice of sweet egg omelette, or some croquettes or a piece of grilled fish.

My mother faced a dilemma as my departure to English boarding school grew closer. How was I going to cope over thirteen weeks with no washoku? It would be the first time in my life I’d gone so long without it. My grandmother, uncle, aunt and mother understood just how much my identity was steadied by eating Japanese food. In the experience of eating, my body forgot its cultural confusion. It was more than a preference or a hankering; it was an anchor in a safe harbour. My mother always served western food in the evening whenever my father was home; it was tasty, and I enjoyed eating it. But breakfast and lunch was always Japanese, and whenever my father was away on a business trip or working late in the office, which was fairly often, the evening meal was Japanese, too.

To start preparing me for the transition, my mother made sandwiches for me to take to school. The bread made my stomach feel uncomfortable and unwrapping my bento became something I approached with trepidation rather than joyful anticipation. I’d see the onigiri basket inside my bento wrapper and close my eyes and wish that when I picked it up, I’d feel the weight of three onigiri rice balls inside. If it was light, that meant sandwiches. I just hoped it wouldn’t be egg mayonnaise. I enjoy it now, especially when it’s made with Kewpie mayonnaise, but back then, it was my nemesis.

There was no way I could complain and ask my mother for a Japanese bento. As someone who’d gone hungry for years during the war, with no choice but to eat the same thing she hated every day, sometimes not getting any at all, she would have been unforgiving if I fussed about not getting what I wanted. I was never allowed to say I didn’t like anything; I always had to eat what was on my plate, even when I was full, and I had to try everything. Besides, this was training for boarding school, where I’d have no choice at all.

If I got the dreaded sandwiches, I’d keep quiet, but I’d endeavour to swap them as soon as I got to school with a friend who’d brought a bento lunch but preferred sandwiches. I wasn’t always successful, in which case I’d feed them to the shiba inu at a timberyard I walked past each day on my way home from school. It was a happy arrangement; I loved dogs, and the sandwiches earned me love back from the dog. I was especially thankful, on those days, to have my osanji – literally ‘three o’clock’, an afternoon version of elevenses – waiting for me at home, but I never let on how hungry I was as I walked through the front door. If only I’d realised how much tastier my mother’s sandwiches were than what I’d be eating at boarding school over the next six years.

One egg-sandwich day, I walked past the timberyard with my uneaten lunch to find the dog wasn’t there. I’d been so well trained to think of discarding food as an abomination warranting divine punishment that I couldn’t bring myself to throw the sandwiches in the bin. I brought them home, sneaking them into my bedroom, not knowing what to do. I was so afraid of my mother finding them that I ended up hiding them under my bed on a piece of tissue and returning the empty Tupperware to the kitchen. My mother eventually discovered them while hoovering the house, ‘looking like seagulls a child would draw’, the dried bread curled up at the edges like wings. I got into immense trouble, but later my mother would laugh about it, astonished at the lengths to which I’d go to avoid those sandwiches, and at just how much I preferred Japanese food.

~

I was born and raised in a world so unlike the one I live in now that it may as well have been another planet. My sudden exile from it came when I was eleven years old, on the September day my parents dropped me off at boarding school with my packing trunk for the first of many interminable thirteen-week terms. The stares my mother endured that day made it clear most of the students had never seen an Asian person before.

As my parents drove away I felt myself spin off into a void of disorientation. I wouldn’t be going home again. At the end of the term I’d be put on a plane to Hong Kong, a place I’d never known. Worse still, at boarding school there’d be no more of the food I knew and loved. The hard-boiled ox liver and onions, the tapioca, the grey mush of over-boiled vegetables, the gristle-laden, watery stews, the reconstituted powdered mashed potato powder swimming in thin, tasteless gravy was the killer of joy. I intoned my gratitude in unison with a hundred others for having food to eat before sitting down to each meal, but I struggled to feel it.

I didn’t fit in, with my strange accent and face, my bespectacled nerdiness and the odd behaviour driven by my as-yet-undiagnosed ADHD. Every child in that school would have been grieving over the loss of nurture and home. For some of them, the way to side-step their suffering was to inflict pain on others. Crying from homesickness, which many of us couldn’t help doing every night – it really does feel like a physical sickness – invited shouts of ‘Shut up!’ and if the crying didn’t stop, a slipper smacked across the face in the dark usually did the trick.

You learn how to survive when you’re stuck day and night in a dormitory with twenty-seven eleven-year-old girls for thirteen weeks. You learn to kill off the self that doesn’t fit in, and I learned quickly. I picked up the approved English slang, figured out what was cool and what wasn’t, made myself the class clown who got into trouble with teachers. The racist taunts, the rhyme that came complete with fingers stretching the corners of eyes, and the faux-Japanese ‘ying-tong’ babblings bounced off me. Denying my Japanese self became as easy as slipping on a giant coat, and I eventually made some friends. I survived this way for five years.

ASAZUKE

Quick and easy pickles

Serves 4

Washoku offers a vast choice of different tsukemono (pickles). Some, like umeboshi are a labour of love and patience, only to be enjoyed after many months of preparation. Others, like asazuke (meaning ‘shallow pickle’) can be made and enjoyed within the hour. Making pickles that are light, crunchy and refreshing, the asazuke method can be used for all kinds of vegetables, and there are different tweaks you can make to the pickling seasoning recipe to achieve different flavours. Some add yuzu peel, a pinch of katsubushi shavings or a sprinkling of Fujikko konbu. My mother usually made her asazuke with Chinese cabbage (wombok) and daikon radish she sliced paper-thin using a mandolin. You can try this recipe with cucumber, carrots, turnips or even red radishes.

INGREDIENTS

2cm fresh ginger

½ taka no tsume dried chilli* (optional)

5cm length of a medium-sized daikon radish

¼ head of Chinese cabbage (wombok)

1 tsp sea salt

½ tsp mirin

1 tsp sesame seeds (optional)

Shōyu, to serve

METHOD

Scrape the peel off the ginger with a teaspoon and cut the flesh into fine shreds. Finely chop the taka no tsume chilli, if using. Peel the daikon and cut into thin slices, preferably with a mandolin. Break apart the cabbage leaves and wash well. Pat dry with paper towel. Slice crossways into 3cm pieces and put into a silicone or sturdy plastic sandwich bag together with the daikon slices. Add the salt, ginger, mirin, chilli and sesame seeds (if using) and seal the bag. Massage the bag for about 20 seconds, then leave for an hour in the fridge. Drain excess liquid from the bag, squeezing the vegetables firmly, and serve in small portions drizzled with a little shōyu.

NASU NO MISONI

Miso-stewed eggplant

Serves 4 as a small side dish

INGREDIENTS

2 medium-sized eggplants

Handful of salt

3 tbsp saké

3 tbsp mirin

3 tbsp caster sugar

2 tbsp shōyu

3 tbsp red miso paste

3 tbsp water

½ cup sesame oil

METHOD

Cut the eggplants into bite-sized chunks and set in a large colander with a loose handful of sea salt. Mix the salt through the eggplant and leave to drain for about 30 minutes.

Mix the saké, mirin, sugar and shōyu in a small bowl. Blend the miso paste in a separate bowl with the water to make a smooth, loose paste.

Heat the sesame oil in a wok and, when shimmering hot, add the eggplant, tossing frequently. Fry for 7–8 minutes or until the eggplant is tender. Add the saké mixture and continue frying for 3–4 minutes. Take care not to let the mixture burn, turning down the heat if necessary. Once the eggplant has softened and become silky, add the miso mixture and cook for another 2 minutes. Serve hot.

雷乃収声

23–27 September

Kaminari sunawachi koe o osamu

Thunder ceases

蟄虫坏戸

28 September – 2 October

Mushi kakurete to o fusagu

Insects hole up underground

水始涸

3–7 October

Mizu hajimete karuru

Farmers drain fields

It is Shūbun, the time of the autumn equinox. The god of thunder puts away his taiko drums; insects return to the dark warmth of their burrows to wait until spring returns. The rice paddies are emptied of their water. Typhoons still come occasionally, and there is an autumn rainy season called shurin.

Ohigan, a Buddhist festival that involves an Obon-like visit to ancestral graves, takes place at the autumn equinox. A highlight of this festival for me is the ohagi dumpling, a soft ball of mochi enclosed in a thick coating of rough azuki bean paste, where some of the azuki beans are left whole and visible to lend the anko texture.

I spent a little time with a famous ohagi fan when I worked as an intern at a contemporary art gallery in Ginza, a suburb of Tokyo. The gallery represented Tadanori Yokoo, who came to fame in the 1960s through his psychedelic graphic art posters. By the time I met him, he’d moved further into sculpture installations and painting, and the gallery was holding an exhibition of his work. He’s a true eccentric, and we had some surreal conversations about his belief that people from multiple dimensions lived in a kingdom deep in the earth’s core. He also waxed lyrical about ohagi dumplings, since his exhibition was held during Ohigan. He drew me a picture of one on a piece of paper, labelling it O H A G I, and asked if I could head out and buy some for him, as he loved them more than anything. I was duly despatched to the food basement of the nearby department store to get a boxload, enough for Yokoo-sensei and the gallery staff.

My internship mostly involved serving tea and running errands. You could say it was a gendered role, but I was young and eager for experience. I learned a great deal about Japanese contemporary art, and about tea.

The tea we usually served customers and artists at the gallery was gyokurō, which had to be brewed in 40–60 degree water for two to three minutes. The standard green tea the staff would drink every day is brewed at 70–90 degrees and only for thirty seconds, or else it will turn bitter. The better the quality of tea, the more umami it has. The cheaper and lower the grade of tea, the higher the temperature of water used to brew it is, and the shorter the brewing time. The water should be brought to a boil first, then the heat switched off and the temperature allowed to drop. I was taught to do this in the gallery after my first few embarrassing cups were served to important guests. The quietly spoken senior curator had to take me aside and gently whisper that my tea-making skills needed a brush-up.

The senior curator also happened to be a tea master, and she ended up teaching me the principles of tea ceremony. She lived in the beautiful traditional town of Kamakura and commuted each day to Tokyo. After work, she would take me through the steps to learn the first, most basic stages of the Urasenkei style of chadō, the way of tea.

I never imagined how difficult learning chadō would be. The movements are microscopically precise and ritualistic, and there are many to remember, and in the correct order; there are precise rules to follow, even when you’re a guest. Repeating the same meditative motions each time while preparing to make the tea, or to drink it, calms and centres the mind, so you approach the chanoyu ceremony in an appropriately respectful, humble and mindful state. A vermillion silk cloth is used to symbolically wipe the tea bowl before the ceremony begins; when not in use the cloth is stored in a rectangular silk-embroidered wallet, along with your long, flat bamboo chashaku (tea scoop), two-pronged sweet fork and white papers. The fork and paper are used when you are a guest being served wagashi after your matcha tea.

The big, beautiful traditional wooden house in Kamakura that my teacher lived in once belonged to the original owner of the gallery, a famous antiquarian, art collector and tea master who had a full-sized chashitsu, traditional tea house, built in his beautiful Japanese garden, along with a museum vault in which he stored his precious collection of ancient tea bowls, some of them almost a thousand years old, which he used in the ceremonies.

I was lucky enough to attend my first proper chanoyu in that exquisite tea house; as a complete novice, there was no way I would be allowed to prepare the matcha, but I could learn how to be a guest, which has its own conventions. There were others invited, and about five of us entered the chashitsu that day. My teacher sat next to me, ready to nudge me if I looked as though I was about to get the order of something wrong, or forgot what I was supposed to be doing.

Since the chadō is an expression of Zen, you approach the tea house in a calm, meditative state of mind. You arrive at the side entrance, a low square door in the wall. There is a large sliding screen door at the front, but this is reserved for the emperor – or the shogun, as might once have been. To enter through the low, square door you have to bow your head low, a gesture of humility, and the door is so small that you would not be able to pass through it if you were wearing a katana sword. You enter in peace.

You walk inside, taking small, quiet steps, kneel, place your fingers a short way in front of you and bow your head elegantly to greet the host, then turn and look at the objects in the tokonoma recess to admire and acknowledge them. There might be a scroll and a simple arrangement of two or three flowers that have been specially chosen to fit the season and have some kind of personal relevance for the main guest.

You then take up your position, and wait while the host begins the ritual. It is slow and peaceful, the expert motions of the host beautiful to watch. I wished I could have made it look so effortless. The matcha – emerald green premium tea leaves powdered to a talcum-like consistency – is whisked with water in a bowl, which is placed on the tatami mat in front of the first guest. The guest picks it up, using the correct, precise hand movements, turns the bowl a quarter turn to the left, takes a sip, places it down, picks up their white gauze cloth, folds it just so and wipes the edge of the cup they’ve just drunk from. They then pick it up again, turn it back a quarter turn to the right, bow to the next guest, place the bowl in front of them, and so on. With five guests the process took a long time, and halfway through the bowl was returned, in the correct manner, to the host, who ritually cleansed and dried it, before scooping in more matcha powder and starting the process again.

I found it deeply meditative and would have liked to continue learning with my teacher, but with no Japanese passport, I had to leave Tokyo when my tourist visa ran out. There’s a tea ceremony teacher in Adelaide; at least I know I can pick it up again whenever I want, thirty years after my first lessons.

MATCHA TEA (THE PROPER WAY)

Serves 1

Matcha has caught on everywhere: you see it blended into lattes and smoothies, baked into cakes or mixed into desserts. But the true, tea-ceremony method of preparing it is to whisk the powder into a very small amount of hot water to make a frothy, bright-green and refreshingly bitter drink. Highly nutritious, it’s wonderful accompanied with a traditional wagashi sweet or cake, the sweetness balancing out the bitterness of the matcha.

You don’t need to go through all the tea-ceremony formalities to make it, but if you want to drink it properly and enjoy the fragrance, you’ll need a small tea bowl and a chasen – a special whisk made of bamboo. Many specialty tea shops sell these, or you can find them online. You can use any ceramic bowl, preferably with a flattish bottom to allow the whisk to move around freely, and of a size that fits comfortably into your cupped hands.

Use a chashaku (a flat bamboo scoop) for portioning out your matcha powder, which you can also buy online – they’re not expensive – and choose the best quality matcha tea you can find. Be careful you don’t end up buying a matcha-latte powder, which is a different thing altogether, sometimes with sugar and milk powder added. Real matcha is finely powdered green tea leaves prepared in a special process, with nothing else added – it is a vivid shade of green and has the consistency of talcum powder. It’s also expensive, but if you want to taste matcha properly, find Japanese ceremonial or ceremonial-practice – grade matcha.

INGREDIENTS

½ teaspoon best quality matcha powder (1 chashaku scoop)

¼ cup water, boiled and left to settle for a minute or two

METHOD

Place a chashaku scoop of matcha powder in the bottom of your tea bowl and pour over water. Immediately begin whisking with the chasen to remove any lumps and to froth up the mixture a little. The matcha should be thick and bright green. Drink with a wagashi sweet or a slice of cake.

鴻雁来

8–12 October

Kōgan kitaru

Wild geese return

菊花開

13–17 October

Kiku no hana hiraku

Chrysanthemums bloom

蟋蟀在戸

18–22 October

Kirigirisu to ni ari

Crickets chirp around the door

The cold has truly set in by October, and the mind turns to warming activities, like going to onsen, hot springs, or eating hearty foods like nabe, hot pot, or stewed pumpkin. It’s also the season for matsutake mushrooms, the finest autumn mushroom of all. It’s prized for its meaty texture and its delicate, fragrant flavour that diminishes quickly once picked. The season is extremely short and demand is high. Gathered by skilled foragers in Hokkaido, where they grow in red pine forests, the mushrooms arrive to great fanfare and long queues in Tokyo’s department stores, where they sell out within the week, despite the eye-watering price.

Matsutake are a luxurious treat however they’re prepared: simply grilled over hibachi hot coals with a little salt, steamed with rice as matsutake gohan, or lightly cooked in a delicious dashi broth. I’ve found them in Asian supermarkets in Australia, and they’ll do as a substitute, but nothing can beat the delicate flavour of those northern Hokkaido, pine-forest-grown matsutake.

October is also pumpkin season. My mother had a taste for earthier-tasting autumn foods like gobo (burdock), fried tofu skins and pumpkin. She made her pumpkin-based okazu the way Obā-chan made them, and often told me the story of how pumpkins caused fights between my uncles when they were schoolboys. My younger uncle, Ryōji, had a thin, long head while my older uncle, Yūichi (Ōkī Oji-chan), had a rounder one. Whenever Obā-chan bought a pumpkin from Yaoya no Obasan she’d hurry to hide it in a cupboard before they came home from school. If she didn’t, Ryōji would sit and stare at his older brother for a long time, then at the pumpkin, then back at his brother, back at the pumpkin, back at his brother until Yūichi lost his temper and they’d get into a fight, Ryōji yelling, ‘Kabochaaa! Kabochaaa!’ – ‘Pumpkin! Pumpkin!’ – all the while.

My uncle Yūichi and I bantered a lot as I grew older. When I had my hair cut short, he said my head looked like a bog brush, and I’d call him pumpkin head. It was all in good humour, never hurtful, and we laughed ourselves stupid. He loved to play pranks, like my mother did. It seems they inherited this from my grandfather, who used to set up elaborate practical jokes – like the time he filled up the floor of the entrance lobby of the house with lotus root jelly when relatives were due to visit, turning off the lights so that when they removed their shoes they’d experience the shock of feeling it squishing between their toes. He was a skilled draftsperson, like my mother and her siblings, and once drew a huge oni ogre on a big piece of paper and stuck it up on the wall of the drop toilet; my mother told me how terrified she’d been when she came across it in the semi-dark. He wasn’t always the gentlest of pranksters.

When I was twelve, Ōkī Oji-chan – Big Uncle – bought me a mustard bottle from a joke shop, one of those yellow plastic ones you see at American hot dog stands, except instead of mustard there was a piece of thin mustard-yellow rope inside which, when you squeezed the bottle, would dash out looking exactly like the real thing. When he presented this gift to me he held it in front of my face – Yeah, and? I’d said – then he squeezed it quickly so the rope shot out and I ducked instinctively, it was so realistic. The Yorkshire terrier they owned at the time, Kuro, loved and hated this thing, barking crazily every time the mustard rope shot out of the bottle, skittering about in excitement on Obā-chan’s tatami floor while she tried to stop him from tearing up the smooth reeds with his claws. It was mayhem.

One day I was walking home from the rice merchants with Obā-chan when a wet zōkin floor cloth came plummeting down from on high. Obā-chan tutted and hurried me along, saying, ‘It’s probably someone who objects to gaijin’ – which hadn’t even crossed my mind, but I suppose adults around me would have been alert to insults, trying to protect me. When we reached her apartment on the seventh floor my uncle was chuckling with delight. ‘Gotcha!’ he said. ‘Even from all the way up here on the verandah, I could see how furious Obā-chan was, hurrying you away.’ I told him I’d get my revenge when he least expected it.

It may have been the same evening, or the next day – he was stretched out on his side on the tatami like a great reclining Buddha, propping his head up with his hand, elbow on the tatami, as he often did after lunch to have a rest before heading back downstairs to the shop. I approached him, waggling the mustard bottle. I’d played with it quite often, laughing at how his immediate reaction was to recoil whenever I crept up on and squeezed the bottle at him. Gotcha! I’d say each time. Surely you know it’s fake by now!

So this time, he rolled his eyes. ‘Again?’ he said. ‘Booooringg.’ I could barely contain myself as I leaned right over him with it and said, ‘Then you won’t mind if I come right up to you, will you, like this?’ and I held the mustard bottle right above his upturned ear and squeezed. I’d filled the bottle with cold water and he scrambled to his knees, shaking his head. ‘AHHHH!!!! You got me!’ he shouted, as I giggled with glee. I loved how he humoured me, letting me enjoy my sweet revenge.

Ōkī Oji-chan was good at sleight-of-hand manoeuvres, too. When we were little, he’d pick up a chopstick rest, say, or some other small item, and throw it into his mouth. Or so it appeared, he was so good at it. Then he’d munch away, looking for all the world as if he had a mouthful of the most delicious thing, going Mmmm, delicious! and making realistic crunching movements with his jaws as if he really were breaking up a ceramic chopstick rest with his teeth; other times he’d pretend to eat something a bit too fluffy, like a ball of cotton wool, and pull faces as he tried to remove bits caught on the roof of his mouth. Whatever it was – my new eraser, a chopstick, a clothes peg, he’d chew on it for a realistic length of time before gulping it down, then he’d display his open mouth for me to inspect. Lift your tongue! I’d shout, convinced he’d hidden it there. He’d insist he’d really eaten it, and never revealed it hidden in his hand. I can’t remember the moment I realised it was a trick, and I don’t know when he knew I knew, but we’d play along all the same, him mugging away with his pantomime eating, and me looking amazed at his omnivorousness.

My mother loved playing pranks on her nieces and nephews, too. Sometimes she’d put a rubber spider in my English cousins’ cups of orange squash, and they loved her for it. But the best prank of all was the exotic, rare scorpion trick.

Instructions: take a used matchstick, cut off the burned end, then cut the remaining stick exactly in half. Loop a thin, strong rubber band around the centre of one of the pieces, using a hook knot. Take a square piece of not-too-thin, colourful paper the width of a B6 notebook. Tape each end of the rubber-banded stick down in the middle of the paper so it’s firmly fixed. Take the other half-matchstick, put it inside the loop of rubber band attached to the first piece and start twisting. Twist, twist, twist and twist until the two half-matchsticks are lying side by side. Try to make the thing as flat as you can. Hold tight! Don’t let go. Holding the whole caboodle down, carefully fold the paper into a neat square, two opposite edges folded one on top of the other, then the other two edges folded over so you end up with a small square package that’s tucked in firmly enough to keep the two matchsticks and the rubber band from unravelling. Place the package inside a birthday or other fun card and slide into the envelope. Hand it to your chosen recipient telling them to be very careful opening it, as it’s a precious fossilised scorpion from Peru/China/Guatemala. Do your best to maintain a poker face as you watch them unfold the little package.

My mother was a master of both the construction and delivery of the scorpion trick. But she wasn’t above simple pranks, or store-bought props. She hid those surprise jars of peanuts in drawers she didn’t want me to go snooping around in. Of course, I did – and screamed the place down when a tautly sprung snake shot out at me the moment I opened the jar. I got my revenge over a summer lunch of hanpen and sōmen. Someone had given me a fake, but extremely realistic, ice cube with a fake fly embedded inside it. I’d forgotten that it wasn’t a great idea to give my mother any kind of sudden shock with her heart condition, but when she lifted a mouthful of sōmen from the bowl and spotted it underneath, flinging chopsticks, water and noodles up in the air in reflexive shock before clutching at her chest and reeling back – she hated insects of any kind – it came back to me in a flash, and for a moment I was terrified I might have killed her. I grabbed the ice cube to show her, yelling, ‘Nisemono yo!’ – ‘It’s fake!’ She was fine, thank goodness, and once she’d recovered, she pocketed the ice cube for herself to prank my cousins, nodding as if impressed by how much her student had learned.

We laughed a lot, my mother and me, sometimes to the point where we couldn’t speak, tears in our eyes. We’d laugh at the most stupid, immature things; it was such a release and a joy. We had private meme-like jokes from something we’d seen or heard that we’d repeat and alter over time, things that only we seemed to find funny. Her laugh would trigger laughter from me, which would lead to more laughter from her, which would amp up mine, and off we’d go, feeding off one another’s laughter until we were helpless on the floor.

My tech-crazy aunt bought my mother a Memoboy from Akihabara, a district of Tokyo crammed with electronic appliance and gadget shops. It was a rectangular white gadget the height and width of a portable bluetooth speaker; when you lifted it up, it would play ten seconds of whatever was last recorded. It was marketed as a device to replace the tedious action of putting pen to paper if you needed to remind yourself or another in your household about something. You pressed a button on top to record, and then the thing would play on a loop when you lifted the gadget up, releasing the on–off switch on its base. I don’t think we ever used it for its intended purpose; I’d just grab it when she was on one of her laughing jags and press record. Then I’d play it back to her, which made her laugh even more, and if it was a particularly good, long snorting cackle I’d record that too, and end up with this eternal loop of both of us laughing like drains; we’d go on like this for ages until we had to stop so my mother could draw breath. It was ridiculous, juvenile and wonderful.

You couldn’t help but laugh when you heard her cackling. She once got a whole corner of a restaurant going when she started laughing, even though no one had any idea what she was laughing about. It was irresistibly catching. Japanese women generally hide their mouths behind their hands when they laugh; in the old days, women even blacked out their teeth with charcoal so they wouldn’t be visible, as if the interior of the mouth was too shameful to display. But my mother always threw her head back, laughing her infectious belly laugh, spreading the joy so that soon, everyone else would be laughing alongside her.

‘Yakiiiiiimooo! Hokka-hoka de oishī yakiiiiimooo!’ – ‘Roast sweet potaaatooo! Toasty hot, tasty roast sweet potaaaaaatooo!’ On crisp autumn days, the sing-song megaphone call of the roasted sweet potato seller would float up through the air as he wheeled his charcoal brazier along the road below our apartment. I’d beg my mother for a few yen so I could run downstairs to buy one. She’d refuse, unable to eat another sweet potato after the war, or even to bear the thought of seeing me eat one in the house. I did manage to persuade her, though, just once.

I rushed downstairs to catch up with the satsumaimo seller and, panting white clouds into the chilly air, gave him the coins I’d been clutching tight in the lift all the way down from the thirteenth floor where we lived. Wearing a heavy apron, wrapped against the cold in overalls, thick coat, cap and scarf, he swapped his woollen gloves for thick, heatproof ones and hauled aside the lid of his brazier, releasing a blast of welcome heat. He plucked a sweet potato off the glowing coals and wrapped it in newspaper with one end peeking out. In a swift, precise movement he peeled back the blistered, dusky pink skin with his knife to reveal the steaming, creamy flesh beneath, sweet as honey and hotter than the sun, and handed it to me. Satsumaimo are sweeter than the sweet potatoes eaten in Australia and Britain, sweet like dessert. I ate it sitting on the swing in the playground downstairs, the heat through the newspaper warming my hands as I puffed steam out with each mouthful, trying not to burn my tongue, making sure to eat it all before going back upstairs so my mother didn’t have to see.

TAKIKOMI GOHAN

Rice cooked with ingredients

You can add all kinds of ingredients to your rice as it steams, from bite-sized pieces of chicken to bamboo shoots, mushrooms of every variety, peas, carrots, aburaage, edamame, hijiki or shredded konbu seaweed.

I’ve given two recipes here – one is a typical chicken and vegetable rice dish, the other with tinned tuna. As the rice contains so much nutrition, you need only serve this alongside a bowl of misoshiru and a small plate of pickles.

TAKIKOMI GOHAN WITH CHICKEN AND VEGETABLES

Serves 4

INGREDIENTS

5 dried shītake mushrooms, soaked overnight in 2 cups cold water (reserve liquid)

100g carrot, peeled

2 rectangles of aburaage (deep-fried tofu pockets)

200g chicken thighs, boned and skinless

3 cups uncooked uruchimai rice

Stock for cooking the chicken, vegetables and aburaage

1 cup soaking water from the shītake mushrooms

3 tbsp shōyu

2 tbsp saké

2 tsp sugar

1 tsp salt

Stock for cooking the rice

2 tbsp saké

1 tsp shōyu

Water to make up 3 ½ cups liquid

METHOD

Drain the shītake mushrooms, reserving 1 cup of the soaking water. Remove the stalks. Squeeze excess water from the mushroom caps and cut into thin slices.

Chop the carrot into thin matchsticks.

Place the aburaage in a bowl, pour boiling water over the top and leave to soak for a minute or two to remove excess oil. Drain, then pat dry with paper towel. Cut across the rectangle lengthways, then across the short side to make 0.5cm strips. Cut the chicken into 2.5cm pieces.

Combine the ingredients for the stock to cook the chicken, aburaage and vegetables in a pan and bring to a simmer. Add the mushrooms and cook at a gentle simmer for 2–3 minutes before adding the carrot. Cook a minute or two more, then add the chicken and aburaage, cover and simmer for about 5 minutes until the chicken is cooked through. Remove the chicken, aburaage and vegetables from the pan, reserving the stock.

Combine this stock with the saké and shōyu to prepare the stock for cooking the rice. Pour the mixture into a large measuring jug and add enough cold water to make 3 ½ cups of liquid.

Add the rice and cook as described here.

When the rice is cooked and sitting with the lid on for its final steaming, put the chicken-and-vegetable mixture in a pan to reheat. Turn the rice out into a larger pot with a lid, and fold in the heated chicken and vegetables, distributing it evenly through the rice while taking care not to squash the rice grains. Place a dry tea towel over the pot before replacing the lid to absorb excess moisture and prevent the rice from becoming soggy before serving. Serve in individual rice bowls with misoshiru and pickles.

TSUNA TO FUJIKKO NO TAKIKOMI GOHAN

Rice cooked with tinned tuna and shredded konbu seaweed

Serves 4

My mother often made this quick, easy, nutritious and umami-rich rice in her rice cooker. Fujikko is a brand name for a tender, specially seasoned shredded seaweed available in good Asian food stores.

INGREDIENTS

3 cups uncooked uruchimai rice

3 1/3 cups water for cooking the rice

180g can of sustainably caught tuna in vegetable oil (not brine)

140g bag of Fujikko

METHOD

Rinse the rice and put it in your rice cooker with its water (see here). Add the tuna to the rice, along with the oil from the tin. You don’t need to mix it in, though if there are any large chunks, gently break them up. Empty the bag of Fujikko on top, spreading it out so there aren’t any big lumps anywhere, but, again, it doesn’t need to be mixed in.

Close the lid of the rice cooker and switch it on. That’s it!

Once it’s done, mix through gently with a rice spatula and serve along with a bowl of misoshiru and some pickles.

KABOCHA NO NIMONO

Simmered Japanese pumpkin

Serves 4 as a small side dish

INGREDIENTS

500g Japanese pumpkin (also known as Kent pumpkin)

1 ½ cups dashi

2 ½ tbsp sugar

1 tbsp mirin

1 ½ tbsp shōyu

METHOD

Wash the pumpkin, remove the seeds and peel the skin off here and there to reveal the orange flesh in an attractive contrast against the dark-green skin. Cut into 5cm cubes.

Mix the dashi, sugar and mirin together in a saucepan, then place the pumpkin skin-side down in it before covering the pan and setting it over medium heat.

Bring to a boil, then lower the heat to a simmer. After about 5 minutes, turn the pumpkin over gently, piece by piece, taking care not to squash or break them. Add the shōyu, then cover the pan again and cook for a further 5 minutes before turning the pieces over a final time and replacing the lid. Simmer for 2–3 minutes more, until the pumpkin is tender. Be careful not to overcook them as they’ll turn to mush.

This dish is typically served at room temperature or warm, which heightens the flavour and adds a compelling temperature contrast when eaten with hot rice.

霜始降

23–27 October

Shimo hajimete furu

First frost

霎時施

28 October – 1 November

Kosame tokidoki furu

Light rains sometimes fall

楓蔦黄

2–6 November

Momiji tsuta kibamu

Maple leaves and ivy turn yellow

As October makes way for November, autumn flexes its muscles in preparation for its transformation to winter. It does so prettily, the last of the sun-bronzed leaves clinging on to almost-bare trees, resisting the chill winds of change. The air grows dry. In our old apartment, my mother would swap dehumidifiers for humidifiers, and my long hair crackled into a halo whenever I brushed it. The sticky humidity of summer felt as though it belonged to another country.

I liked this time of year, in those days when I still called Tokyo home, before the dark, cold autumns of English boarding school. With the heavy summer heat washed from the air, the world felt fresh, and the school year stretched ahead, brimming with possibility. I was still excited by school, then. I’d already developed a stationery fetish – it’s hard not to in Japan, that sovereign state of stationery – and I’d pack new notebooks, folders and pens into their proper places in my pencil case and school bag, the thrill of the ritual ramped up if either were new, replacing old ones worn out by the rough-and-tumble of the previous school year.

I liked the feeling of cool air on my knee-socked legs as I walked along the six-lane road from the bus stop near school, turning through the wide gates and heading up the steep hill towards the sleek concrete and glass of the school entrance. I’d gaze with awe upon the superstar 12th-graders walking ahead of me, who looked impossibly cool with their headscarf-wrapped hair, white pop-socks and Swedish clogs. The white clouds we breathed out en masse as we walked up the hill wafted bright against the dazzling blue of the autumn sky, mingling with the smell of the chapsticks we used to keep our lips from cracking in the dry air: bright, chunky Bonne Bell Lip Smackers in delicious flavours like grape, cherry or cinnamon apple pie, from the American-style supermarket nearby that stocked items like jars of Smucker’s Goober peanut butter and jelly, Kool-Aid and Twinkie bars.

As we waited in our new classroom to see who our homeroom teacher would be for the year, we’d admire each other’s Sanrio acquisitions from the summer holidays. Sanrio had just introduced its first character, Hello Kitty, to the world. There were rumours that she hailed from London, a faraway city that seemed as exotic and strange to me as Narnia. We all found her irresistible, and most of us had bought the adorable little see-through red-and-white coin purse that was the first product she ever adorned. It cost 220 yen back then, just under two Australian dollars in today’s money. The rare few that make an appearance now on online bidding sites fetch hundreds of dollars.

More must-have treasures bearing Kitty’s sweet face swiftly followed: tiny mirror and comb sets in pop-closure folders; boxy pencil cases with tiny compartments for fruit-scented pens or lollipop-scented erasers; hair clips; doll’s-house-sized drawers for storing multicoloured paperclips and kitten-shaped pushpins. New Sanrio characters appeared to keep her company: Little Twin Stars, angelic pink- and blue-haired twins; Patty & Jimmy, blonde-haired, all-American kids in varsity tops emblazoned with a P and a J; My Melody, a white rabbit in a pink bonnet shaped to fit her long ears. Sanrio knew the way to our childish hearts with their pocket-money-priced, high-quality objects of desire. Back then, we were ignorant about the impact of such things on the environment and we acquired new trinkets as fast as they appeared. Quite organically, we began a practice we simply called ‘Trade’. We’d bring items we’d grown bored with to school to barter for new Sanrio goodies. Negotiations could be intense – one girl’s opinion that a Hello Kitty doll’s house tea set was worth at least three Little Twin Stars items might be hotly contested by another – but it was a good way of enjoying the thrill of a novel trinket without buying something new.

My friends and I had a habit of stopping on the way home from school to buy snacks with our pocket money. There was a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream parlour next to the American supermarket, which we’d frequent until the weather grew too cold, but since I wasn’t much of a sweet tooth, I felt greater anticipation for the cloud-white puffs of steamed nikuman the ojisan at the bus stop kiosk would begin to sell once autumn set in. The day we saw the glass and steel steamer cabinet appear on his counter, we’d collectively squeal Yay! and queue up for the first of these cold-weather treats.

The round, white, fluffy bao-like buns were just the right size to fill our hands so we could warm our chilly fingers. We’d peel off the square of greaseproof paper underneath, and tuck in, puffing out quickly as we ate to avoid burning our tongues. I loved breaking open the bun to release great clouds of steam from the hot minced pork and spring onion filling. Most of my friends preferred anman, the other bun that the kiosk ojisan sold, filled with smooth, sweet anko paste instead of mince. Because of the sugar in the anko, biting into an anman without care was a painful experience; the filling was hotter than the sun. I did eat the occasional anman when the mood took me and remember some painful tongue-burning episodes. But most of the time, it was a nikuman I opted for. I’d break it open, dribble shōyu into the middle from the tiny oblong bottle the ojisan handed me, and do my best to wait so it would cool a little, but I’d be too impatient and eat the lot in four or five bites, feeling that little nudge of disappointment when it was all gone. As tempted as I was, I knew if I bought another I’d be too full to eat both the osanji snack my mother often left out for me and my supper later that evening. My mother was strict about me finishing what was on my plate.

Sometimes my mother would announce what she was planning to prepare for my after-school osanji, and if it was something fabulous like isobeyaki mochi, I’d happily forego the nikuman. Mochi is a pounded rice cake, sold dried and cut into waxy, white rectangular blocks, also called kirimochi. Traditionally, yaki mochi was made by roasting the mochi over a hibachi charcoal brazier, and most people these days dry-roast them in a frying pan or under a grill, but I still cook them on thick steel mesh over a low open gas flame the way my mother used to, and eat them off the same multicoloured melamine plates I ate them off back then. They’re fun to cook, but need to be watched closely so they don’t burn, especially when they begin to swell and puff in odd places as they heat up. I loved watching my mother flip them quickly from one side to the other with her cooking chopsticks so they wouldn’t puff out too much and lose their rectangular shape. ‘You have to turn them quickly, as if you haven’t eaten for days and you’re starving hungry and you’re too impatient to wait for them to cook,’ she’d tell me. If a wayward mochi suddenly billowed out a big sticky bubble, she’d stab it with a chopstick to deflate it before it burned, and it would succumb with a sigh. They’re noisy when they’re being grilled, these kirimochi, making little squeals and groans as they cook.

Once they were ready, soft and hot all the way through to the middle, and crispy golden on the outside, my mother would pop them straight into a dish of shōyu, where they’d sizzle and deflate. The smell of the hot shōyu would fill the kitchen, and I’d start skipping around doing my I-can’t-wait-to-eat-this dance. For the final step, she’d place each one onto a rectangle of nori seaweed she’d cut to the right size, and wrap it around the mochi. The nori had a dual purpose – it added umami flavour, but it also made for a convenient edible wrapper that stopped fingers from sticking or burning on the hot mochi. She’d make me wait until I was sitting at the table, the plate in front of me, before I tucked in. Even writing about the soft, chewy texture of the hot mochi, its crisp outer skin salted with the savoury deliciousness of the shōyu, makes my mouth water; I’ve made a mental note to buy some next time I’m in town; I was overjoyed when I discovered my local Japanese supermarket sold big bags of them. It’s easy to eat too many. My mother would often remind me, when I pleaded for just one more, that one kirimochi is about one full bowl of rice pounded into a paste – eat more than two or three and your stomach will swell tight, especially if you drink anything with it.

I would often run, when it was warm enough, to buy snacks or some little toy at the old-fashioned dagashiya that had escaped wartime bombs and catastrophic earthquakes in the narrow back lane high up on the hill behind our apartment. The neighbourhood children would taunt me from time to time with cries of ‘Gaijin, gaijin!’ – ‘Foreigner, foreigner!’ – when I appeared, but the tiny, wrinkled Obā-chan who ran the shop treated me the same as she did everyone else, and was always kind. She sat high up on a tatami dais that overlooked the old wooden shelves and boxes that held the sweets, snacks and toys she sold, looking to me as if she were a hundred years old, with her white hair pulled back in a bun, her back so stooped that her body was a question mark. There were one or two modern sweets, like the little fizzy tablets in foil wrappers in cola, Fanta grape or Fanta orange flavours that you were meant to drop into a glass of water to make a drink, but which everyone seemed to prefer to break into tiny crumbs, to be eaten one piece at a time. Any more than that would result in an oral tsunami of lurid foam, as I witnessed more than once when neighbourhood boys were showing off. But most of the treats the dagashiya no obā-san sold were the same old-fashioned treats my mother might have enjoyed: puffed black sugar crackers; delicious cubes of Glico salted caramels in the same honey-coloured boxes they’re still sold in today; tiny bags of Baby-Star ramen, a savoury, crispy dried-noodle snack; strips of sour-plum-flavoured soft konbu seaweed in tiny red-and-white rectangular boxes; konpeitō, pea-sized sweets shaped like 3D asterisks in pastel colours of pink, green, yellow and cream that Sen fed the susuwatari dust-sprites in Kamaji’s chamber in the anime movie Spirited Away.

There was always a huge choice of menko – colourful round or rectangular cards made of thick, heavy cardboard that were used in a game mostly played by boys. Illustrated on both sides with different themes from famous Japanese baseball players to manga characters like Doraemon the robot cat, the goal was to win as many cards as possible by flipping over your opponent’s. To do this, you had to throw one of your cards down as forcefully as you could onto the hard surface where your opponent had placed their card; if you could strike the edge of it in the right way, or if you generated enough of a downdraft as you threw your card, your opponent’s card would flip over, and you got to keep both cards.

I liked to play bokon, the onomatopoeic name for a lucky dip; after paying the dagashiya no obā-san 10 yen, you got to push through a hole perforated into the thick cardboard covering a dozen or so little square compartments set into a wooden frame. You might win a round, wooden spinning top that flipped upside down when you spun it; or a tin toy, like the whistles tied to strings that you could whirl in the air above your head to make the sound of twittering birds; or brightly coloured hollow goldfish that you could float in the bath.

Dagashiya stores provided children with such simple pleasures. The one behind our apartment disappeared sometime in the 80s, along with so many of the old places. New ones have appeared in a postmodern tribute to Shōwa-era Tokyo, a strange mixture of nostalgia and novelty, but with modern checkouts and employees instead of a real-life dagashiya no obā-san, the heart has gone out of them. They’re just not the same anymore.

ISOBE YAKIMOCHI

Roasted savoury pounded rice cake

Serves 1

INGREDIENTS

2–3 squares of nori

2–3 rectangles of shop-bought dried pounded mochi rice cake

1 tbsp shōyu

METHOD

Cut squares of nori large enough to fold around each mochi. If you cook with gas, waft the nori at a distance over the flames to crisp them up, but be careful not to let them burn. Put the shōyu into a saucer ready to dip the mochi into once they’re cooked.

Set a grill pan to medium-high heat, or use a wire cooking mesh over an open flame or white-hot charcoal. You can also dry-roast the mochi in a non-stick frying pan set over medium-high heat.

Place the blocks of dried mochi over the heat source and turn regularly. At first, it will look as though nothing is happening, but before long the mochi will begin to swell up, sometimes at odd, comical angles, then deflate again, sometimes making squeaking and puffing noises. Keep turning the mochi every 10 seconds or so, taking care not to let any of the bubbles grow too large or get too close to the heat source, if using a grill or charcoal, and burn. Cooking chopsticks, if you can use them, are perfect for this job, as any wayward bubble can be stabbed and deflated with the pointy end. The mochi will start to soften and turn sticky and gooey as they begin to cook through. Once each surface is golden and crispy, test the softness in the middle of the mochi by pressing in with the flat side of a chopstick. If it gives, it’s ready. Remove from the heat and dunk each mochi immediately in the saucer of shōyu, turning to coat thoroughly (the fragrance of the roasted mochi together with the hot shōyu is irresistible). Wrap each mochi in the prepared nori rectangles and serve.

山茶始開

7–11 November

Tsubaki hajimete hiraku

Camellias bloom

地始凍

12–16 November

Chi hajimete kōru

Soil starts to freeze

金盞香

17–21 November

Kinsenka saku

Winter narcisuss bloom

The rite of passage called Shichigosan takes place each year on the fifteenth day of November, and is for children aged three, five or seven according to the old system of kazoedoshi, where children are considered one year old at birth (and so are two, four or six when taking part in this ceremony, according to the western age-counting system). Girls and boys are dressed up in fine clothes, the girls usually in full kimono, complete with an elaborate up-do and pretty hair ornaments, and the boys in tiny black and grey hakama, a pant-like kimono – although some parents these days dress their children in western formal wear.

In the old days, it was thought that children weren’t fully formed until they reached the age of eight, and therefore needed extra protection from malign spirits during early childhood. The Shichigosan ceremony was a matter of survival in eras when childhood mortality was high, and at a time of year when, heading into the hardships of winter, there was more likelihood of children falling ill. In a modern Japan with good healthcare, the celebration has become more of a special treat for the kids and a happy rite of passage.

After prayers at the local Shintō shrine for good health, good fortune and longevity, children are given long rectangular paper bags decorated with a crane and a turtle, symbols of longevity and luck, filled with long, thin candies called chitoseame (thousand-year sweets). It has long been standard practice to hire a professional photographer for the occasion, and my mother’s old school friend sent us a photo of her standing in front of Himeji castle with her daughter, my friend Hanako, who was seven years old and a year younger than me. I looked at the beautiful kimono she was wearing, the silver flowers dangling from her hairpin, and couldn’t help feeling a wild envy. I’d been a shichigosan when I was two, but had no memory of it; I only know from photographs my mother took of the occasion. I’m wearing a tiny red-patterned kimono with the padded hifu vest over it, and tiny little geta held onto my feet at the back with elastic straps. We were living in Kobe at the time, and friends of my parents, a British couple, dressed up their two-year-old boy for the occasion, too. I still wonder whether this was instigated by my mother, or by the little boy’s mother, because that was the only time I took part in Shichigosan.

Winter begins in earnest, and in Hokkaido, the snow falls thick and fast. While snow is rare so early in the winter in Tokyo, the cold is still intense, and provides plenty of excuses to eat hearty winter dishes. When my father was away on one of his frequent business trips overseas, my mother sometimes made her version of yosenabe, a delicious form of edible central heating. She’d prepare serving plates with a variety of raw ingredients: paper-thin slices of pork, chunky cubes of firm momen tofu, shirataki konjac noodles, thick-cut batons of Japanese spring onion, enoki and shītake mushrooms, hakusai – known as wombok or Chinese cabbage in Australia – and other vegetables; and set a gas konro grill at the table. I still own the lidded nabe, a glazed earthenware pot, that she’d fill with a dashi-konbu broth and set on the open flame. Once the broth was steaming, she’d fill the pot with a selection of the raw ingredients. We’d fish out whatever was ready with our chopsticks, dip it into a small bowl of gomadare – sesame – or ponzu sauce heaped with a mound of zesty grated daikon and ginger, and devour it with fresh-steamed rice and pickles. The broth grew tastier as more ingredients were added, and once we’d eaten our fill of the ingredients, we’d add the broth to the leftover sauce to make a delicious soup.

Afterwards, we’d sit back clutching our stomachs, warmed to the core, and although we were full, the food was not too rich and I’d sleep solidly afterwards. Every region and every family has a different version of yosenabe. Some versions add thick udon noodles to the broth as the finishing touch to this glorious meal, and I like to do this now, when I make yosenabe. Each time I get the pot from the cupboard, I recall my mother’s beaming face, rosy from the steam rising from the pot, and the safe feeling of cosiness that sharing our meal this way always gave me.

Despite the cold, camellias – a relative of the tea plant – bloom. When my parents moved back to Tokyo in the 80s, they lived in a sleek, low apartment block in a neighbourhood close to the family shop; it was called Homat Camellia and, unsurprisingly, had large camellia bushes near the entrance. I love these flowers and have tried to grow them in my South Australian garden without success.

There are times I look back and wish my teenage self had fully appreciated this period in my life. I was, of course, overjoyed that I could visit my parents back in my native city; I’d just finished my final year of school in Hamburg, and was studying harder than I’d ever done in my life in the hope of winning a place at Cambridge University. It was that year that my mother took me to Yushima Tenjin, to fill out my ema plaque with my prayer to succeed in the entrance exams. I was too full of youthful hope, and that feeling of a long life stretched ahead, to realise just how good a time this was. Back among her family and old friends, in her old haunts, my mother was the happiest and healthiest I’d ever known her. My father was busy with work, and often away on business trips, and my mother and I travelled across Japan, going to onsen, hot springs, where we ate memorable, delicious meals in ryokan, inns. These times provided me with many happy moments for my bank of memories, ready to pull out in the tougher times I didn’t realise lay ahead.

I have a single, precious photograph of Ōkī Oji-chan, Obā-chan and my mother sitting together in Obā-chan’s apartment. It was the last time I saw them together this way; after I returned to England to prepare for my university entrance exams, Obā-chan died. It was September 1985, and with the impending exams, I wasn’t able to make it back to Japan for her funeral, to my eternal regret. My mother would die exactly ten years later, and ten years after that, in 2005, Ōkī Oji-chan. All three of them gone before their time.

My mother died far from home, in London, at sixteen minutes past five on the morning of 8 November 1995. She’d been in intensive care, unconscious, for three and a half weeks after a failed attempt to repair her damaged heart. I’d stayed at her side the entire time, sitting by her bed each day for as long as the nurses allowed me to, and heading to sleep each night in the lodgings provided for relatives of cardiac transplant patients in the hospital grounds. After the surgery revealed the extent of the deterioration of her heart, an artificial heart the size of a washing machine was flown in from a hospital in northern England to keep blood pumping around her body until a donor heart could be found to replace her broken one. These days, the machine is the size of a matchbox and can be implanted in the chest for a cardiac patient awaiting transplant so they can go home to their families, but back then, a patient on such a machine had to be kept unconscious in intensive care.

Twice, I was told it was the end, and the nurses would rush me to her side to say goodbye, her death seemingly so imminent that there hadn’t been time to clean things up from the invasive procedures. Each time, somehow, she held on. But as the days went by and no donor heart became available, her organs began to fail; first her kidneys, then her liver. After she suffered a catastrophic stroke, her surgeon came to me to say her chances of survival were now so slim that even a donor heart was unlikely to save her; that even if, by some miracle, she survived, the stroke meant she’d remain in a permanent vegetative state. He handed me some papers to read and sign, as the only family member present. Signing it meant giving my permission to switch off her life support. My mother gave me life, and I had to end hers. Even though I was in my twenties, I still felt like a child. Signing that document changed me forever.

My mother hadn’t wanted my father to know she’d be undergoing cardiac surgery and had asked me not to tell him, but once I’d signed the papers, I relayed a message to him in France, and he immediately set out for the long drive to London.

I’d always been sceptical about unseen forces, but as the numbers on the monitor dropped steadily through that night, I felt the air around me thicken and grow strange. I couldn’t sleep, and held on to my mother’s hand, my head next to hers. Later, when I described this odd atmosphere in the room to my aunt, she looked at me as if she were surprised I hadn’t figured it out. Of course they came, she said. Obā-chan, Ojī-chan, Ryōji, the ancestors: they were all there, waiting to take her home.

The end-of-life nurse allowed me to switch off the bright lights, and to turn on the small lamp beside my mother’s bed. I had a soft blanket of hers from home, and clung onto a tiny bodhisattva carved from quartz crystal her sister had given her. With the life-support machinery switched off, the room was quiet, apart from the quiet double-beep of the heart and blood pressure monitor. The numbers on the monitor dropped steadily: 80, 70, 60. The nurse had warned me that my father would probably arrive too late. I kept whispering in my mother’s ear, in case she could hear me, that he was coming and to hold on. When the monitor hit 50, it stayed steady for a long time. When it hit 40, the nurse said, It’ll be time soon. My father arrived at the hospital, having driven through the night, at just after five in the morning. By a quarter past five, my mother was gone.

For months afterwards I lost my appetite and stopped eating. For a while I ate okayu and not much else, but it gave me enough strength to deal with my mother’s apartment full of her things. She had so much stuff; all neatly packed away, but endless amounts of it: ranks of crockery, every kind of dish, every kind of bowl, pickle saucer, grilled fish plate, all with patterns for each season. She had three entire dinner services for the beautiful Cordon Bleu dishes she used to cook to entertain my father’s business guests. She had so many different cooking utensils and pieces of specialist equipment, the tokoroten moulds, the sushi presses, the tofu boxes, the sesame hand grinders, everything. It was overwhelming.

I called some of her friends in London and told them to come and help themselves and word went around. I didn’t know some of the people who came. I was wearing my mother’s favourite apron that day, made of linen in a colour she used to call blackberry fool. One of the visitors came up to me, pointing to the apron and asking me if she could have it. I love that apron, she said. It reminds me of your mother; she was always wearing it in the kitchen whenever I visited her for lunch. When I refused, she began to cry, and I found myself having to comfort her. But I remained steadfast. I wore that apron until it was so threadbare I ended up cutting it into rags to use for dusting.

It was months before I could bring myself to move the dress she’d draped across the back of her bedroom chair, leaving it exactly as it was until I had to move out, because somehow, in the way it draped, I could see the movements she’d made to place it there.

As a child, I had recurring dreams of running after my mother in a strange, urban landscape devoid of traffic or people, following her into deserted buildings or down long alleyways, never quite catching up with her.

It was only after she died that I dreamed of us together. There were three dreams, each so vivid I wrote them down. In the first, I was living in an airy timber treehouse, surrounded by lush greenery. My mother stepped through the window into the sunny room, smiling and saying: Kyā-dango! Zūtto tonari ni itano yo. I’ve been living next door all along.

In the second, we were hurrying to a hotel room she’d been staying in so we could pack up her things; there’d been an earthquake and a tsunami was on its way. We escaped with her suitcase, only a hairbrush and a pair of slippers inside, and watched from high up on a hill as giant waves swept away cars, trees and lampposts, a haunting image that echoed in my mind as I watched the terrible events unfold on the news that day in March 2011.

In the last of the three dreams, my mother and I sat together at a table in a small room above an unidentifiable railway station in Tokyo. It was a rainy winter’s night, and I could see the reflection of the city lights glistening in the wet streets outside the window, Blade Runner style. We sat in the strange room in comfortable silence, sharing a great steaming pot of yosenabe, my mother refilling my rice bowl from the cooker and passing it to me, just the way she used to.

YOSENABE

Winter hot pot

Serves 4

This is a warming, communal dish that’s fun to eat and easy to prepare, since most of the cooking is done at the table. You will need a butane gas–powered portable mini stove, which you can find in most Asian supermarkets. Traditionally, you cook yosenabe in a semi-glazed earthenware pot with a lid called a donabe (‘do’ means ‘earth’ or ‘clay’ and ‘nabe’ means ‘pot’). They come in different sizes and shapes to suit whatever purpose they’re being used for – a donabe to cook rice is different from one you’d use for yosenabe. The one used for yosenabe is wide and fairly shallow in comparison, usually with small handles on each side for lifting, and a close-fitting lid.

There are so many ways you can put together a yosenabe meal – every family will have its favourite selection of ingredients and dipping sauces: firm-fleshed fish, like salmon or monkfish; slices of kamaboko fish paste; soft-boiled quail eggs; chicken meatballs; small chunks of roasted mochi; any kind of leafy green; prawns, squid and other seafood. The choices are endless. This is the one my mother used to make.

INGREDIENTS

100g thinly sliced lean pork loin (you can also use strips of chicken thigh or pieces of fish, such as salmon)

6 leaves Chinese cabbage

8 large prawns, uncooked

300g firm tofu, cut into 4cm cubes

8 fresh shītake mushrooms

Handful white enoki mushrooms

½ daikon radish, peeled and cut into 2cm slices

2 Japanese spring onions or slender leeks, cut diagonally into 5cm lengths

1 bag shirataki noodles, drained (sold in the refrigerated section of most Asian food stores)

1 bunch chrysanthemum leaves, mustard greens or spinach

Nabe broth

4 cups dashi stock (see here)

7 tbsp shōyu

1 tbsp mirin

1 6cm square dried konbu (kelp)

1 tbsp cooking saké (use Chinese cooking wine or dry sherry if unavailable)

METHOD

For the nabe broth, you’ll need a donabe or heavy-based pan (preferably wider than it is deep) that you’ll be cooking the ingredients in at the table. Wipe the square of dried konbu with a slightly dampened clean cloth and add to the pot together with the rest of the broth ingredients. Cover the pot with its lid and set over a low heat on your kitchen stovetop to begin with. Make sure the broth doesn’t boil while the konbu is in it; turn the heat off occasionally if you can’t lower it any further.

In the meantime, prepare your dipping sauces (see recipes on the following pages) and all the ingredients you’ll be cooking in the yosenabe, arranging them attractively on large serving plates, which will go on the dining table so the nabe can be topped up with more ingredients as needed: cut leafy greens into bite-sized pieces; arrange the tofu cubes in a separate bowl, together with a slotted spoon that will make it easier to retrieve the tofu from the donabe without them falling apart. Arrange the sliced pork on a separate plate, with its own set of cooking chopsticks or tongs.

Lay the table for everyone who’ll be sharing the hot pot: chopsticks, rice bowls, two dipping bowls for the sauces listed on the following pages, a small plate in case space is needed for extra cooked yosenabe morsels, though we always tended to put whatever we’d plucked from the nabe straight into one of our dipping sauces so we could eat it while it was still hot.

Once all the raw ingredients are prepared and the table is set, carefully transfer the donabe with its broth onto the portable stove in the middle of your dining table, and set the flame to medium low. If the contents start boiling wildly, turn it down a little; if the contents are looking listless and are taking too long to cook, turn it up.

Put a selection of all the ingredients into the pot so they can start cooking. Be mindful that some things, like the daikon and the shītake mushrooms, taste better the longer they simmer in the broth; others, like the prawns and the thinly sliced pork, are quick to cook, so care should be taken not to leave them in the pot for too long.

Serve a bowl of rice to everyone at the table; you can keep a suihanki rice cooker switched to ‘warm’ on the table, ready for top-ups. Then leave the rest to everyone else; they can select whichever morsels take their fancy from the donabe, dip them into their choice of sauce and eat with a mouthful of hot rice and maybe some pickles, too.

GOMADARE

Sesame sauce

Serves 4

INGREDIENTS

4 tbsp white sesame seeds

1 tbsp miso paste

1 tbsp caster sugar

2 tbsp mirin

2 tbsp Japanese rice wine vinegar

4 tbsp shōyu

METHOD

Toast the sesame seeds in a dry frying pan over low heat until golden, stirring constantly to prevent burning. Once the sesame seeds begin to turn golden and make popping sounds, remove from the pan and grind them while they’re still hot with a mortar and pestle, or in a spice grinder. Combine with the remaining ingredients in a bowl to form a smooth, thick sauce. Allow about half a cup per person, serving it in a small dipping bowl wide enough to allow generous amounts of dipping.

PONZU SAUCE

Commercially prepared ponzu is tasty and widely available. A popular brand is Ajipon, made by Mizkan, the same company that makes rice vinegar and sushi seasoning. Ajipon comes in a distinctive glass bottle with a yellow-and-white label with red writing, and is a blend of yuzu citrus, mirin, shōyu, katsubushi dashi, kelp dashi and rice vinegar. It does have various additives some may wish to avoid, so if you’d like to make your own, you can combine the ingredients on the following page and portion out half-cup amounts in dipping bowls for each person. My mother served the ponzu in dipping bowls with a mound of finely grated fresh daikon radish (using a fine-toothed grater). After grating the daikon, she’d leave it to drain in a fine sieve for half an hour to allow some of the astringent juice to drip away. She topped each mound of daikon with a half-teaspoonful of finely grated fresh ginger and a sprinkling of finely chopped chives. The fresh, umami-rich citrus tang of the ponzu and the nose-tingling grated daikon cuts through the richness of the pork and enhances every morsel of your yosenabe.

PONZU

Ponzu sauce

Makes about 2 ½ cups

INGREDIENTS

1 cup yuzu juice, or ½ cup each of lemon and lime juice

¹/₃ cup rice vinegar

1 cup shōyu

3 tbsp mirin

4 tbsp shōyu

1 handful katsubushi (optional)

5cm square piece of konbu

METHOD

Mix all ingredients and leave to steep in the fridge for at least 12 hours. Use a sieve to strain out katsubushi and konbu before using.

虹蔵不見

22–26 November

Niji kakurete miezu

Rainbows hide

朔風払葉

27 November – 1 December

Kitakaze konoha o harau

North wind blows the leaves
from the trees

橘始黄

2–6 December

Tachibana hajimete kibamu

Tachibana citrus leaves turn yellow

The cold takes on a sharper edge in Tokyo at this time of year. It stokes an appetite for hearty, energy-rich and warming foods like tonkatsu, crumbed pork cutlet; tonjiru, miso soup with pork; or nabe, hot pot. In winter, fish put on extra fat, and there is an abundant choice of seasonal seafood, so sushi and sashimi are especially delicious – even if they are served at room temperature.

Sashimi is the name for raw fish prepared, sliced and carefully presented on a serving dish by a skilled itamae. The term ‘sushi’ encompasses many more forms than the sushi rolls you’ll find in Australian food courts. There’s the pretty-as-a-picture chirashizushi eaten in a bowl or bento box at Hinamatsuri; oshizushi (pressed sushi – also called hako-zushi) box sushi – an Osaka specialty made by pressing sushi rice topped with a layer of oily fish, like mackerel, in a rectangular wooden box mould and cutting into attractive slices. There’s temarizushi, bite-sized balls of sushi rice moulded in a cloth with a layer of fish, squid or prawns, perfect for picnics and party finger food. There’s inarizushi, named after O-Inari-san, as the shape-shifting messenger of the gods was thought to love aburaage, the deep-fried tofu pouches stuffed with mixed sushi rice (the popular noodle dishes kitsune-soba and kitsune-udon – ‘kitsune’ means ‘fox’ – are named following the same logic). Inarizushi is entirely plant-based; pockets of aburaage are simmered in a slightly sweet soy-dashi broth, allowed to cool, then each half is filled with flavoursome mixed rice speckled with small pieces of carrot, burdock root and bamboo shoot, and moulded into a palm-sized loaf shape.

There are other less common varieties of sushi I haven’t tried, such as kaki no ha zushi, attractive parcels of rice with mackerel, eel or prawn wrapped in persimmon leaves, a meibutsu of Nara and a popular omiage to take home after a tour of the deer-loving temple city. There’s sasazushi, a meibutsu of Nīgata and Nagano prefectures, which is sushi rice with various seafood and other toppings wrapped in bamboo leaves; and narezushi, which is thought to be the earliest version of sushi, originating in the 8th century. Back then, fish was fermented for months, even years, in rice and salt, before being eaten on its own after discarding the rice. Then the rice was found to be edible when fermentation times were shorter, a discovery that eventually led to the sushi eaten in Japan today.

The sushi that I’m obsessed with is a Tokyo specialty: Edomae sushi, sometimes known as nigiri sushi – slices of seafood, most often raw, draped on a small loaf of hand-moulded, room-temperature sweet-vinegared sushi rice. Edomae means ‘in front of Edo’, referring to the view of Tokyo Bay and the Sumida River that could be seen from the upper floors of the old Edo castle that stood on the site of the present Imperial Palace until it was destroyed by fire. True Edomae sushi only uses seafood sourced from Tokyo Bay; if not, technically, it is nigiri sushi. Nigiri means ‘gripped’ or ‘grasped’, as also heard in ‘onigiri’, which are rice balls moulded by hand into triangles or ovoids, the Japanese version of a sandwich.

There are other forms of nigiri sushi you can order in a sushi shop. There’s gunkan, often called ‘ships’ in Australia: a small loaf of rice with a taller skirt of nori seaweed that forms a kind of enclosure so that seafood which would slide off a nigiri, like ikura, salmon eggs, or uni, sea urchin, can be contained. Hosomaki: nori, rice and a filling of fish, takuan pickle, nattō or cucumber rolled tight in a bamboo mat in such a way that the roll has square corners, then cut into six or eight even pieces and served in two neat rows. Or temaki, which means ‘hand-wrapped’, where rice and filling are laid diagonally on a square of nori and rolled by hand into a cone shape. Temaki is the easiest to serve guests at home. The fun is in the DIY nature of it; guests help themselves to the nori squares, sushi rice and their choice of fillings laid out on the table, then roll their own temaki, dip it into their little dish of shōyu and eat.

You will not find inside-out rolls, beef, avocado, pumpkin or mango, crabsticks or mayonnaise in traditional, authentic sushiya in Japan. These are western inventions, though you might find California rolls in the cheaper sushi trains, or pre-packaged in the chilled section of a neighbourhood 7-Eleven. But these are a far cry from Edomae sushi.

If I ever had to choose what to eat for my last meal, I wouldn’t hesitate for a millisecond: Edomae sushi. If anyone asked my family what my favourite washoku is, they’d echo that. Growing up, my enthusiasm for it verged on fanaticism. At seven, I announced in a Tokyo sushi shop, to everyone’s amusement, that I planned to marry a sushi itamae so I could eat it every day; although, as my mother would say, the reality would have meant very little time eating sushi and lots of time on my feet working long hours, seven days a week, helping to run the business. The family joke was that I’d marry for sushi, rather than for love.

When I left for boarding school, my mother gave me a poster of the best nigiri sushi varieties so I could look at them at least, even if I couldn’t eat them. I kept it under my pillow as we weren’t allowed posters on our dormitory walls.

The nigiri sushi that sets me alight isn’t the kind you’d find in a sushi train, even in Japan. The eye-watering bill at the end of a meal at an authentic Edomae sushi shop, ordering as you go, reflects the difference. Many have one or more Michelin stars and typically only seat between eight and fifteen people; you’re looking at upwards of three to four hundred Australian dollars per head. True Edomae sushi eaten at the counter of a fine sushiya is a memorable, once-in-a-while luxury. I’m so thankful to have had the privilege of being treated to a meal in such places, not only by my uncle, but also by my mother’s sister, by my Obā-chan, my father, and by my parents’ Japanese friends. There’s no other eating experience I’ve had that can compare, despite transcendental moments eating in restaurants serving other types of washoku cuisine, or at Michelin-starred restaurants in England or France.

When I say I’m a huge fan of sushi, I know I’m a member of a club that probably includes most of the Japanese population. It’s a national culinary treasure.

My uncle used to tease me that if I misbehaved he’d take me to kaitenzushi – sushi train – instead of his favourite sushi shops. He never followed up on his threat. Instead, many times he treated me to lunch, together with my cousins, at an excellent sushiya a few blocks away from the family shop.

Cries of Irasshaimase! – Welcome! – would greet us when we walked in, as is customary when you walk into any shop in Japan. The itamae-san and his wife knew the family well and lavished attention on us children. We’d sit on the high stools at the counter in front of the itamae-san and the wakiita who worked alongside him. Kicking our legs in anticipation, we’d eye the narrow glass cabinet that extended the length of the counter, where the season’s fish, crustaceans and shellfish were on colourful display.

My uncle ordered the hot green tea that’s the customary drink when eating sushi, calling out, Ocha kudasai! which would trigger shouts of Ei! Getapin! first from the itamae-san, swiftly echoed by his wakiita and then by the okusan, the itamae-san’s wife. Answering: Getapin! Hai, hai! she’d hurry around the back and pour the tea into the chunky, oversized yunomi teacups that are standard in sushi shops (instead of the small, delicate porcelain type found in other washoku restaurants). The salty shōyu the sushi is dipped into is thirst-inducing, and the earthy, grassy flavour of the hot tea pairs so deliciously with the sushi that large cups save the okusan from constantly having to refill the tea. She’d bring the cups to us on a tray, along with hot, neatly rolled damp towels laid in narrow trays for wiping our hands before we ate.

Hands clean, we’d each call out our individual sushi order to the itamae-san, one variety at a time. My uncle taught us what was best to eat each season, and the general rule is to start with the lighter cuts of fish before building up to the oilier fish, like maguro or ōtoro, both the fattiest parts of tuna, or anago, freshwater Japanese eel. One of the few nigiri sushi where the seafood is cooked, the eel is steamed, skinned, deboned, sliced and draped on the little loaf of rice, then daubed with a sticky, salty, sweet taré (pronounced ‘ta-ray’) sauce.

Hamachi! I’d call, then Aji! or Akagai! Maguro! Kohada! Mirugai! Amaebi! Ōtoro! Anago! Tamago!

Amberjack! Horse mackerel! Ark clam! Medium-fat tuna! Gizzard shad! Pacific geoduck clam! Sweet prawn! Tuna belly! Steamed freshwater eel! Sweet egg!

We’d watch the itamae-san slice two perfectly proportioned pieces from a gleaming hunk of fish, or use his huge sharp knife to open up the shellfish he’d taken out of the cabinet. Then at lightning speed he’d scoop up a handful of slightly warm, sugar-and-vinegar-seasoned rice from a wooden vat and knead it with deft fingers into two evenly shaped, tiny loaves. He’d take one of the loaves of rice in one hand, then flash a finger into a pot of pale green wasabi and dab a smear on top of the rice so fast that if you blinked you’d miss it, then use two fingers laid flat to mould the rice with the piece of fish on top, and then repeat the same actions for the other loaf of rice. More recently, the finer sushiya have moved away from the custom of serving two nigiri of the same type for each order, serving just one piece instead; it somehow makes the quality of whatever you’ve chosen stand out all the more, and it allows you to eat double the variety without filling up too soon. Some of them don’t offer little saucers to pour your own shōyu into, either, instead dabbing a little shōyu on the fish with a brush, so that you get exactly the right amount for a perfectly balanced mouthful.

An exemplary serving of nigiri sushi has fine, tapered oblongs of fish draped elegantly over the rice which must, of course, be pert, cool and sparkling-fresh. It’s usually been caught the same morning. The ratio of fish to rice must be just so – a little more fish than rice, but not too much. The rice should be a fraction warmer than room temperature, the grains firm and sticky, but not too moist; the sweetened vinegar and salt should subtly flavour the rice, noticeable only if missing. The little dab of wasabi goes in the exact centre of the rice under the fish; just enough to liven up your mouthful, but not so much that your eyes water. When we were kids, we’d ask for ‘wasabi-nuki’ – without wasabi – but the itamae-san was so used to moving his hands in the same way each time that sometimes he’d accidentally dab some wasabi in there; lucky for the adults who were with us as, apologising, he’d give the pair of nigiri to one of them instead, no charge.

The itamae-san’s hands moved as if he could mould sushi in his sleep, keeping up his conversation with my uncle except for the moments when he sliced the fish, when he’d become utterly focused. The time between calling out our order and the moment he placed the identical twin pieces of sushi on the polished counter in front of us was – as it should be at all good sushiya counters – less than a minute. We’d dab our sushi into our little saucers of shōyu with our chopsticks – etiquette dictates you dab it fish side down, without letting it fall off the rice it sits on and without leaving any grains of rice in your shōyu. Not too much, either.

Itamae means ‘in front of the cutting board’, and wakiita – the trainee – means ‘to the side of the cutting board’. The senior itamae is respectfully addressed using the honorific suffix ‘san’. A novice aspiring to itamae-ship must train for at least five years before he can become an apprentice, and even then, won’t be permitted to prepare the fish until he’s trained for many years more. At first, he might only be allowed to toast the nori, the dried seaweed sheets used to wrap cones of temaki sushi, or makizushi, which the itamae makes by using a bamboo makisu mat to roll the nori tightly around the rice and chosen filling before slicing into half a dozen immaculate one-inch square cubes, serving them in two neat rows of three. Eventually, the wakiita might be allowed to prepare the rice under the watchful eye of the itamae-san, using the precise proportions of rice vinegar, sugar and salt that are jealously guarded by each establishment.

After years of working at these menial tasks, a wakiita might finally be allowed to prepare the fish that will go in the display cabinet. It will take many more years of hard work and commitment before he earns the right to shape the sushi himself and serve it to customers at the counter as the itamae. By the time he becomes a sushi master, he’ll have studied all there is to know about the different fish, crustaceans and shellfish he serves, and the perfect way to cut, slice and serve them. He’ll have learned how to move with smooth, swift and calm efficiency behind his counter – not just his hands but his whole body – and become skilled in the art of relaxed conversation with the customers sitting in front of him while he works.

If you’ve ever watched David Gelb’s 2011 documentary film Jiro Dreams of Sushi, you’ll understand the all-consuming dedication of a great sushi master. Jiro’s obsession with perfecting sushi in his triple-Michelin-starred sushiya was especially challenging for his two adult sons, both of whom spent years on the most menial and monotonous of tasks, doing nothing more than toasting sheets of nori or preparing the egg for the tamagoyaki. Jiro has exceptionally high standards, as you’d expect from a Michelin-starred itamae master. He’s since lost those three stars, but only because he no longer takes bookings from members of the public, which means Michelin can’t list him in their guide; only regulars, guests in luxury hotels booking through the concierge, or those with special personal connections in the city can eat there now. He’s still the best sushi itamae in the world. Born in 1925, he’s 97 years old as I write, and still making the best sushi in Japan. He’s never taken a day off work. And it took more than a decade before Jiro allowed either of his sons anywhere near the fish.

Using the gendered pronoun ‘he’ when writing about itamae is deliberate. Sushi itamaeship in Japan is a deeply masculine world that’s extremely hard for women to break into. Few women have made it to sushi master level; many train for the first five years at a sushi training college, but it’s almost impossible for them to find an apprenticeship when they graduate, and most end up cooking different types of washoku in less discriminatory restaurant environments, or making sushi overseas. The excuses given for this discrimination vary: women’s hands are too warm to handle the fish; or their pheromones taint the sushi; or the female sense of smell is affected by hormonal cycles, making women unable to select the best seafood with consistency. A significant part of sushi itamaeship is about maintaining supreme cleanliness. It’s possible that the belief in some cultures that women are unclean when they menstruate is also an unspoken factor. Then there’s the old-fashioned, cover-all excuse that it goes against tradition. When Yuki Chizui, one of the very few women who’ve made it to itamae level, started out, the predominantly male fish vendors in Tsukiji market refused to sell their produce to her. Having worked long and hard to earn their respect, she no longer has these issues, but continues to work towards making much-needed changes to the machismo of itamae culture.

I was ignorant of such things when I was a child; it was simply accepted then that there were no female itamae in Tokyo sushi shops, and I would have been so enraptured by what I was eating I’d never have stopped to wonder why all the itamae who served me were men.

When Anthony Bourdain ate his first Edo-style sushi meal in a fine Tokyo sushiya in the first episode of A Cook’s Tour, he was served ōtoro nigiri sushi – fat belly tuna. He ate it, and fell into a long silence. When he finally managed to get the words out, he said: ‘You’re struck dumb. You’re almost cheapening the thing by talking about it.’

Bourdain instantly sensed how the ritual of eating fine food like this is sacred in Japan, likening the experience to worshipping at a ‘church of food’. He talked about that particular sushi meal as ‘one of the most incredible dining experiences of my life’.

He’d return many more times to Japan, especially to Tokyo, having falling in love with the city, the culture, the people and, of course, the food, and he made enduring friendships in the itamae world. Tokyo loved him right back. Its food-loving people recognised that Bourdain really got it, understood the profound feelings this culinary culture instils in Japanese people, and respected his modest acknowledgement that he’d never grasp the full richness of it. When Bourdain took his own life in 2018, Japanese itamae chefs openly wept while being interviewed about him on camera, and the city went into mourning. I confess I did, too.

Thirty years ago, the okusan at the neighbourhood sushiya gave me one of their hand-made yunomi cups to keep. It’s matte green, the colour of wasabi, with the name of the shop, Kamome – seagull – inscribed with a calligraphy brush on its side in white glaze. The shop no longer exists, the itamae-san having retired without passing on the business to anyone, but I still have the teacup. I use it to quench my thirst for hot tea whenever I make hand-rolled sushi, or grilled salted salmon and rice, or any especially salty Japanese food. I feel the familiar shape of the yunomi in my hands, the fragrant steam of the tea moistening my cheeks as I sip from it, and fly back through the decades to that tiny sushiya down the road where I once sat with my uncle and cousins, relishing every sublime mouthful of sushi, never fully comprehending, back then, just how lucky I was to be eating such miraculous food.

TONJIRU

Hearty winter misoshiru with pork and vegetables

Serves 4

INGREDIENTS

Vegetable oil, for frying

200g lean boneless pork, thinly sliced

4 fresh shītake mushrooms, cut into quarters

50g daikon, peeled and sliced into 0.5cm rounds

1 medium-sized carrot, peeled and cut into 1cm rounds

2 medium-sized potatoes, peeled and cut into 1.5cm cubes

200g firm tofu, cut into 2cm cubes

1 shop-bought frozen aburaage tofu pocket (optional), sliced into 1cm strips

880mL dashi stock

4 ½ tbsp miso paste

2 spring onions, chopped

METHOD

First, get the ‘gu’ ingredients ready. Place a little oil in a saucepan over high heat until shimmering hot. Fry the pork for a few seconds, then add the shītake mushrooms, daikon, carrot, potatoes, tofu and aburaage, if using. Once the pork changes colour, add the dashi stock, then bring to the boil, using a ladle to skim off and discard the foam that rises to the top of the dashi. Cover the pan and set to simmer over low heat for 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, place the miso paste in a small bowl with a ladleful of the hot stock and whisk until thoroughly blended and smooth. Stir about half the miso mixture into the saucepan, tasting as you go, adding more if you want a saltier, stronger taste.

Ladle into individual bowls and serve, garnishing with spring onion.

TONKATSU

Panko-crumbed pork cutlets

Serves 4

INGREDIENTS

¼ white cabbage

4 pork loin cutlets, cut into fillets about 1cm thick

Salt and white pepper to taste

2 tbsp plain flour

1 egg, beaten

1 cup panko breadcrumbs

Vegetable oil, for deep frying

Bulldog sauce, to serve*

*You should be able to find Bulldog sauce in most Asian supermarkets, but if it’s unavailable, you can make your own by combining 4 tbsp ketchup, 2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce and 2 tbsp white wine or unsweetened cooking saké and simmering in a pan for a few minutes until the alcohol has evaporated. Allow to cool before using.

METHOD

Separate the leaves from the cabbage and remove tough stalks. Layer the leaves on top of each other on a chopping board and shred as finely as possible. A food processor with a fine slicer attachment will also do the trick; just roll up the layered cabbage leaves and feed through. Place the shreds in a bowl of fresh, icy water to crispen up.

Remove rind, if any, from the pork and cut remaining fat at intervals along the edge to prevent it from shrinking and causing the pork fillet to curl up. Season both sides with salt and a little white pepper (use sparingly as it can be surprisingly hot).

Prepare three shallow bowls or deep plates wide enough for the pork cutlets: fill one with the flour, the second with the beaten egg and the third with the panko breadcrumbs.

Take a cutlet and place in the flour to coat both sides, then shake off the excess. Next, dip it into the egg, both sides, allowing the excess to drip off before pressing into the panko breadcrumbs with a firm hand, making sure the panko sticks and covers the meat evenly.

Place enough oil in a deep frying pan to cover the cutlets and heat to 160–170°C – it helps to use a cooking thermometer. Once the oil reaches the right temperature (if you don’t have a thermometer, you can drop in a cube of bread to see how quickly it browns), carefully slide the coated cutlets, one or two at a time, into the hot oil. Don’t add too many at once as this will lower the temperature of the oil and will result in greasy tonkatsu.

Once the cutlets have turned golden underneath (around 2–3 minutes), flip them over, turning the heat up for the final minute (until the oil reaches about 180°C) to finish. Remove from the oil with tongs or cooking chopsticks and place on a rack covered with paper towel to soak up excess oil; they can be kept warm in the oven while you fry the remaining cutlets.

Mound shredded cabbage onto each serving plate. Slice the tonkatsu cutlets into bite-sized strips about 2cm wide, then slide a fish slice or spatula underneath the whole thing and lay it next to the cabbage so the slices remain in the shape of the cutlet.

Drizzle with Bulldog sauce and serve with a bowl of freshly steamed rice.

閉塞成冬

7–11 December

Sora samuku fuyu to naru

Cold sets in, winter begins

熊蟄穴

12–16 December

Kuma ana ni komoru

Bears hibernate in their dens

鱖魚群

17–21 December

Sake no uo muragaru

Salmon gather and swim upstream

For a mixed Japanese and English kid like me, this time of year was full of the promise of abundance. The oseibō gift-giving season begins at the start of December, and there was the anticipation of Christmas and Oshōgatsu (New Year) following the festive end of the semester at my international school.

Oseibō is the winter version of ochūgen in summer, the two times of the year designated for giving gifts to express gratitude to people who play a role in family or professional life: customers, colleagues, suppliers, doctors, teachers, neighbours, friends and loved ones. We’d receive boxes of oseibō from the family bank, insurance company, and the local bakery where we were regulars, and from customers who shipped their products through the shipping company my father worked for. The gifts were usually of food – though we’d receive the occasional set of tenugui hand-towels or glassware – most often gourmet items you wouldn’t think of buying for yourself, packed into beautiful tins and wooden boxes wrapped in furoshiki cloths you could keep for storing treasures in. I still use some of those boxes and cloths all these decades later.

Ōkī Oji-chan and Obā-chan received so many oseibō gifts they’d sometimes have to pass things on to my mother. We’d enjoy the fancy French sablé biscuits; the traditional senbei rice crackers and expensive gourmet jams and spreads; the preserved mentaiko, spicy fish roe, delivered in insulated boxes full of dry ice, which I loved to drop into bowls of water so that thick mists flowed across the table while I stood over them pretending to chant magic spells. We’d receive earthy, wood-like wedges of fragrant dried bonito, packed complete with the special wooden shaving box needed to make curls of katsubushi for dashi stock, or to sprinkle over okazu. Even the less glamorous gifts, like huge tins of top-quality cooking oil or dried udon noodles, were gratefully received.

My two favourite oseibō boxes, which I’d await with anticipation each winter, were from the sumo stable my father sponsored and from a paper-pulp company that shipped its products with his company. The sumo box contained a giant slab of milk chocolate moulded in a 3D bas-relief of the latest yokozuna champion in full ceremonial dress, and a selection of tea cups and rice bowls with different sumo-themed designs. The pulp company box was a demonstration of all the wonderful things you could do with paper, the prettily patterned box itself octagon shaped with a detachable lid, so large it came as high as my waist when I was younger. The paper products it contained, from decorated cups to fans, from floral decorations to notebooks and writing pads, lasted all year.

The department stores had special ochūgen and oseibō departments, and the food courts in their basements would be heaving with customers. It was a frantic time of year at the family shop, with hundreds of orders coming in for the beautifully wrapped paulownia-wood boxes packed with the best selection of tsukudani. My mother often went to help out. The family didn’t get much respite even when oseibō was over; they then had to get on to preparing the osechi – special food that’s eaten cold on New Year’s Day – straight away.

When I was growing up, you didn’t often see salmon in sushi shops. It was most often eaten, grilled, as an okazu in an ichijū-sansai home-cooked meal. If you did find salmon sushi, it was usually in the cheaper sushi trains where it was called ‘sāmon’ instead of the Japanese ‘shaké’, the Japanese pronunciation of ‘salmon’ reflecting its non-traditional style.

In western countries, salmon is usually steamed, fried or baked as it is, but Japanese cuisine has many more delicious ways of preparing shaké. In Tokyo you can buy different varieties of fish preserved in the indigenous Ainu manner in department store food stalls; I remember peeking into knee-high wooden barrels packed with salmon fillets – skin on, always – buried in salt or miso, the saltiness drawing out the moisture from the flesh to make it perkier, more flavoursome, or in saké lees, which made the salmon sweet and juicy.

My mother always made shiojaké, salmon semi-cured with salt, and I continue to eat salmon this way as it’s so much more delicious than cooking it as it is when you buy it from the fishmongers. You grill the shiojaké belly side up until the flesh is opaque – not yet browning – then flip it over, carefully, so the skin is on top. Once it’s golden and crisp, it’s ready, and you can eat it on hot rice, and always with hōjicha or green tea. There’s something magical about the combination of this salted salmon with the tea, a perfect marrying of flavours, like apple and cinnamon, or strawberries and cream. When cooled, you can flake the salmon and use it as a filling for onigiri; or mix through rice, maybe with some shredded shiso (also known as perilla) leaves, or toasted white sesame seeds and fine shreds of nori seaweed; or add to ochazuke, my favourite way of eating leftover shiojaké and rice. Rice topped with rosy flakes of shiojaké, a packet of the ubiquitous Nagatanien ochazukenori, and hot hōji tea makes the healthiest, tastiest washoku-style fast food.

I always leave the strip of salmon skin for last, keeping it out of the tea to avoid it getting soggy before I’m ready to eat it. Semi-cured with salt and grilled, it’s food fit for the gods. Once cooled, it becomes perfectly crisp, toothsome and deeply savoury. The belly end is the fattiest and most luxurious, simultaneously crunchy and melt-in-the-mouth. I’ve exhorted non-Japanese friends or family many times not to strip off the skin and throw it away. My cry of No! That’s the best bit! is often met with grimaces of disgust: Fish skin? they say, Urgh, no thanks. Whenever I manage to persuade a shiojaké-skin newbie to try some, I love watching their scrunched-up look of anticipated horror transform to wide-eyed wonder at the sublime deliciousness. Another convert, I think. If you’re going to eat a living creature, best to eat as much of it as possible. British fine-dining chef Heston Blumenthal cottoned on to it long ago – he removes the skin from a huge side of salmon in one piece and stretches it across a board, curing it with salt before slow roasting it in his high-tech kitchen lab. He serves it broken into pieces, like brittle.

I buy several salmon fillets at a time from our local fishmongers, so I can salt them in bulk and freeze them. If you buy fillets with the skin on, make sure they have been scaled. If they haven’t, you’ll need to scrape the scales off using the blunt edge of your knife, which can be a messy business, so do it over a sink. Forget to scale your salmon and you’ll find yourself munching on something akin to fingernails, not a pleasant experience. But whatever you do, don’t throw away the skin, or buy skinless fillets. You’re missing out on a great gourmet delicacy.

A few years ago, I made up a dish to serve to friends who came to dinner. Fancying myself a contender for MasterChef, I smeared a bright, leaf-green spoonful of smooth edamame purée onto a dark plate. Next I arranged a few slices of peachy-pink salmon sashimi, fresh from the fishmongers, carefully deboned and sliced as thinly and artistically as possible. Next to this, I placed a slender fillet of shio-jake, sizzling from the grill, golden skin still on. In the opposite corner I turned out a moulded mound of fresh-steamed Japanese rice, containing a few grains I’d coloured red with beetroot juice, and topped it with a sprinkling of finely shredded nori and toasted white sesame seeds. I finished plating with a careful placement of microgreens, what a chef my husband used to work with called ‘a little bit of bullshit’. It wasn’t a traditional kaiseki dish, or as expert a dish as you’d find in a Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris; I knew the shiojaké did all the work to tickle my guests’ tastebuds, but I felt a certain smug satisfaction as I stood back to admire the colourful plate. A fusion of two cultures: hafu, just like me.

One of my favourite things about winter in Tokyo was, and still is, the appearance of the household kotatsu. The traditional low chabudai table is transformed into a kotatsu by attaching a heating element protected by a basket underneath, draping an oversized, padded kotatsu-buton – a square quilt specially used for this purpose – over the top and fixing it in place with a solid tabletop. You can eat, study, read or watch TV with your legs tucked underneath, all toasty-warm, the kotatsu-buton pulled up to cover as much of the upper body as possible. The kotatsu is a communal space; it gathers the family together, everyone basking in the warmth while getting on with their own thing. It also reduces the need for heating the rest of the house. I hanker after one for the cold South Australian winters, but they’re hard to find without cumbersome voltage transformers, and they don’t come cheap. I haven’t given up my search just yet; they are supremely comforting, as well as warm.

Obā-chan had a kotatsu that came out as soon as the weather turned cold. After a busy weekend morning in the shop, Ōkī Oji-chan would come up to the seventh floor to share a bite to eat with us. After he finished, he’d lie back on the tatami for his nap before heading back to work. Fingers nonchalantly interlaced behind his head, still cross-legged and toasty under the kotatsu with the warm quilt pulled over his belly, he’d softly snore while Obā-chan, my mother and I sat beside him, eating snacks, mikan mandarins and drinking hōji tea, topping up the teapot from the enormous denki-potto, a thermal hot water pot Obā-chan filled each morning so we didn’t have to keep getting up to go to the kitchen. Obā-chan’s kotatsu was small; Obā-chan sat neatly with her legs folded underneath her on her zabuton while my mother sat with legs elegantly folded to one side. The taller I grew, the more space my legs would take up beneath the kotatsu, and sometimes I’d stretch my legs across under the kotatsu-buton to tickle my mother’s feet with my toes. KYĀ! Yamenasai! Stop it! she’d scold. Obā-chan would chuckle her soft, laugh, and I’d burrow down under the kotatsu-buton, feeling like a Hokkaido brown bear nestling into its cosy den, ready to hibernate through the winter.

Kotatsu often made an appearance in TV series and manga comics, as they provided the perfect focus for any family tensions and dramas. Eating meals occupied only a fraction of the time families spent around the kotatsu in winter; there’d always be someone or other sitting there reading, talking, studying, watching TV or arguing. It made a regular appearance in one of my favourite manga comics of the late 80s and early 90s, the best-selling series Chibi Maruko-chan (Little Maruko-chan). The first stories appeared in the hugely popular monthly magazine Ribon, an inches-thick colour newsprint volume of manga stories by different artists aimed at teenaged girls. It came packed with themed goodies every month. I’d started buying it in the 70s with my pocket money, long before I left for boarding school, but Chibi Maruko-chan didn’t make an appearance in it until I was in my late teens, after I’d been sent to England. My mother bought the first volume of the independent Chibi Maruko-chan series for me on a visit back home to Tokyo, and I was hooked. It was the first of a new genre of hybrid essay/manga comics aimed at older teenage girls, and appealed to women, too.

The author of Chibi Maruko-chan, Sakura Momoko, whose original name was Miura Miki, was born two years before me, and grew up in suburban Shōwa-era Japan. The semi-autobiographical series depicted the life of eponymous nine-year-old lead character Sakura ‘Maruko’ Momoko in the mid-1970s. She lived with her parents, Sumire and Hiroshi, her eleven-year-old sister, Sakiko, her kind, talkative and absent-minded grandfather, Tomozō, and her almost entirely silent but wise, kimono-clad, bespectacled grandmother, Kotake. Many a hilarious family conversation took place around a winter kotatsu, which Chibi Maruko-chan loved just as much as I did.

The stories were laugh-out-loud funny and heartbreaking by turns, sometimes making me weep either way. One by one, I collected each of the seventeen volumes, sometimes bought for me by my mother, or by my aunt, her older sister. Later, in the early 90s when I lived for a few months in my Obā-chan’s old apartment in Tokyo while I worked out my internship at the Ginza art gallery, I bought Sakura’s two volumes of illustrated essays. The manga had been made into an animated TV series by then, so popular that a new series was planned for 2020, though it had to be cancelled because of the COVID pandemic.

My mother loved the manga comic series, too; she’d write out phonetic furigana characters in pencil alongside the less familiar kanji so I could read them more easily, snorting with laughter as she worked, unable to resist showing me the funniest bits. The nostalgic Shōwa-era flavour of the stories gave me enormous pleasure, stranded as I was in England back then, struggling with the erasure of my Japanese self and my past: Sakura Momoko’s references to TV ads, famous actors and singers, popular songs, games, toys, sayings, to snacks and childish food crazes from the time, made me feel I was still connected to something, to memories shared by people my age back home.

I still own all of the volumes, though after my mother died I hadn’t looked at them until writing this book. Chibi Maruko-chan’s mother, Sumire, was so much like my own, with her loose-curled perm and apron, and the way she scolded Chibi Maruko-chan for the sorts of transgressions I was often guilty of when I was nine. We used to read them together, and talk about them, repeating the funny bits and laughing until we cried; I knew the sight of her handwritten furigana would unleash the grief I’d worked hard to suppress.

As I began to write in these pages about Chibi Maruko-chan, I took the well-travelled volumes off my bookshelf for the first time in decades, and began to read again, starting at the beginning. I opened the first book, turning the pages from right to left. Japanese stories read from right to left, with the text running from top to bottom on the page, so what would be the back cover of a book in English is the front in Japan. Like my two cultures themselves, opposite. The sight of Sumire and my mother’s hand-written furigana opened a crack somewhere deep in my heart, but as I laughed, the crack filled back in, just a little.

I did a little research to see whether Sakura Momoko had written any more volumes, and it was then I saw that she had died, of breast cancer, in 2018. It would have been big news in Japan, but with my surviving aunt suffering from dementia, my mother and uncle long gone, Sakura Momoko’s death had completely passed me by. She was only fifty-three years old.

In December, the wild salmon of Hokkaido in the north return from the ocean to the icy mountain rivers to spawn. Brown bears lie in wait as the fish expend the last of their energy to leap as high as three metres into the air, throwing themselves over and over again up rapids and rocks, pushing upstream against the powerful, icy current as they fight their way back to where they were born. Catching them is not easy; the bears balance precariously on boulders, lunging forward in the hope that their jaws clamp shut at just the right moment, when a fish is leaping; that their long claws will hook a meal as they swipe into the roiling waters. They try and fail; try and fail again, until they succeed. They need to conserve as much energy as they can while obeying their instinct to lay down as much fat as possible to last them through the long winter hibernation, so that in spring, they might find a mate, perhaps birth some cubs if the conditions are right. The salmon need to return home to spawn the next generation before they die, to ensure the cycle of life continues.

MY HAFU JAPANESE–EUROPEAN DINNER-PARTY DISH

Salmon two ways, with edamame purée and rice

Serves 4

This is my take on a fusion Japanese dish that looks fiddly but is relatively easy to make. It looks pretty plated up and, made with good-quality, simple ingredients, it tastes good, too. It’s perfect for a dinner party; just get as much ready as possible in advance before grilling the shiojaké and plating up. The sashimi is served cold, of course, and the rice nice and hot – it’s best kept in the rice cooker until it’s needed.

INGREDIENTS

1 small beetroot

2 tsp hot water

4 cups steamed Japanese rice

3 cups edamame beans, removed from their pods

1 tbsp olive oil

1 tsp lemon juice

Salt and pepper to taste

1 sashimi-grade salmon fillet, skinned and boned

4 salmon fillets (100g each) prepared a day or two before as shiojaké

Salmon caviar (optional)

METHOD

Preheat oven to 180°C. Trim leaves and especially long roots from the beetroot, wash and wrap in foil. There’s no need to peel it. Place the foil-wrapped beetroot on a baking tray to catch any drips and roast for about 30–40 minutes or until the beetroot is soft and cooked through. If a skewer slides easily into the middle, it’s done. Take out of the oven and set aside to cool. Unwrap the foil and peel off the skin – it should slide off easily. I find it easier to do this in a bowl of cool water, especially if the beetroot is still on the hot side.

Rinse the beetroot with water before blending it in a food processor or with a stick blender. Mix in 2 tbsp hot water, then tip into a sieve or piece of muslin and set over a small bowl or cup to drip through. Add 3 tbsp of your cooked rice to the juice, lightly stir, and drain well. This is primarily to add flecks of spectacular colour to the dish; if you’re not a fan of beetroot, don’t worry as you won’t necessarily notice the taste. If you are a fan of beetroot, don’t waste the purée – you can add it to a smoothie, eat it as it is, seasoned with salt and pepper, or mix it into some yoghurt and season it to make a beetroot dip.

Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil and blanch the edamame for 2–3 minutes. Drain thoroughly. Use a stick blender or food processor to blend into a purée with the olive oil and lemon juice. Season with salt and pepper to taste and set aside.

Grill the shiojaké until the skins are crispy, and set aside.

Add the beetroot-stained rice grains to the rest of the rice and gently mix in.

Cut the salmon into neat, thin slices.

Choose four attractive plates – I used dark-coloured ones as they really lift the colourful ingredients – and begin plating up. Spoon out the edamame purée onto each plate, smearing it across with the back of a spoon, or pooling it in whatever way you find most aesthetically pleasing. Pack each portion of rice into a mould – a coffee cup will do – and turn out on each plate beside the purée.

Arrange the salmon sashimi slices and the grilled shiojaké as you like. If you want to go the full deluxe version, dot the dishes with glowing, gem-like salmon caviar.

乃東生

22–26 December

Natsukarekusa shōzu

Self-heal sprouts

麋角解

27–31 December

Sawashika no tsuno otsuru

Deer shed antlers

雪下出麦

1–4 January

Yuki watarite mugi nobiru

Wheat sprouts under snow

The most significant annual celebrations belonging to each of my cultures occur in this sekki: Christmas and Oshōgatsu – Japanese New Year. It’s a busy time of year, and one I looked forward to eagerly as a child.

Even in the 70s, Christmas-themed decorations would begin to appear in the shops early in December. There’s a significant Christian community in Japan, comprising about 1 per cent of the population, dating back to the 16th century, when Portuguese missionaries arrived on their black ships. Despite centuries of persecution by the Tokugawa shogunate, which feared that the European colonisation that had reached the Philippines would enter Japan by stealth, there are now hundreds of churches across Japan, and Christmas is celebrated by everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

Oshōgatsu, on the other hand, is a home-grown celebration, and when I was growing up in Tokyo, the more significant of the two, by far. Observed in both Shintōism and Zen Buddhism, the rituals performed during the week-long celebration symbolise a quiet letting go of the past, so that another year can begin anew.

~

The sekki of Tōji contains the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, culminating in the longest night. The solstice is the turning point after which the days begin to grow longer again as spring moves closer. According to the ancient Chinese cosmology that formed the basis for the ancient Japanese system of Onmyōdō (‘the way of Yin and Yang’) at the start of the 6th century, the dark of night and cold of winter represented negative, slow, passive, damp, cold Yin energy, while daylight and the warmer days were manifestations of positive, dynamic, dry, hot Yang energy.

The concept of Yin and Yang, symbolised by a black comma and a white comma interlocking to make a dynamic circle, acknowledges how darkness and light, negative and positive, destruction and creation, death and birth are necessary parts of a whole. One force cannot exist without the other; there can be no positive without a negative, no growth without decay. Even in the depths of winter, the stirring Yang forces of spring begin to push away the Yin. As noted in the kō of this sekki, sprouts of natsukarekusa, self-heal, and green shoots of barley, rye and wheat emerge from the soil, deep beneath blanketing snow. Time forever rolls onwards.

My parents marked Christmas quietly at home, my mother decorating the plastic tree – there’d have been no easy way of obtaining a real one in Tokyo back then – with tasteful red-and-white wooden ornaments she’d bought on her trips with my father to Norway and Sweden. We each gave and received one present; some relatives occasionally posted the odd package, but my presents from my parents, my English grandmother and Obā-chan were always the best. I would leave one of my father’s rugby socks at the end of my bed on Christmas Eve, reassured by my father’s explanation that Santa’s magical powers meant he could go anywhere he chose, after I questioned Santa’s ability to enter our thirteenth floor apartment without the aid of a chimney. I loved the rustling sound and heavy weight of it against my toes in the morning, knobbly with its mysterious contents. Of course, both my parents had secretly collected these little knick-knacks throughout the year, but until I was seven, I believed that the red-and-white Coca-Cola Santa was the one who had left the set of oversized, flattened, gorgeously multicoloured paperclips I still own; packets of vinegar-flavoured konbu seaweed (ah, how well he knew how to source my favourites, impressive given the lack of dagashiya stores in Lapland); my little Sanrio notepads, pens and stickers; and the rectangular, transparent acrylic paperweight that bore the words, in red capital letters, ‘I’M NUMBER 2, I DON’T TRY AT ALL.’ Santa knew what all children got up to, I thought, so it was his way of admonishing me for my flaws.

When I discovered, on a routine childish snoop through household cupboards, a treasure that later appeared in the annual rugby sock, the game was up. My decision not to inform my parents for two more years about my discovery that Santa wasn’t real (my apologies for the spoiler) was a multifaceted one. I didn’t want to confess I’d been snooping, and I didn’t want the Christmas stocking tradition to end, but it was also because I wanted to save them the embarrassment of being found out for telling a fib and, finally, because I felt a peculiar urge to protect my parents from witnessing my loss of innocence. I was an odd child.

At Christmas time, Japanese department store patisseries sell fluffy, delicious chocolate-buttercream-covered Yule-log cakes with cute decorations of red-nosed reindeers and snowmen. I preferred these light and fluffy confections to the heavy, rich fruitcake covered in marzipan and tooth-breakingly hard icing that I encountered in England.

Christmas in Japan is idiosyncratically, well, Japanese. The most prevalent Christmas tradition, which increased momentum after I’d left for boarding school and is often regarded with utter bewilderment by non-Japanese people, grew from a marketing campaign devised by the Harvard-educated CEO and president of Kentucky Fried Chicken Japan, Okawara Takeshi. The story goes that in the mid-1970s, he overheard western customers talking about how much they missed eating turkey at Christmas. Not long after, he coined the phrase ‘Kurisumasu ni wa Kentakkī’ (‘Kentucky for Christmas’) and it became part of a popular marketing campaign. By the 80s, the practice of heading to KFC to buy a special ‘Christmas barrel’ had become so popular the meals had to be ordered in advance, and even then, people queued outside for hours to purchase them. Last year, the BBC reported that 3.6 million Japanese customers celebrated Christmas this way, increasing sales tenfold for KFC Japan at this time of year.

As with so much else in my mother country that combines the sacred with the profane, or ancient tradition with high-tech modernity, there’s a prevailing mindset that accepts the co-existence of such odd contradictions. Whenever I hear people mock this practice, my mind turns to equally commercial drivers for elements of Christmas in traditionally Christian nations; it turns to the excessive consumption of food, of too many costly gifts that often seem to lead to burgeoning credit card debt. But I think, too, of the joy of sharing meals and time with loved ones, of gifts thoughtfully given and gratefully received, of parents who pass on the excitement of this time of year to their children, who go on to do the same for their own. It is, after all, a day to share with others for those lucky enough to be able to do so, regardless of whether weekly church services had been attended throughout the year, a day to share food together. The Japanese KFC tradition, as besmirched as it is by its fast-food, market-savvy commercialism and the controversies that attend chicken farming, doesn’t seem to me to be so far removed from that.

At home in Tokyo, we didn’t have any special meal that I remember. It’s likely we went out to eat at a nice restaurant somewhere. Christmas isn’t a public holiday in Japan, so everything remains open. Some years, we flew to England to spend Christmas with my family there. While my grandparents were alive, and long after my grandmother became a widow, those Christmases at the farmhouse in Hawkshead were glorious, idyllic. The family would all chip in with getting everything ready for Christmas day, teaming together to set up the enormous Christmas tree in the converted barn sitting room, the kitchen bustling with people decorating the Christmas cake, arranging flowers, making bread sauce for the turkey. At its height, the family comprised one grandmother, thirteen cousins, four aunts, four uncles, one great aunt, nine dogs and, on one occasion, two black Shetland ponies driven down in a horsebox from their home in the Borders by one of the two Scottish branches of the family. They came with a sled they’d pull aross the snow-covered fields, bells on bridles, kids giggling and trying not to fall off the back. My grandmother borrowed long trestle tables from Hawkshead Village hall, which stretched the length of the room. You could only see the top half of the glistening Christmas tree, with mountains of gifts piled high beneath. The adults grew rosy-faced from the crackling log fire and from the glasses of sherry, wine and brandy, and sugared up, the kids would play shouty games of charades. We’d gather around my grandmother’s piano, and once I got over my self-consciousness, would be persuaded to play the accompaniment to my family’s enthusiastic carol singing, my uncles and father trying to outdo each other’s enthusiasm, complete with gestures and the swinging of brandy glasses in wassail. Those moments, lost after my grandmother died and the farmhouse was sold, after my cousins grew up to have families of their own, are deeply felt, treasured memories too.

Just as spring follows winter, New Year – Oshōgatsu – comes after Christmas. Unlike the celebrations in England and Australia, New Year in Japan was a quieter, more contemplative experience, although there was fun to be had, too, and gifts of otoshidama (New Year money) for the children. It’s an opportunity to wipe the slate clean; by ōmisoka, the final day of the year, households should have completed a thorough declutter and clean: clothes, blankets, futon and zabuton mended, washed and beaten free of dust; accounts tidied and debts settled; each family member bathed and dressed in clean clothes. It’s a symbolic purging of anything burdensome to the house, body or soul that should not be carried over into the fresh new year.

Auspicious decorations to honour the Shintō kami, protect the home and inhabitants from malign spirits, and invite abundance and health for the year ahead are put up on either the 27, 28 or 30 December. Never on the 29th – ‘ku’, the word for the number nine, sounds too much like ‘kurushī’, meaning ‘struggle’ and ‘suffering’. There are three main types of Oshōgatsu decoration. The first is the shimekazari, which comes in different sizes and styles, some with extra embellishments, but always includes the core elements of a wreath-like ring woven from ropes of fresh rice straw, sacred zigzags of white shide paper, sprigs of pine needles and a bitter orange citrus fruit called a daidai, which is auspicious because the name sounds like ‘generation after generation’ in Japanese.

Kadomatsu are made from a cluster of three pieces of green bamboo cut to different lengths and decorated with plum and pine branches. They come in pairs, flanking the entrance to the home to act as temporary places of residence for the kami when they come to bless the household. Kadomatsu means ‘gate-pine’, but ‘matsu’, the word for ‘pine’, also sounds like the word for ‘wait’; kadomatsu also carries the meaning of ‘waiting for the gods’.

The third, most potent symbol of New Year is the kagami-mochi (mirror-mochi) offered to the household gods. Two flattened rounds of mochi, one small, one slightly larger, representing Yin and Yang, are arranged with the smaller one sitting atop the larger, crowned with a daidai and adorned with sprigs of pine needles or fern leaves. As it’s a sacred offering, it’s carefully presented on a piece of red-and-white paper called a shihōbeni placed on a square wooden stand called a sanpō, and the whole thing is placed on the family’s Shintō kamidana altar, if they have one, or in the household tokonoma, the alcove where hanging scrolls and ikebana arrangements are displayed in traditional tatami rooms.

On 11 January, the shimekazari and kadomatsu are burned in a sacred ritual, and the kagami-mochi is removed from its altar in a ceremony called Kagami-biraki (Mirror-opening), where the mochi is broken into bite-sized pieces with the hands or with a special hammer – never cut with a knife – then cooked and served in ozōni, a savoury dashi broth with added gu, or zenzai, azuki beans cooked down with sugar to a thick, warming soup.

The mochi is the same type my mother used to grill for my autumnal osanji snacks, though ideally, the New Year kagami-mochi is freshly pounded. The process of pounding rice is time-consuming and requires special equipment, so most families buy their kagami-mochi dried and enclosed in a see-through plastic mould so it remains fresh. But it’s much tastier to eat just after it’s been pounded during the traditional New Year mochi-making ceremony called mochitsuki.

After the sweet mochi rice has been steamed – in vast quantities to allow for the reduction in volume that comes with the pounding – it’s turned out in a great steaming pile into a giant wooden mortar, ready for the joyful and sometimes raucous mochitsuki ceremony. Mochi-pounding requires two people with strength, stamina and impeccable timing in order to avoid injury. One stands over the mortar wielding the huge, heavy wooden mallet that will beat the rice into gooey submission, while the other, braver participant, kneels, squats or bends on the other side of the mortar with clean hands, a large bowl of cold water ready by their side. Both will have a hachimaki of twisted tenugui cotton tied around their forehead to prevent stray drops of sweat running into the eyes, or may the kami forbid, into the mochi rice itself. It’s a serious workout, especially for the mallet wielder – although the other participant will likely produce a similar amount of sweat due to adrenalin.

It begins, slowly, with the pounder arcing the huge mallet back over their shoulder, accompanied by kakegoe cries of ‘Yoooo!’, ‘Ei!’ or ‘Yoisho!’, then down it comes on the mound of steaming rice, sometimes with an enthusiastic cry of ‘Yoishooooo!’ from the spectators. As the heavy mallet, which will have been soaked in water beforehand to prevent sticking, is drawn back up, the other person swiftly wets their hand in the bowl of water and darts it into the mortar to turn the steaming rice, to ensure it’s pounded evenly. They need to be quick, because the giant mallet will already be on its downward trajectory. Yoishooooo! Down it comes again. Hui! The mochi-turner dips their hand in the water, turns the rice, removes their hand a split second before – Yoishooooo! The mallet slams down again, building up speed and rhythm. The mochi-turner is quicker now. Hui! Hand in water, turn the rice, hand out. Yoishoooo! Down comes the mallet. Rhythm is key here, and hesitation must be avoided. Usually, the pace of the pounding remains relatively sedate, the mallet descending roughly once every two seconds, but there are videos of some showier mochitsuki online. There’s one where the mallet comes down around twice a second, the mochi-turner’s hands a blur in between; it’s almost laugh-out-loud funny, but for the involuntary shudder each time the mochi-turner escapes bone-crushing injury by a millisecond.

However it’s done, the rice is pounded rhythmically, evenly, little by little, into a gloriously smooth, thick, sticky paste, and when it’s ready to eat, everyone attending the mochitsuki ceremony is given a small, gooey portion in a small bowl and a pair of chopsticks. The mochi is eaten simply, with a drizzle of good quality shōyu and maybe some finely shredded nori seaweed. While shop-bought kirimochi is delicious enough, freshly pounded, warm mochi with shōyu is highly addictive. My best experience of it was with Ōkī Oji-chan at, somewhat incongruously, the local branch of the family bank. I remember having to restrain myself from asking for a third helping, it was so delicious. The remaining mochi is often cut into pieces and dried, and I didn’t want a rumour going around the neighbourhood that Akko-chan’s kid had eaten so much mochi there was none left to keep for later.

The last night of the year, ōmisoka, is typically spent at home. Relaxing after the rush of cleaning and preparation, families gather around the cosy kotatsu to eat toshikoshi soba (‘year-crossing noodles’), snacks and endless mikan, tangerines, while watching or listening to the live simultaneous broadcast of NHK’s Kōhaku Uta Gassen (Red and White Song Competition), the most-watched music show in Japan. The best singers and musicians in the country are invited to perform by a special selection committee and split into the female akagumi (red team) and male shirogumi (white team). The show opens to great fanfare on a huge stage at NHK Hall, with dancers and marching bands, the singers dressed in fabulous costumes, fan clubs in the audience cheering on their favourites. Over four hours, performing everything from J-pop to ballads to traditional enka songs, the teams compete to earn the highest number of points, awarded by official Kōhaku judges and the audience. The teams are judged on costumes, dancing, enthusiasm and energy as well as their singing. After the winning team is announced shortly before midnight, all join in to sing ‘Hotaru no Hikari’ to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. As soon as the ticker tape and confetti have stopped falling on that year’s winners, everything quietens, and the NHK broadcast flips from the starry stage to a slow succession of still shots of Buddhist temples around Japan.

There’s one in Sapporo, the snow falling through the darkness; then another in Okinawa, shadows of swaying palm trees visible in the distance; another in the remote mountains, lit only by flaming torches; the Golden Temple in Kyoto, floodlights making it gleam. Each scene shows the temple bell, with a large bell-knocker hewn from a tree trunk suspended by ropes from the eaves of the bell-shelter, a monk holding onto the ends.

A hush falls around the kotatsu as we watch the monk slowly draw back the trunk, and then: bonggggg … the vast bell tolls the first of the 108 bell strikes called Joya no Kane, representing the number of earthly desires a person can experience in life. There’s a long pause as the reverberations fade before the monk slowly, mindfully, draws the heavy striker back again, ready for its second release: bonggggggg … Every temple around the country begins to toll away the sufferings of the previous year. The bells ring out 107 times as the year draws to a close, the final bell struck only once midnight has passed.

Spending ōmisoka this way with the family in Obā-chan’s apartment remains one of my most precious memories. Around the kotatsu, no unnecessary words were spoken as even we children sat transfixed; Obā-chan might quietly observe the beauty of a particular temple, or my mother might recall a time the family had visited one of the temples on the screen. In between each bell toll, in the silence, we all reflected on the year that had been, and pondered what the next would bring, until the final bell was rung, we were cleansed of our suffering, ready to embark on another year, and we children would fall into our futons and into a deep and happy sleep.

NEW YEAR OZONI

New Year broth with roasted mochi rice cakes
and other ingredients

Serves 4

This is what almost everyone eats on New Year’s Day, though you can have it at other times of year, too. The foundations for ozōni are a clear, well-seasoned dashi broth and roasted pounded-rice mochi cake. But besides those two constants, there’s a huge range of vegetables, meats, fish and plant proteins to choose from.

The recipe here is a standard classic. Whatever ingredients you choose, ozōni is warming, filling and tasty, and Oshōgatsu (New Year) wouldn’t quite be Oshōgatsu without it.

INGREDIENTS

4 medium-sized prawns, deveined, shells removed but tails left on

220g chicken thighs, boned and skinless

1 small carrot

5cm length daikon radish

a few sprigs of shungiku* (edible chrysanthemum leaves)

750mL dashi

½ tsp shōyu

½ tsp salt

4 dried pounded-rice mochi cakes

4 flat strips of yuzu** or other citrus peel, measuring about 3cm x 1cm

* Edible chrysanthemum leaves are available in many Asian food stores, but if you can’t find any, other tender leafy greens such as spinach, mizuna or watercress will work well, too, as well as microgreens, such as snow-pea shoots.

** If you can find it! Yuzu has gained in popularity among Australian chefs and gin distillers in recent years, though I’ve not yet seen the fresh fruit in any shops. You can buy yuzu juice in a bottle in most Japanese shops, as well as the delicious yuzukoshō, a tangy, savoury, peppery condiment, but there’s nothing to compare with the fragrance of real yuzu peel.

METHOD

Prepare all the ingredients first before assembling the bowl of ozōni.

Set a small pan of lightly salted water to simmer over medium heat. Add the prawns and cook for 2–3 minutes until pink and tender, then stop them from cooking further by putting them into a bowl of ice water.

Cut the chicken into thin, bite-sized pieces and season with salt. Simmer in a medium-sized pan in salted water until the meat turns white and opaque, then remove from the water and set aside.

Peel and thinly slice the carrot and daikon, then use a small cutter to create festive shapes. If you don’t have a cutter, use a knife to make neat, simple geometric shapes. Cook in lightly salted boiling water until softened: about 15 minutes for the daikon and about 10 minutes for the carrot. Drain and set aside.

Blanch the shingiku leaves in lightly salted water until tender, but with some bite remaining, then plunge into a bowl of cold water. Remove from the water, squeezing out the excess water, then chop into 1cm lengths.

To prepare the broth, add the dashi to a saucepan over medium-high heat until just boiling. Turn down the heat to low, add the shōyu and salt to taste.

Grill the mochi (see here) until golden. Pierce the crispy skin through several times with chopsticks, a fork or a skewer so that when added to the broth, the mochi will soak up the flavours.

As with misoshiru, the best bowls to use for ozōni are wood or lacquer owan soup bowls, but if you don’t have any, use any deep bowl with a diameter of up to 15cm. Place a mound of the shungiku or other green leaves in the bottom of each bowl and, next to that, a piece of mochi. Arrange the chicken pieces, prawns, carrot and daikon slices around them so they’re all visible and roughly in the same position in each bowl. Add the slice of yuzu or other citrus peel, then, very slowly and gently, ladle the hot broth over the ingredients in each bowl, taking care not to disturb them. Enjoy while hot.

ZENZAI

Sweet red-bean soup with roasted mochi rice cakes

Serves 4

For those with a sweet tooth, this is a bowl of comforting, warming winter bliss. It can be eaten as a dessert, or at any time of day when you need a hit of sweet, mochi-based carbs. A perfect New Year’s pick-me-up.

INGREDIENTS

180g dried azuki beans

1 ½ cups water

200g caster sugar

Pinch of salt

4 pieces dried pounded-rice mochi cakes

METHOD

A day or so before making the zenzai, wash the azuki beans, place in a large saucepan with plenty of water and set over high heat, bringing to a rolling boil. As soon as it boils, remove from heat, drain and discard water, keeping the beans in the pan. Add 750mL fresh water and soak for 24 hours.

Keep the water and the beans in the pan after soaking, discarding any beans floating on the surface of the water first. Set the pan over high heat until the water comes to a boil. Turn the heat low and simmer for an hour, or until the beans are very soft, keeping the pan half-covered and stirring from time to time with a wooden spoon and adding more water as necessary. The water should almost be completely absorbed by the time the beans are ready.

Add the water, sugar and salt. Set over a medium-high heat until about to boil, then turn down the heat and simmer until the mixture thickens into a rich, burgundy-coloured soup. Turn the heat down as low as possible to keep warm.

Grill the mochi (see here). Place a piece in each bowl, ladle the sweet azuki bean soup over the top and enjoy.

芹乃栄

5–9 January

Seri sunawachi sakau

Parsley flourishes

水泉動

10–14 January

Shimizu atataka o fukumu

Springs thaw

雉始雊

15–19 January

Kiji hajimete naku

Pheasants start to call

It would have been a magnificent meal. I’m sure of that, because my uncle arranged it. People told me afterwards how exquisite the food had been, how appropriate it had been to serve that day. Of course it was the finest washoku; only Japanese food can soothe a grieving Japanese soul. My mother would have expected nothing less.

It’s rare for me to skim over details of a fine washoku feast, but I have no recollection of what was eaten; the food was as insubstantial to me as air. Most of that cold January day remains blank and impenetrable – except for one piercing moment.

In the photos of my mother’s funeral feast, about twenty of us are sitting in a traditional tatami room, probably a private room in a restaurant – not, as I’d shockingly misremembered, in the Sōtō Zen temple where most of my mother’s remains are interred, along with those of my grandparents, uncles and ancestors.

In one of the photos, my gaunt and grey twenty-eight-year-old self sits dazed and crumpled at the table. It hurts to see my hollow cheeks, my face pale and glassy with grief, and I feel excoriated all over again, as if my insides have been scraped out. My body kneeling on the square zabuton at the low table beside my pearl-necklaced, black-kimono-clad family and friends looks to me like an empty shell, as if my soul had vacated it the night my mother lost her battle for life.

Wary of pain, I collect the shards of memory that reflect fragments from that day: the cold, milky light filtering through the white paper squares of the shōji, sliding doors, enclosing the room where we sat; the kimono-clad serving attendants’ white, tabi-socked feet that whispered across the faded gold of the tatami floor as they came and went with quiet grace. Their shadows as they kneeled on the other side of the shōji, placing laden trays aside to slide open the pale wooden screens with elegant, aligned fingers. They brought fine gyokurō tea, daiginjyo saké, bottles of Asahi beer, more delicate dishes to replace the empty ones on our trays, though I have no memory of what they contained.

In the picture, I’m sitting in seiza, the posture expected of women when seated on tatami in polite company – legs folded beneath, knees to the front, toes behind, backside resting on the heels. It’s a position that can cause pins and needles. You have to mime steady steps when you get up to disguise the fact you can’t feel the tatami under your feet and are on the verge of falling.

I’m surrounded by relatives and my mother’s friends at the centre of the long, low table set with black, rectangular lacquer trays; one for each guest, with identical arrangements of small ceramic dishes and bowls. My father is there, somewhere, too, though he is not in this photograph. I remember soft conversations spinning and drifting around me, measured out by quiet taps of chopsticks on ceramic. I remember feeling disconnected from everyone, as if I were halfway between the world of the living and the dead, trying to follow my mother into the ether, the way I used to in those recurring childhood dreams.

My parents first met in Hokkaido, at a countryside bus stop. My 26-year-old mother was on holiday with her best friend from school, waiting for a bus that would take them to a folk museum they wanted to visit. My father, on leave from his job as a shipping executive in Tokyo, was doing the same, except he couldn’t work out which bus to get as there was no English on the bus timetable, so he approached my mother and her friend for help. Since he was also planning to visit the museum, the three of them went together, and ended up spending the whole day in each other’s company.

They parted ways without exchanging contact details – for my mother and her friend, this would have been unseemly – but my mother, when my father had asked about her family, had mentioned that they owned a tsukudani shop in Tokyo, and somehow, my father managed to find it. One day, he presented himself at the shop, to my family’s shock, and asked my mother on a date. When she turned up in the lobby of the hotel where the fine restaurant he’d invited her to was perched high on the top floor, with stunning views across the city, she had her friend in tow. My father had to make a surreptitious call to the maître d’ from reception to ask for another setting to be added to his reservation for a romantic, window-side table for two.

The next time they met, my mother went alone; two years and several dates later, my father proposed, and after a celebratory feast with my mother’s friends and family in Tokyo, my father returned to England to prepare for their civil ceremony and a blessing in the family’s local church. As a Buddhist, my mother wasn’t permitted to marry in a Christian ceremony. A reception would be held at my grandparents’ beautiful house and garden in Birkenhead, beside the Mersey, where, as a boy, my father had watched ships coming and going, inspiring in him a feverish need to travel.

Both families had been hesitant, doubtful whether a marriage between two people from such disparate cultures could work. My mother landed at Heathrow Airport, with two pale blue Skyliner suitcases containing the white wedding suit and white floral crescent hat she’d had made for the occasion, a gift of a pearl necklace from her family, and new clothes for this first trip outside Japan, and her first ever on an aeroplane. While my father had been in England, my mother had written letters to him in hesitant English, using a dictionary to look up every word, but still struggled with English conversation. All the same, she was able to charm my grandparents and great-grandparents. She had the kind of smiling energy that people immediately warmed to. Still, she told me, that first night, sleeping in a guest bedroom in her future in-laws’ home, everything had felt so strange and bewildering that she stayed awake most of the night in tears, wondering what she’d done. But the next day, my great-grandmother, who’d taken an instant liking to her, had guided her about the house explaining what things were in slow English. Pointing to the telephone and lifting the receiver, she mimed making a call. ‘This … is … a … telephone,’ she’d said, and my mother had nodded and smiled, unable to bring herself to say, even if she’d had the English words for it, that telephones had long been a part of every-day life in Japan.

In the silver-framed black-and-white photograph I have of my parents’ wedding day, they stand beaming in the sunlit garden of my grandparents’ old house. It was a summer wedding. My grandmother had prepared the wedding breakfast; years later, my aunt gave me the ragged blue book my grandmother wrote her recipes in, with dishes she’d cooked over the years when entertaining guests. Each of these dinner party menus was recorded neatly in the back, together with the names of invited guests and a date. My parents’ wedding breakfast menu is in there, too, ‘Miles’ and Akiko’s Wedding Breakfast’ written in my grandmother’s confident hand and underlined, the dishes listed beneath typical of those popular at the time: devilled eggs, prawn cocktail Marie Rose, vol-au-vents, moulded salad in aspic, chicken à la king, Eton mess, fruit punch.

The nōkotsu, the ceremony of the settlement of the remains, took place the morning of the funeral feast. I stood with my family around the metal tray of grey, cremated bone fragments I’d brought with me from England. How could this be all that was left of my mother, that vibrant, funny, beautiful, imaginative and complex soul? Ōkī Oji-chan leaned over the pile with the long metal chopsticks until he found what he was looking for. He picked it up and turned to me. ‘Here’s the most important piece,’ he said, all matter-of-fact. ‘The nodobotoke.’ Nodobotoke means ‘throat Buddha’. Known in English as the Adam’s apple, it’s the laryngeal prominence, connected to the hyoid bone, that protects the vocal cords. Its shape resembles a meditating Buddha, and so is considered one of the most sacred bones in the body.

I took up my chopsticks, turned to Ōkī Oji-chan and used them to take the little bone Buddha that resided in my mother’s throat from Ōkī Oji-chan’s chopsticks. I placed it inside the speckled grey granite urn my uncle had ordered to be made for me, carved with my mother’s kaimyō, her spirit name: Kareimeigyokudaishi. It shares one kanji with her living name: 明. The ‘Aki’ in Akiko, meaning light, also pronounced ‘mei’. It was a nominal remnant of her living identity, hidden inside a new name fit for a spirit, which, when uttered, would not draw the spirit back to the material world and interrupt its path towards enlightenment.

My uncle picked up another fragment and passed it to my male cousin, who placed it in another, larger urn. There were two urns – the larger to be interred with my grandparents, my uncle Ryōji and my aunt in the family grave, and the other, smaller one, to take back with me to England, Ōkī Oji-chan said, so I could keep it close, and not be too lonely. Piece by piece, the fragments were passed from chopstick to chopstick held by all the members of the family, and placed inside the urns.

This practice is the source of the second chopstick taboo. If you share a morsel of food off your plate, pick it up with your chopsticks and leave it on the side of the recipient’s plate. Never pass a morsel of food with your chopsticks directly to someone else's, for this action is reserved only for the nōkotsu ceremony, when the bones of a loved one are laid to rest.

There are only a few small fragments in that small grey granite urn I keep inside an antique Korean cabinet I use as my ancestral altar here in my Australian home. The urn sits in a pale box of Japanese pine, hidden under a cover of gold brocade. I keep it inside the cabinet with precious things my mother owned.

On top of the Korean cabinet sits a 20-centimetre-high, red lacquer case, a miniature butsudan (‘Buddha shelf’). It holds my mother’s black lacquer spirit tablet, and every morning, I open it up to pay my respects, refilling the tiny porcelain teacup with fresh water, and lighting two sticks of incense to insert into the bronze incense burner sitting in front of it. I tap the brass prayer bowl on its little cushion, twice, with its little dark wooden stick, and it rings through the room and my head with a clear sound that feels restorative. I put my hands together and recite my mother’s, uncles’, grandparents’ spirit names, and then I might speak to them. Sometimes, in the morning, when the sun shines at a certain angle into the room, the gold-leaf interior of the red lacquer cabinet gleams with a heart-stopping, extraordinary glow.

I keep framed photographs of my mother, of Obā-chan, of Ryōji, of Ōkī Oji-chan on the altar too, and as I look at them each morning, I offer my gratitude to all of them and talk to them, even though I know they’re long gone. It’s the only way I can acknowledge the kindness shown to me by my uncle, Ōkī Oji-chan. He had provided me with all the sacred objects on the altar; the small red lacquer butsudan and my mother’s spirit tablet inside it, the prayer bell, the candlestick, the incense burner. He’d given me these things so I could keep my mother, my family, my ancestors and my Japanese spirit near. He was the one who had arranged for the interment of my mother’s ashes in the family grave in Tokyo, when traditionally, wives were meant to be interred in their husband’s family graves. He had arranged the nōkotsu, the funeral feast. None of this was part of his duty, as head of a family my mother had officially stopped being part of when she married my father. But my uncle did these things out of a quiet care for me, the only child of his beloved sister.

The last time I saw Ōkī Oji-chan, I was on my way to the train that would take me to Narita airport. I’d been on a short visit to see family and friends in Tokyo, to return to the temple where my mother had been interred so I could pay my respects at the family grave, and I was on my way back to London. I’d bowed my goodbyes to everyone in the family shop and had begun the short walk to the station, wheeling my suitcase behind me, when I heard Ōkī Oji-chan call my name. I turned to see him hurrying towards me, an indescribable expression on his usually stoic face: a kind of smiling sadness. He was older now, thinner, and a little stooped, even though he was still taller than me. In Japan, especially among men of that generation, physical signs of affection are uncommon; expressions of care are limited to bows, to words, to action. We stood facing each other in the busy Yotsuya street and he reached out to grasp my shoulder with his warm, wide palm, half-shook, half-patted it, and with a quiet smile, looked into my eyes and said: Kyā-chan no koto, keshite wasurete naikarane. You should know that I’ve never forgotten about you, Kyā-chan.

With that, he turned and I watched him walk away. It was the last thing I’d hear him say, and the last time I’d see him alive.

Sometimes I think, as I did as a child, about how close I came to not existing. If my grandfather had still been alive and forbidden my mother from agreeing to that first date; if my father or mother had turned up at that Hokkaido bus stop half an hour later; if my mother had never mentioned her family had a tsukudani shop. What were the chances of them meeting, given my father was born in Liverpool, England, and my mother in central Tokyo to a traditional Japanese family? When they were children, their countries were at war with one another.

I trace my destiny back to that bus stop, when really, as it did for every single one of us, it began over a million years ago, when our ancestors first began to wander across the surface of the earth. I think of how unlikely my existence is, how it required generation after generation and millions of ancestors to survive the tribulations and dangers of this world – wars, plagues, famines, firestorms, typhoons, earthquakes and tsunamis. I feel a profound gratitude to have my chance on this earth, despite everything, and when I pay my respects at my butsudan, it’s to all of those generations of ancestors.

My only pregnancy ended at thirteen weeks. The same gynaecological condition my mother suffered from ended my chances of having a child; perhaps a quiet blessing, given I’d been told there was a fifty–fifty chance I’d pass on the faulty gene that caused my mother’s heart condition to my child. And so this line ends with me, with no children of my own or siblings with whom to share my memories or the stories, recipes and cultural treasures passed down to me from those I loved in the mother country from which I’ve long been exiled. These precious gifts will end when I do.

Writing them into a sort of permanence is my way of honouring all those who have gone before me. This book, in a way, is the daughter I nearly had, but who didn’t make it into the world.

One moment from my mother’s funeral feast has remained crystallised in my mind, an unassailable memory. My head had been drooping from the weight of my sadness, when I felt a compulsion to look up. Everything in my direct line of sight telescoped into unnatural focus, and everything else fell away. There was a dais covered with white cloth on the other side of the room; on top of it was a large black-and-white photograph of my mother in a black frame, draped at each of the top corners with black ribbon. She was looking directly at me, unreachable. In front of the photo sat a white porcelain bowl of perfectly mounded rice, scooped fresh from the cooking pot so the steam still wafted upwards and drifted across my mother’s face like tiny wraiths. From the centre of the mound of rice rose a pair of neatly aligned black lacquer chopsticks. They were inserted into the rice. Vertically. The sight struck me with such force it felt as though I could see the whole thing right through the heads of the guests dining opposite me. Ōkī Oji-chan likely placed me at that spot at the table precisely so I would face it. He knew I had to.

Never in my life had I seen chopsticks positioned in such a way at a communal feast. I’d always known what it meant, ever since I’d stuck a pair into my rice that way at my grandmother’s house when I was younger. There’d been immediate dismay around the table, with cries of ‘Sore dame yo, Kyā!’ – ‘You can’t do that, Kyā!’ – and the chopsticks had swiftly been returned to their acceptable position: lined up and balanced across the edge of my ochawan.

The vertical insertion of a pair of chopsticks into a bowl of rice is the second great taboo around the handling of chopsticks. The only time it’s acceptable to do this is when you’re preparing a bowlful of rice for the dead at their funeral. Freshly steamed rice is the last thing a soul eats before it departs the material world, a final carnal act before it drifts away from all it loved on earth and on into the void. I imagined the essence of my mother hovering over the funeral feast, watching, reluctant to leave, resisting the pull upwards along with the steam that was rising from the rice.

款冬華

20–24 January

Fuki no hana saku

The giant butterbur blooms

水沢腹堅

25–29 January

Sawamizu kōri tsumeru

Ice thickens on streams

鶏始乳

30 January – 3 February

Niwatori hajimete toya ni tsuku

Hens start laying eggs

Towards the end of January, when the searing, tinderbox-dry heat of the South Australian summer makes my body forget where it came from, the rice terraces carved into the mountainsides of my mother country 8000 kilometres away are covered in snow.

The paddies lie fallow beneath thick blankets of ice, deserted temporarily by the creatures that live in symbiosis with the growing rice plants during the rest of the year. The ta-no-kami statues peek out through snowdrifts, watching over the spent, brown stalks that stubble the white, just as they’ve done for centuries, as one harvest rolls on to the next.

In January, from the snow-bound island of Hokkaido in Japan’s north to the subtropical islands of Okinawa in the south, the creamy-white buds of the giant butterbur, Petasites japonicus, emerge then bloom, seeking light. The flowers appear long before the huge, kidney-shaped leaves, before the great cold relents. Their bright, feathery petals burst forth in clusters like tiny firework stars suspended at the moment of explosion. The sight of them restores hope that the seemingly endless bleak days of winter will come to an end, and spring will return again.

Butterbur leaves, when they come, grow as wide as a suitcase and as tall as a fridge. It’s the leaf the tree spirit Totoro uses as an umbrella in Hayao Miyazaki’s animated feature film My Neighbor Totoro, just as country children used to do during spring rains. The scientific name, Petasites japonicus, means ‘wide-brimmed hat of Japan’. Commonly, however, it is called fuki – pronounced ‘fki’. It likes to grow in the shadows, in boggy, rich soils near mountain forest streams, its rhizomes perpetually dividing below ground.

Fuki is just one of hundreds of wild plants collectively known as sansai, ‘mountain vegetables’, eaten for centuries as much for their flavour as their health-giving properties. There were once two hundred varieties of wild fuki growing the length of Japan, but these days most of the fuki that’s bought and eaten comes from Aichi Prefecture at the northern end of the biggest island of Honshu. It’s cultivated in greenhouses so it can be harvested continually from October through to April. When summer comes, the stumps of the harvested spring plants are frozen and replanted in August, their subsequent thawing tricking them into thinking it’s spring again.

Before these new farming methods made it available throughout the year, fuki was preserved or pickled so it could be eaten out of season. It’s been sold as tsukudani in the family shop ever since I can remember. We always had some at home, so my mother often tucked a spoonful into the corner of my obento school lunch, or inside an onigiri rice ball.

When fresh fuki is available, it’s the young, tender stems that are most often eaten. It can be cooked in many ways: coated in feather-light batter and fried as tempura; braised with tofu in a savoury broth of soy, dashi or miso; or blanched and served, like many Japanese green vegetables, as a cold side dish dressed in a sesame or miso sauce. When cooked, its crunchy exterior gives way to a soft interior, with a taste and texture similar to celery, which can be substituted for fuki when outside Japan. This is what my mother used to do.

There were two hundred fuki farmers in Aichi just twenty years ago; now there are only seventy. The association of fuki farmers has been forced to modernise, with a marketing campaign offering free tastings in supermarkets. Like tsukudani, fuki is no longer as popular as it was when I was growing up. Younger generations want new, more fashionable things to eat. It seems even the most traditional of world cuisines is subject to change, like everything in this world.

The day before Risshun, usually around the third or fourth day of February, is the festival of Setsubun, which means ‘splitting of the seasons’. In ancient times it was thought the veil between the human and dark spirit worlds was especially thin at this time, which coincides with the Lunar New Year. The festival of Setsubun, which although not a public holiday is widely celebrated, includes a special ritual for driving out any oni, evil spirits, that might be loitering around the house.

Someone, usually the male head of the family, is chosen to represent the oni. The role involves prowling and leaping about in a menacing manner, growling. Everyone else’s job is to pelt the oni with dry-roasted soybeans called fukumame (lucky beans), shouting Oni wa oto! Fuku wa uchi! – Demons outside! Good fortune inside! – until the oni is chased out of the house. Kids love this day, when they have full permission to torment their fathers, shouting as loudly as they can while pelting them with the small, hard soybeans. Setsubun is a joyful release after the long winter months – but it can be a painful experience, being an oni.

~

As the seasons split and spring steps forward, leaving winter behind, chickens increase or restart egg production after the long cold. While Japanese cuisine has traditionally made extensive – and delicious – use of eggs, chicken meat is a more recent addition to the nation’s culinary repertoire. Chickens aren’t native to Japan and in ancient times roosters were revered as sacred keepers of time; chickens were kept mostly as pets, and only their eggs were eaten.

There are seemingly countless ways with eggs in washoku cooking. Often egg is combined with some kind of dashi, or stock, or soy sauce, which makes it lighter, and deliciously savoury. Sometimes it’s whisked thoroughly, the gelatinous chalaza (those stringy white bits that hold the yolk in place) removed to keep the texture smooth, and cooked in a thin pancake-like layer, to be used in dishes such as omuraisu (a shortened form of ‘omelette rice’), a hybrid Japanese–western dish devised in a Tokyo restaurant in the early 1900s. The soft layer of egg is gently draped over an almond-shaped mound of rice cooked in stock and mixed with small pieces of chicken, peas, carrot and tomato sauce. To give it the iconic omuraisu look, tomato ketchup is artfully daubed across the middle.

Sometimes the egg is cooked paper-thin, cooled, finely sliced and used as a topping for rice in bento, or on noodles; other times it’s fried quickly in a wok, stirred vigorously with a spatula to yield small golden nuggets of egg that my mother used to mix into chā-han, a Chinese-influenced stir-fried rice dish. It’s a tasty, easy way of using up leftover rice: heat some oil in a wok over a high flame and stir-fry diced onion and carrot. Add diced ham, chicken, green capsicum and celery, slices of shītake mushroom, green peas and the nuggets of egg and stir-fry, adding a splash of Chinese cooking wine, a dash of white pepper and a pinch of salt. Once it’s heated through, empty the wok into a bowl, scraping it out well, and put the bowl aside. Place the wok back on the flame and add a tablespoonful of oil. Once it’s shimmering hot, tip in the leftover rice and fry, breaking up lumps with your spatula until the grains are separated, heated through and starting to brown. Tip the vegetable, meat and egg mixture back in with the rice and toss together over a high flame until fragrant and thoroughly heated through, and serve.

In the mornings before school, I always had a Japanese breakfast. Sometimes this was a raw egg thoroughly whisked with shōyu and poured over hot rice. When I tell non-Japanese people how delicious this is, they often grimace and shudder at the idea of raw egg, but the heat of the rice semi-cooks the egg, and if I manage to persuade someone to try it, they’re usually converted. A caveat: though I grew up eating raw eggs, and still do, without any ill effect, the current advice is that eating raw eggs should be undertaken with caution, especially if pregnant. In any case, only the freshest eggs should be used. The better the quality of the egg and the better the care of the chicken that laid it, the better it tastes and the less likely it is to cause food poisoning.

My mother always washed the egg before cracking it into a bowl. She’d use her chopsticks to pick out and discard the chalaza, which you don’t want to encounter while eating this dish, and to whisk it ferociously, taking her time to make sure the white was broken up and well blended in to avoid unpleasant textural surprises. Then she’d add a tablespoonful of good quality shōyu, whisk again, pour the lot over hot rice and stir. It’s one of the most nutritious, healthy and easy fast-food dishes I can think of, and I often eat it when I need a quick lunch, reheating leftover rice in a steamer so it’s good and hot before the egg goes on it.

One of my favourite egg dishes that my mother used to cook is oyakodon, which means ‘mother-and-child bowl’. ‘Don’ is the suffix for any dish that comprises a generous portion of white rice in a deep, round donburi bowl, with some kind of protein on top. Tendon is fresh-fried crispy tempura on rice, most often made with tiger prawns. Gyūdon is paper-thin strips of beef cooked down in a salty-sweet broth with onions and mixed with an egg, on rice.

Oyako-don is a Tokyo specialty, one my mother perfected. Bite-sized chunks of tender, skinless chicken thigh are cooked in a little umami-rich broth in which finely sliced white onion has already been cooked down into sweet softness. When the chicken is cooked a whisked egg is poured into the broth. There’s a special kind of round pan used for this dish, another of Japanese cuisine’s treasure trove of specialised kitchenware – the same diameter as a standard donburi, it is made of flat, hammered metal with a wooden handle sticking up vertically on one side and a funnelled lid to let steam escape so the egg sets in just the right way. The broth keeps the just-set egg soft and silky, and when you slide the whole chickeny-brothy-eggy disc out of the pan and into the bowl, the broth oozes into the rice. It’s quick and easy to make, delicious, and never fails to warm and cheer on a chilly winter’s night.

My mother thought through every decision with unhurried consideration. I know now that making mindful choices prevents mistakes and extra expense and saves time in the long term, but as a child I’d feel impatient and restless if I was ever involved in one of her marathon deliberations, especially when I accompanied her on a shopping trip for something significant. The most memorable of these was a quest for the perfect kitchen knife. I remember traipsing back and forth with her between dozens of cutlers’ shops in downtown Tokyo’s Kappabashi district, which has a high concentration of shops selling kitchenware and catering equipment; I must have been eight or nine years old.

She’d been using a traditional knife made of hagane – carbon steel – a beautiful object with a dark wooden handle, but it required too much maintenance. The relative softness of hagane meant the knife had to be sharpened constantly and wiped dry immediately after chopping something to keep it from tarnishing and rusting. She wanted to replace it with a traditional Japanese knife, but forged from stainless steel. Like all good cooks, my mother insisted on a blade edge so sharp it could slice through whatever it brushed against like butter. She wielded her knife like a professional, slicing and dicing with speedy finesse, and taught me so I could aspire to do the same.

My mother used the same heavy, oblong, pinky-grey sharpening stone all her life. I’d run my little fingers across it whenever she wet it in preparation for sharpening, shivering at its strange texture; it was dense and fine, yet somehow porous, like the surface of a chalkboard. It’s mine now. The green-and-white cardboard box it used to be stored in has crumbled away, but whenever a knife is sharpened across it, the rhythmic sound of the flat blade as it slides across its wet surface takes me back to the kitchen of our old apartment where I spent so much time watching my mother cook. I see my mother now, still young and in her apron, bent over knife and stone, and bobbing her rhythmic little dance back and forth as she sharpened, mouth pursed in concentration.

We returned to Kappabashi more than once that week while my mother tried to make up her mind which knife she wanted to buy. I was too young, then, to understand the seriousness of this mission. It was a once-in-a-lifetime purchase, and it had to be exactly right; the weight of the knife had to feel natural in the hand, and the aesthetics of it were also a factor. Whatever she chose would become the principal knife she’d use in the kitchen, an extension of her body, personal only to her the way rice bowls and yunomi teacups are personal to each individual in a family, with different styles and designs chosen according to each person’s taste.

I remember the long discussions with each knife merchant, who’d fetch this knife and that from the display cases so my mother could examine the cutting edges, the quality of the handles, the rivets that connected steel and wood. She asked many questions. Unlike me, the merchants were patient, respecting the care she was taking over her decision. Clearly, she was someone who knew knives. She’d consider one, teetering on the brink of decision, then reject it, returning to another shop we’d been to earlier to look at another knife that had interested her. We’d walk all the way back and she’d contemplate the knife again for another half an hour, only for her to reject it again. Then off we’d go again, to yet more cutlers’ shops.

I knew better than to complain, but my feet ached, I was bored, and I’d let out long, deliberate sighs, as I often did during such shopping trips. My mother knew exactly what I was doing, but chose to ignore this and waited for the Japanese daughter to emerge. I sulked, feeling my English half protesting: Why is this taking so long? When can we eat lunch? Why can’t we go to those shops that sell the plastic replica food? I love looking at those. Why can’t I spend the day with Obā-chan? Then my Japanese half reminded me: Come on, Kyā, where’s your oyakōkō?

Oyakōkō, from ‘oya’ – parent – and kōkō – devotion – meaning ‘filial piety’, is a term used surprisingly often in conversation. It’s based on Confucian ideals of showing respect and reverence for your parents. Japanese children are taught early on about its importance, and a child whose actions reflect their oyakōkō is praised and admired in the community. Oyakōkō can also mean ‘performing a service to parents with gratitude’; ‘being mindful of the role your parents played in giving you life, raising you and providing for you’; ‘respecting / obeying / being grateful towards your parents’, ‘to make your parents happy’, or simply ‘being a good or dutiful son or daughter’.

Two small kanji characters can say a lot, and sometimes come prickling with complexity.

I was relieved when my mother finally made her decision: a Santoku knife with a dark wooden handle and a fine, stainless steel blade, the kanji etched into its side showing it was made by craftsmen from the house of Kiya, a 220-year-old maker of swords. I was too young to be impressed by the knife as much as I was by the prospect of lunch, which was the usual reward for pretending to be so patient and remembering to practise oyakōkō whenever I accompanied her on those interminable shopping trips. It was always washoku: a steaming bowl of soba noodles, or cold zarusoba dipped into a cup of dashi-shōyu broth in summer, perhaps some tempura on the side; or if we were in a department store, an okosama teishoku – a children’s lunch set, served on a tray arranged with child-sized portions on plates shaped like dolls, robots, cars or cute animals, strangely always with a round mound of rice with a Japanese flag stuck on top, as if it were a tiny mountain conquered by a Japanese rice-climber. Sometimes there’d even be a little toy to take home, a genuinely happy meal.

As for the Kiya knife she bought that day; it travelled around the world with her as she moved from country to country. When she died, it became my principal knife. As I sliced and chopped with it every day, I connected to her. Eventually, it became an extension of me, too. But it never made it with me to Australia. While I was still in London, I went to use it one evening and found it gone. My husband, who was working in a restaurant kitchen at the time, found me searching for it everywhere, and sheepishly confessed that he’d taken it to work and left it there, and it had been stolen. I never saw it again. I mourned it as if it were still an extension of my mother, but in the end, it’s just a thing. Mujō: clinging to what has been lost only causes suffering.

CHA-HAN

Chinese-style fried rice

Serve 4

INGREDIENTS

2 1/2 tbsp vegetable oil, for frying

3 eggs, beaten

1 medium white onion, diced

1 medium carrot, peeled and diced into 1cm cubes

1 tbsp saké

1 medium zucchini, diced into 1cm cubes

4 thick slices lean ham, cut into 1.5cm squares

3 spring onions, chopped

4 cups leftover rice (cooked at least a day prior)

1 tsp shōyu

Pinch white pepper

METHOD

Get all the ingredients ready before cooking as everything will be stir-fried very quickly in a wok.

Heat ½ tbsp of the oil in the wok over high heat until shimmering hot, then pour in the beaten egg. Working quickly with a wok spatula to keep the egg from burning or sticking, roll the egg around so you end up with fat, juicy crumbs of firmly cooked egg. Scrape out into a separate bowl and set aside.

Heat 1 tbsp of the oil in the same wok and, once it’s smoking hot, fry the white onion and carrot until golden. Add the saké, stirring quickly, then add the zucchini, ham, spring onions and egg, turning frequently. Tip everything out into a separate bowl.

Heat 1 tbsp oil in the wok again, then add the leftover rice, breaking the clumps apart with the back of the spatula and turning quickly to prevent sticking or burning. Once the grains have separated out and softened, add the shōyu and white pepper and mix in well. Tip in the bowl of cooked ingredients, mix thoroughly and serve.

東風解凍

4–8 February

Harukaze kōri o toku

Spring winds thaw the ice

黄鶯睍睆

9–13 February

Uguisu naku

The bush-warbler sings

魚上氷

14–18 February

Uo kōri o izuru

Fish emerge from the ice

The song of the male bush-warbler is a distinctive and universally loved sound of early spring. This adorable, bobble-shaped bird, the uguisu, spends winter in the mountains and first makes itself heard in the high country villages as it waits for the sharp edge of winter to soften so it can return to the plains. Its resonant call, disproportionate to its tiny body, can be heard pealing through the mountains and valleys. Hooooo hokekkyo.

For over 400 years uguisu droppings have been used as a cosmetic treatment. They’re collected, dried and mixed into creams and soaps. It’s used as an anti-ageing, clarifying treatment, and in times past the women who used it were known as ‘porcelain ladies’ because of their flawless skin. They say it’s the guanine, urea and proteolytic enzymes in there that do the trick. I try to imagine the circumstances that prompted someone centuries ago to smear uguisu poo on their faces.

There’s a wagashi sweet named in the bird’s honour: uguisu mochi. (Of course there is!) Made of sweet azuki beans wrapped in glutinous, sweet rice dough and shaped into a bobble like the bird, it’s eaten at this time of year to celebrate the ever-approaching spring.

~

Like many others around the world, the travel restrictions still current as I write have kept me locked in place in a country I didn’t grow up in, far from family and old friends. My trip to Japan I’d been planning at the end of 2020 to begin another book didn’t materialise. But writing this one in its place yielded an unexpected transformation of my inner cultural landscape; not only did it force me to confront feelings I hadn’t realised I’d suppressed, allowing me to purge them, but it gave me the opportunity to examine the underpinnings of a Japanese culture I’d unquestioningly accepted since childhood.

For years I resisted confronting what I’d lost too closely. I didn’t want to get stuck haunting corridors of the past, or to feel the sharpness of dispossession. But in writing about the food that is central to memories of my Japanese childhood, I’ve delved down research rabbit holes that have led me to discover new ways of making washoku dishes, or food I love that I can’t buy here. I have learned the meanings and histories behind cultural practices I took for granted, of words I regularly used in conversation but whose full import remained obscured as I did not learn the kanji in childhood. I continue to use the same crockery my mother owned, continue to cook certain recipes just as she did. But now, my repertoire of Japanese dishes is growing, and my understanding of my own language and culture is deepening.

I have to accept that certain things are forever lost, as we all do. With each breakage of a precious piece of crockery my mother held on to for decades, I’ve had to let a little more of her go. In clinging to my mother’s way of doing things, and only doing those same things, by turning away from Japanese culture to avoid being reminded of my sorrow, I’d kept myself passive and child-like, locked in the past. I made my perception of exile more desolate than it needed to be. As I write, I find my native culture increasingly illuminated. Now that the light shines into the dark places where I kept myself in hibernation for long years, my adult Japanese self is waking up, emerging blinking into the sunlight, hungry.

I teach myself kanji as I go along, each new revelation bringing me closer to the long-sought-after level of understanding of the intricacies of my native tongue. There’s a Japanese language school in town where I’ll register for classes when my book is done. One day, I might be able to read through a Japanese novel to the end.

I’m making foods my mother never made, and have a pot of nukazuke for making pickle, like my grandmother. The pickle mix challenges me to be responsible; it requires effort, care and daily attention to keep it going. I once told my mother I wanted to start a nukazuke pot, and she told me not to be daft, that I’d never manage to keep it going without it turning mouldy from neglect.

I want to prove to myself, more than anyone, that I might finally be able to take care of it, the way my grandmother did throughout her life.

I’m not alone, as a person with Eurasian heritage, in my struggle to navigate conflicting worlds. Some struggle more than others. So much depends on which country we live in, which country we were raised in, whether that country belongs to our mothers or fathers, whether we speak just one or both languages. It depends whether we’re descendants of colonising or colonised cultures, whether we’re obstructed by systemic racism, or whether our random draw of genes made us look like we don’t belong to the places we grow up in or later live in, and therefore whether the colour of our skin and hair, or our unusual facial features invite fear, hatred or depersonalising exoticisation. My mixed heritage has brought different challenges to my life, some of which have been painful to address, as privileged as I am. But it’s also been a gift.

Existing in the in-between has forced a search for a self that lies deeper than cultural identity, for a self pared down to the mere fact of being human. It forces a broader view of the world, from our position of not being one or the other – not quite belonging in either world, we sit apart, looking down on our separate existences as if from a distance. Perhaps it’s this transcending of boundaries that offers glimpses of all the different ways of being that exist in the world, making us aware that what surrounds us is not all there is.

Transcendence can come through meditation, psychedelics, hypnosis, ecstatic dance or trance. It can come through suffering, too. Trauma can either build a thick wall that cuts off feelings, hope or growth, or it can shine a light into the darkest places of the psyche, illuminating a path to new ways of being, where wisdom might be found. Another word for the in-between state, of existing between two states, is ‘liminal’, derived from limen, the Latin word for ‘threshhold’. Living with cultural ambiguity, we children of mixed cultural heritage stand in the doorway between two worlds. Whether we choose to shut the door on one world or the other, whether we stand up too quickly trying to pass through the doorway and crack our heads on the lintel, or whether we remove the door from its hinges so we are free to move between our worlds, is up to us.

I sip my hōji tea, looking out at the gum tree tossing its tresses outside my window. The wind has dropped a little, and the tree’s movements are less frantic. The lorikeets are back; whether they’re the same ones as before I don’t know. I scoop up another handful of shōyu-salted arare and eat. There’s nothing more familiar, more evocative of home to a Japanese person than the taste and smell of shōyu, and instantly I go back to the past, to my lost mother, my lost country. Yet the sensation of the rice crackers breaking against my teeth and the sound filling my head, the deliciousness flooding my tongue, brings me back to this moment, back to this body, which, in the end, may be the only real home I have.

I’ve gathered together the fragments of a life that lies scattered across the earth.

Here they are, these splintered pieces: two conflicting neural arrangements of cultural and ethnic identity; memories of disparate lives I’ve lived, of landscapes that made and carried my body, of people I loved who have left this world.

There’s a Japanese tradition of mending broken ceramics with lacquer and gold, a laborious process called kintsugi. Each thin layer of sticky lacquer joining two fragments together must be left to dry for weeks, sometimes months, before being sanded smooth. Coat after coat is brushed onto the cracks, allowed to dry and harden, then sanded. The process is repeated until the broken pieces become whole again, the joins so smooth the break is almost undetectable. Only then is gold painted over the line of lacquer with a fine brush, rendering the piece more beautiful, more meaningful than it was when it was unbroken. ‘Kin’ means gold; ‘tsugi’ means continuity, to inherit, succeed, join or patch. The character for ‘tsugi’ is made up of two kanji characters squashed together. One means thread, or silk. The other component is the kanji for rice.

I may be far from the place where I was born, and I may never be able to return to that life, never be able to belong to my country the way I felt I did as a child. But the one constant that has continued to connect me to that past, to the people and places I loved and lost, is the food that has sustained me through everything. It will continue to sustain me to the end of my days. My rice. My meshi.

NUKAZUKE

Fermented rice-bran pickle

Making nukazuke requires a little dedication; the wet nuka (rice-bran mash) must be tended to every day to keep it from spoiling, but you can keep it going indefinitely. I remember my Obā-chan in her tiny kitchen wearing rubber gloves to turn the nuka she’d kept going for decades in her blue plastic lidded bucket each day. I can still see her at her kitchen sink, scrubbing cucumbers with salt before burying them in the nuka, or pulling pickled ones out of it like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat and brushing off as much of the nuka as possible before rinsing and slicing them up for me to eat, drizzled with a little shōyu. Nukazuke have a crunch and are slightly tangy, with just the right amount of saltiness rounded out with mellow umami undertones.

In Japan, rice bran is easily sourced from okomeya (rice merchant). Outside the country, rice bran is available in most health-food shops. It’s good to have a reliable source, as you’ll need to top up your nuka from time to time with fresh rice-bran mash. Each time you remove vegetables, you lose a little of the nuka (rice bran), so you’ll need to replenish it as needed.

Like sourdough starter, the speed with which your very first batch of rice-bran mash will become ready depends on the ambient temperature. Unlike sourdough starter, wet nuka can spoil easily. You must keep everything spotlessly clean when you handle it; some people will use their hands to dig out the vegetables, but my grandmother took no chances and always put on a pair of rubber washing-up gloves, reserved only for this purpose, before touching the nuka.

You can use a bucket or pickling crock for your nuka mash, but if you live in an area that experiences extremely hot summers, and your air-conditioning isn’t adequate, your choice of pickling container may depend on whether or not it fits in your fridge. On a hot Australian summer’s day, it might need to take refuge there as the heat will speed up the fermentation process a bit too much.

INGREDIENTS

Nuka mash

Fresh vegetables such as Chinese cabbage (wombok), cucumber, daikon radish or small cucumbers

Shōyu, to serve

METHOD

To prepare vegetables for pickling, rub them with salt before rinsing and patting them dry. The salt helps the vegetables absorb plenty of flavour, speeds up the pickling process and enhances the flavour.

Most vegetables can be buried in the nuka mash whole, but if you use Chinese cabbage, cut it into quarters, or separate out the leaves after cutting off the base.

Bury your vegetables in the nuka, making sure none of them are touching; you need about 2cm of mash around each piece.

Generally, pickles will be ready in 24 hours, but it’s okay to leave them in the nuka for up to a month, although this will make them quite salty and strong-tasting.

When the pickles are ready, pick them out of the nuka with scrupulously clean hands, or with gloves on, and brush off the excess nuka before rinsing it off under the tap. Pat dry, slice and drizzle a little shōyu over the top.

NUKA STARTER

INGREDIENTS

1.75kg nuka (rice bran)

450g sea salt

1 tsp powdered yellow mustard

3 cups pre-boiled water, cooled

½ cup beer

Apple peel from 2 apples

3 taka no tsume chillies with seeds removed

10cm square of konbu (kelp)

Scraps of vegetables to add flavour to the mash (they won’t be eaten)*

*These can be left over from preparing other dishes; they don’t have to be fresh. A couple of Chinese cabbage (wombok) leaves, some carrots or a piece of daikon radish will do nicely.

METHOD

As the rice bran must be completely dry before starting to build your starter, it’s worth stirring it in a dry pan over medium-low heat before using it, but take great care not to let it burn. Allow to cool, then empty into your pickling container.

Add the salt and mustard powder, mixing well with clean hands, then add the water and the beer. Continue kneading it with your hands until it becomes a paste. Level the mixture out in your container. Tuck the apple peel, chillies and konbu into different points in the nuka, distributing them evenly. Add the vegetables, pushing your first piece deep into the crock, and the next pieces at different levels so none of them touches each other.

Replace the lid of the container and store in a cool dark place for 24 hours.

Remove the vegetables (not the chillies, konbu or apple peel) from the nuka, brushing off what you can, and discard. Replace with more vegetable scraps. Repeat this each day for ten days, and on the eleventh day, remove the apple peel and push in whole, fresh vegetables to make pickles you can eat. After a while, you’ll notice liquid from the buried vegetables starts to appear on the surface of the nuka; it will need to be drained off regularly.

You’ll also need to top up your nuka now and again with more mash – you will need to replace about half of the nuka you’re using with new mash once every 40 days or so. Make more of the starter above, usually about a quarter or half the amount, depending on how much you need to replace, and mix it into your existing nuka. Give it a day or two to adjust, discarding any pickles you may still have buried there.

Your commitment and dedication to maintaining your nuka will be rewarded with daily helpings of crunchy, juicy, mouth-wateringly delicious pickles.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

When I first had the idea for Meshi, I imagined a simple series of entertaining anecdotes from my childhood, interspersed with recipes and insights into Japanese culture. But as I wrote, I was taken aback by the emotional impact of writing what this book eventually became. It was the support of my agent, Jane Novak, that carried me through the most difficult days. Thank you, Jane. You kept me afloat.

My heartfelt thanks also to the team at Affirm Press, who have been endlessly patient with my vacillations: Martin Hughes, Lauren Ravida, Armelle Davies, Sasha Beekman, and especially to Sonja Heijn, whose experience of living in Japan and love of washoku lent a feeling of companionship throughout the editing process, and who bore the complexities of romanised Japanese with good humour. Thanks also to Lisa White for her beautiful cover design.

My gratitude also to Sarah Sentilles and Alison Flett, who read early sections of the manuscript, and whose insightful feedback helped set the foundations for the rest , as well as my sister in Hafu-dom, Paula McFarlane, for her eagle-eyed proofreading. Thanks also to Craig Harrison and Emma Anderson for allowing me to write, protected from life’s distractions, in their beautiful shack, and to my friend Naoko Nishi Woodrow for helping me raise the standard of my written Japanese.

To my father, Miles Dodd, and to Dr Jocelyn Probert, his partner, my gratitude for checking the manuscript for inaccuracies – any errors that remain are mine alone – and to Paul Arguile, my partner, for keeping our coffee business afloat throughout the pandemic while I buried myself in my writing.

To my Japanese family: 感謝の気持ちでいっぱいです。

This book was written with the financial support of a COVID-19 Quick Response Grant from Arts South Australia, an invaluable organisation that has helped me, and many others like me, to establish their careers.

RECIPE INDEX

The page numbers in this index refer to the page numbers of the printed book and are reproduced here for reference only. Please use the search facility of your device to find the relevant entry.

aburaage

Takikomi Gohan with Chicken and Vegetables 278

Tonjiru 325

Aemono 50

Amazu Renkon 35

apricot

Umeboshi 239

Asazuke 253

azuki beans

Tsubushi-an 69

Zenzai 359

cabbage

Okonomiyaki 209

Tonkatsu 326

Chā-Han 389

chicken

New Year Ozōni 356

Takikomi Gohan with Chicken and Vegetables 278

Yakitori 71

Yosenabe 305

Chinese cabbage

Asazuke 253

Nukazuke 401

Yosenabe 305

Chirashizushi 29

corn

Yakitōmorokoshi 208

cucumber

Hiyashi Chūka 159

Kyūri No Tsukemono 123

Nukazuke 401

daikon radish

Asazuke 253

New Year Ozōni 356

Nukazuke 401

Tonjiru 325

Yosenabe 305

Dashi 53

Ohitashi 49

Dorothy Lila’s Gingerbread 178

eggplant

Nasu Dengaku 224

Nasu No Misoni 255

eggs

Kinshi Tamago 34

enoki mushrooms

Yosenabe 305

‘fueru wakame’ seaweed

Misoshiru 125

Goma-ae 50

Gomadare 308

Hafu Japanese–European Dinner-Party Dish see My Hafu Japanese–European Dinner-Party Dish

ham

Chā-Han 389

Hiyashi Chūka 159

Hiyashi Chūka 159

Isobe Yakimochi 292

Kabocha No Nimono 281

Karashiae 51

Kinshi Tamago 34

konbu

Konbu Dashi 54

Konbu No Tsukudani 86

Nuka Starter 403

Ponzu Sauce 309

Tsuna To Fujikko No Takikomi Gohan 280

Yosenabe 305

Konbu Dashi 54

Konbu No Tsukudani 86

Kyūri No Tsukemono 123

lotus root

Amazu Renkon 35

Chirashizushi 29

Matcha Tea (The Proper Way) 263

Melonpan 140

miso

Gomadare 308

Miso Dengaku Two Ways 223

Misoae 52

Misoshiru 125

Nasu No Misoni 255

Tonjiru 325

Misoae 52

Miso Dengaku Two Ways 223

Misoshiru 125

mochi

Isobe Yakimochi 292

New Year Ozōni 356

Zenzai 359

My Hafu Japanese–European Dinner-Party Dish 340

Nasu Dengaku 224

Nasu No Misoni 255

New Year Ozōni 356

noodles

Hiyashi Chūka 159

Yosenabe 305

Nuka Starter 403

Nukazuke 401

Ohitashi 49

Okayu 237

Okonomiyaki 209

pickles

Asazuke 253

Kyūri No Tsukemono 123

Nukazuke 401

Umeboshi 239

Ponzu Sauce 309

pork

Tonjiru 325

Tonkatsu 326

Yosenabe 305

prawns

Chirashizushi 29

New Year Ozōni 356

Yosenabe 305

pumpkin

Kabocha No Nimono 281

rice

Chā-han 389

Chirashizushi 29

My Hafu Japanese-European Dinner-Party Dish 340

Okayu 237

Steamed Japanese rice 102

Sushi meshi 31

Takikomi Gohan with Chicken and Vegetables 278

Tsuna To Fujikko No Takikomi Gohan 280

salmon

My Hafu Japanese-European Dinner-Party Dish 340

Shiojaké 104

Yosenabe 305

sesame seeds

Goma-ae 50

Gomadare 308

Kyūri No Tsukemono 123

Shiojakē 104

shītake mushrooms

Chirashizushi 29

Shītake Mushroom Dashi 55

Shītake No Tsukudani 87

Simmered Shītake Mushrooms 33

Takikomi Gohan with Chicken and Vegetables 278

Tonjiru 325

Yosenabe 305

Shītake No Tsukudani 87

Simmered Shītake Mushrooms 33

spinach

Goma-ae 50

Ohitashi 49

Yosenabe 305

Steamed Japanese Rice 102

Sushi Meshi 31

Takikomi Gohan 277

Takikomi Gohan with Chicken and Vegetables 278

tofu

Misoshiru 125

Tofu Dengaku 226

Tonjiru 325

Yosenabe 305

Tofu Dengaku 226

Tonjiru 325

Tonkatsu 326

Tsubushi-an 69

Tsuna To Fujikko No Takikomi Gohan 280

tuna

Tsuna To Fujikko No Takikomi Gohan 280

Umeboshi 239

wombok see Chinese cabbage

Yakitōmorokoshi 208

Yakitori 71

Yosenabe 305

Zenzai 359