電武士

I don’t know when, and I don’t know how, but somewhere along the line I started enjoying natto. If you live in Japan you’re no doubt already familiar with this pungent, sticky delicacy, but if not let me get you up to speed. Natto is fermented soybeans, the same ubiquitous bean you enjoy in your tofu and miso soup, only this time they have been boiled, heated and left to rot. Or ferment. I don’t know exactly what the difference is, and once you smell them you’ll understand what I mean.

Natto, while enjoyed by most Japanese in the East of the country as a must-have morning staple, most other Japanese (and practically all foreigners) can’t force the stuff down. I mean, face it, it stinks.

It stinks, but it’s good. Like most addictions, it started with just a little taste, me sharing a bit of the wife’s Styrofoam tin on those mornings when we had nihon-shoku for breakfast. But then little by little I found I wanted more. Had to have more, until now I eat more than she does, and not just for breakfast, either. I get it on the side at Matsuya or 定食屋, or in the evening when I have too much rice, or at kaiten-sushi places when I see it come by. I mean I’m hooked, baby.

But I didn’t come here to evangelize. Instead, I’m here to show you how you, too, can enjoy natto right in your very own home following a few simple steps. For this example I’ll be using some traditional natto I received as お土産 from a friend in Ibaraki, the home of natto. Rather than the familiar square Styrofoam you’re used to seeing in the supermarket, traditional natto is wrapped in straw, and the flavor and scent are far superior. If you ever get to Mito be sure to pick some up for yourself.

Anyway, here we go. We begin at the breakfast table one cheery Tokyo morning. The fish has been grilled, the rice laid out, and the natto deployed to the left. Big, isn’t it? You pick up that bundle and the smell of fresh-cut straw (and natto, of course) fills your nose.

You clips the ropes at the ends of the bundle to free the straw which has been folded over in half to enclose the natto. Opening the bundle you find a pristine core of natto goodness nestled within, it’s cloying charms stoking your appetite and wilting the houseplants some meters away.

Using your chopsticks you gingerly extricate the natto from its bed of straw and pop it into the bowl you’ve prepared for this purpose.

Once it the bowl you break it up slightly and work it into the bowl, and then vigorously whip it in a circular motion until the neba-neba (stickiness) starts to come out, and then you whip it some more.

Finally, you add tare (sauce), mustard, nori (seaweed), or whatever else strikes you fancy to taste and mix it up real good.

And then you’re ready to dine in style! Pour some of that natto onto your waiting bed of rice, get it there with the chopsticks and off you go. Nothing, I tell you, could be finer in the morning. Keeping those sticky threads off your chopsticks, chin and lips takes a bit of practice, but if you can keep the chopsticks on the rice only when you eat you’ll be ahead of the game.

Wanna know more? Check out this excellent article by Mark Schreiber in the Tokyo Weekender for more natto facts and information.

Friday evening I joined the Tokyo Professionals Association (TPA) for an evening of networking (?) in Ikebukuro. The TPA, as the name implies, is a rather loosely-defined group of “Tokyo Professionals” (e.g. – business people rather than, say, professional strippers) and strikes me as one of those groups that is primarily an income-generating vehicle for the organizers and secondarily a social/drinking forum for the members. Other such groups exist in this town, and I’m still not sure if the investment is worth the return.

At any rate, as these things go it was a pretty good deal at 5,500 yen for all you can eat and drink. The restaurant, 芋蔵 (Imo-zou) in Ikebukuro was very well appointed and offered a selection of over 300 shochu varieties. The menu consisted almost entirely of dishes from Kagoshima in Kyushu, including grilled gamecock (軍鶏, shamo) and black hog (黒豚, kurobuta), each of which was wonderful when paired with the assorted shochus we enjoyed that evening. I’ve been back once and wasn’t disappointed. Also, it’s very cheap, making it well-worth the trip up North…

I attended my first SWET (Society of Writers, Editors and Translators) event today, a brief talk by Japanese author Natsuki IKEZAWA (池澤夏樹) who was joined by Alfred Birnbaum, an American translator best known for his translations of Murakami Haruki’s work.

I first encountered Ikezawa’s work as an exchange student here in Tokyo, where we were assigned his collection of short stories 「マリコマリキータ」 to read one semester. The book, much like anything both written and Japanese, was a chore to get through, but the stories left a strong impression on me, and, as I would find later, were typical of Ikezawa’s work in that they explored the lives of Japanese characters living outside of Japan.

That was the last contact I had with his work until recently, when I discovered that one of the essays included in a translation contest I am participating in was written by him as well. So while I hardly knew him as an author or anything else, I thought it might be nice to meet him and see what he had to say about writing and current events.

I was also keen to meet Alfred Birnbaum, whose Murakami translations I am familiar with and much prefer to those of Murakami’s other translator, Jay Rubin. It turns out that Alfred was born in the States but grew up here in Japan, and has been translating Murakami (and others) since the 1980s. I didn’t get to speak with him as long as I would have liked, as he was cornered immediately after the talk by a very talkative Japanese fellow who had introduced himself during the Q&A portion as an employee of an American financial company. What relation that had to his question or the event I don’t know, but I suppose that when you’re work at a 外資系の金融機関 you like to tell people whenever possible.

Frankly, I was a bit irked by this fellow, who approached Birnbaum speaking–what else–English. I mean, we had all just sat through two hours of Ikezawa discussing a wide variety of topics in Japanese without interpretation, right? And Birnbaum is not just a translator but actually a very well-known one. He understands Japanese, and quite well, right? And, we’re in Japan, right? So what on Earth would make this fellow think he has to speak Engrish? This trend, not uncommen here in Tokyo, used to mystify me until I realized that it has nothing to do with any of the above. Mr. Banker simply wanted to speak English, and could care les about setting, tact, or the level of comprehension of the listener. Call me thin-skinned, but to me this just seemed, I dunno, just rude.

Alfred didn’t seem to mind, though, and responded to his curious questions (e.g. – “What do you think of the many recent Japanese movies like Kill Bill 2, Lost in Translation and Last Samurai?”) with only a hint of the irony they deserved. He seems like a really nice guy, but apparently translating literature isn’t the dream job I was thought it might be. It’s hard to find publishers for the work and they pay isn’t great. Well, now what am I going to do when I retire??

Anyway, the talk was good, and Ikezawa-san is clearly a very thoughtful and intelligent man. I apprciated what he had to say about Japanese literature (roughly divided into two types, “heartwarming” and “dokidoki-wakuwaku,” neither of which he finds terribly appealing) and also his recent leaning to the left politically. It seems he’s a vocal critic of the war in Iraq, and even travelled there in 2002 to photograph and write about the people he met there. He published a book based on this visit called On a Small Bridge in Iraq, and it’s available for download for free in English as well as French and German from his web site. It’s a moving portrait of the Iraqi people, and recommended reading for anyone, no matter what your polital stripe.

My hands-down favorite Tokyo event, Friday Bloody Friday, had become a thing of the past some time ago, no doubt to the disappointment of me and all the others for whom it was regular monthly affair. When I was going it was held in Mit-chans basement Gaienmae spot Viva le Vie, and always offered a great combination of art, music, and creative people that made it one of the most scenes going.

Yesterday we enjoyed an FBF reunion of sorts at Roppongi’s SuperDeluxe, gathering under the Friday Bloody Friday banner once again to celebrate the birthdays of the event creators, Adrian and JB.

SuperDeluxe was a great choice of venue, allowing plenty of room for a crowd which just kept growing from 9 till the doors were closed at 3 the next morning. DJs Sister Chill and Guchagucha handled the music early on, with DJ Ohming taking over later, while somewhere in the middle of it all dancer Yumi exploded out of a makeshift and into a wildly sensual dance performance.

Rie and I cut out of there when the smoke got to be too much for us, which happened to be long after the trains stopped running. Rare for us, these days, but a more than welcome diversion from our otherwise sedate baby-expecting lifestyle. Now, if we can just these things happening once a month or so…

…today, and we all turn out at Soho’s in Harajuku to shower him with gifts and praise for getting through his 20s in one piece. We take over the upstairs balcony, the 30 or so of us, and shortly after the sun sets we are treated to the lazy ascent of a giant, glowing moon over the not-distant buildings of Shibuya. A good omen, to be sure, and a nice decorative touch to mark the beginning of a dizzily raucous evening. We all get a bit carried away, bit none so much as 英ドン, who manages to jump squarely into the doorjam on his way back from… actually, I never thought to ask. Ouch.