An Empty Plate

It’s almost six o’clock in the morning. I’m sat at a most solid kitchen table. Dawn has yet to break and I can hear a not so distant rooster. Through the window before me, lights flicker. A village, I presume, but I’ve yet to see the land in daylight. I’ll be sat here a while, so it’s sure to reveal itself to me in due course.

I realise that I am typing without looking at the keyboard. When did that happen?

Joyce (the cat, named after Grenfell. The dog is Ulysses, perhaps the other Joyce) nudges a snack-dispensing toy along the floor. Every once in a while, it gives out some small treat. She needs to lose weight, they say, but she is of a certain age and it seems reasonable enough that ladies of a certain age may also be of a certain size. All is quite calm within the house, a converted old barn with enough ceiling space within the sitting room to probably fit the entirety of my house in London. Coffee, a cigarette. Magical words from my hosts: feel free to smoke absolutely anywhere. No need for doorstep trembling or surreptitious window leaning. All is good.

Haute-Savoie, France. No longer Japan. Several weeks ago, I attended a reunion of several old school friends. Whatever happened to S., I wondered. An hour or so of internet searching narrowed it down to the village of Cernex. I spotted her peeking around the shoulder of some other local in some local newspaper. Aha! I’d not seen her since her marriage to P. some years ago. Letters exchanged, why not come and visit, my return to England softened by the thought that I’d head off soon enough for France. So I’m spending a few days here, a couple in Avignon and then down to the Cote d’Azur again.

Let’s get back to Japan. Tidy up those loose ends whilst they’re still fresh.

So, what about Fukuoka? I guess I should take more photos. What is, you might think, a food blog without photos? As I’ve said before, I have issues with photography. For a start, I find taking photographs skews my perception. Rather than look at things, I look for photographs. Contrasts, framing, colour and so on. I contain the limitless bound of my eye in a frame. I do it sometimes, but it means that I stop looking. I like looking.

We’re used to food writing being accompanied by photography, particularly on the internet where there are no issues of printing expense. Show it to me! I want to see it. I can’t help but think of pornography, or at least sexually explicit images. If I am presented with a dish, is that experience best represented by the uneaten plate, everything before me? Top off, pants down, legs spread. There you go. Oh, she was like that? Well, she looked like that. And yet the experience of the dish might most poignantly be represented by something else entirely: a flower arrangement by the wall, a view from the window, a hand resting upon a pillow, the body unshown, close up of a fork nudged across a plate, some fallen crumbs, a scrunched up napkin partly in shadow. These are the memories. Rather than the meat and two veg of it all.

I’ve never gone to bed with people thinking “I must take photographs of this right now! Do you mind?”. Introducing the camera would change the perception, bound forever in two dimensions, flattened, framed. A performance for the shady gentleman half-hidden behind the curtain. Maybe that works for you, but not for me. I like memory, its assurances and its unreliability, its imperfect humanity. When data is cheap, it’s all remembered – supposedly – all recorded, never thrown away, permanent. It doesn’t dissolve, fade, evaporate as we are all bound to do ourselves.

So, if this makes any sense, I don’t like taking photographs of food anymore than taking revealing photographs of lovers. I want a relationship with the food, I don’t want a representation. So here’s an empty plate:

This empty plate, or rather pan, once contained a delicious fish, but the fish has vanished! Where? My stomach. Can you tell us about the fish? A little, I suppose, it was isaki, aka grunt or Parapristipoma trilineatum. Fished in Nagasaki, with a simple (asari) clam and tomato sauce. I was very happy to eat it. To start, I’d eaten an aubergine and blue cheese salad, except in this case the aubergine was raw. Raw? Yup, some new fangled style of Japanese aubergine that eats more like an apple. Astonishing also. These revelations occurred in the restaurant Kasa that I mentioned previously, although it’s seems just as much to trade under the name Konya Cafe, as part of a gallery/exhibition space. It was only a short walk from my hotel in Daimyo. Yes, I also had Hakata ramen, one-bite gyoza, mentaiko tempura, all manner of local goodness at various yatai (mobile food-stalls), but this is the meal that really left its impression on me. Perhaps because it was my very first upon arriving in Japan.

Yosuke was cooking alone that night. I ate at numerous similar operations in Japan, small restaurants with a central open kitchen, customers around the edge. It’s a style of eating I’d love to see more of in London. As a solitary traveller, I really don’t want a table to myself. My only disappointment with Kasa/Konya was that the singular staffing (on that night, anyway) meant that there were no desserts on offer. I made do with grappa instead…

(The dawn is making itself felt, it looks like this)

That’s all I’m going to say about Fukuoka for now. I’ve also not quite finished with Ishigaki, or rather Iriomote, an island about 45 minutes away on high speed ferry. I had planned to stay three nights here, but a typhoon meandered its way closer and I had to leave, since boats were being cancelled and I could possibly have been marooned for several days. I found the food at my minshuku (Kanpira-so) amply generous and tasty. Breakfast might be rice and miso (for the Japanese), champuru and fried spam (for the locals), poached egg and toast (for the Englishman). All of these things for everyone. Star fruit, dragon fruit, citrus… With breakfast and dinner, there wasn’t really that much room for lunch, but I confidently strode out into the middle of what is called BIG RAIN (ooame, 大雨) for a two-hour walk up the coast and around. After two hours, a thorough soaking, I sought refuge in a bus shelter until I stopped dripping. Upon the Miyamoto’s recommendation, I went and checked out the Iriomote Café. Here for once is an actual photograph of food!

I sat there for a good three hours, sheltering from the rain, drinking beer chatting with a hiking watercolourist, another island-hopper and the waitress. It was off-season, quiet, welcoming. The cafe has been set up with view to creating as low an ecological impact as possible. It’s a very wild island. There are wind turbines outside (only one working, the waitress apologises for the rather dimly lit interior), the owner is building some holiday rooms just to the side of the café, set into the slope, they’ll recycle their water (not that there was any shortage of water on that day). They should be open by next year and some of the rooms will command a beautiful view across the small island facing and the eventual sunset. It’s looking a little bleaker on the day I visit:

What about the food? Oh, that. Light, wholesome, delicately spiced taco rice. Somehow exactly what I needed! Welcome, chat, shelter, beer. All quite perfect. Thank you, Iriomote Cafe!

All in all, despite a couple of so-so experiences, I thought Ishigaki and Iriomote were quite delicious places to visit. Even A&W is tasty!

And next? Well, then it was Osaka and I’ll get to that, in the now I’m not sure. Although a suggestion of visiting a local cheese specialist has been made. Oh, cheese, just pop your top off there, sweetie, it’s been sometime…