Self-Portrait Abroad

tokyo

I don’t know the exact name in French, even less what it’s called in Japanese. But what constantly, sometimes painfully, and always tellingly marked the first three weeks of my stay in Japan was the scruchjètta. Not a simple back pain, not really lumbago, not quite sciatica, the scruchjètta (the word is Corsican) is a sort of pain in the kidneys that can strike you at any time, while you’re picking up your boules over a game of pétanque (crack and you’re stuck, knees stiff, a hand on your back, unable to straighten up), or carrying an outboard motor down a slippery boat launch in a little fishing port on the way to your boat. All things considered I owe my scruchjètta to the unhappy concurrence of two causes, one you could call structural, linked to the general weakening of my back since this summer when I carried my daughter down to the beach on my shoulders every day (she’s only two but she already puts it away like a little sumotori), and the second, more conjunctural, being that as I was trying one day at the end of the summer to put back a shutter I’d repainted with Madeleine, leaning out the first floor window into the emptiness, I made an abrupt turning movement that twisted my spine.

Now if there’s one country where it’s anything but ideal to have the scruchjètta, it’s Japan. Even if it’s got a surface area of almost one hundred and fifty thousand square miles, that’s not the impression you get when you’re there. To enter any public space, be it a restaurant in Gion or a dark little café in the narrow streets of Shinjuku, a tiny basket or lacquer shop whose smallness is apparent as soon as you walk in the door, you have to bend over on entering and walk with your head down while contorting yourself around the shelves, all the time making sure you don’t bang your head against a kakemono or knock over an entire shelf of precious ceramics, tea pots, or little saké glasses with your backpack while turning around. No sooner had I reached the end of a corridor, the other day, at a restaurant, wearing a vague stoic grimace, than I had to take off my shoes. Now if this operation is relatively easy, ordinarily, and hardly requires the limberness of a grasshopper, things are entirely different when you have a scruchjètta, because every time you bend down toward the ground, no matter how minutely, no matter how gradually, to undo your shoelaces, you’re hit with an often searing pain. But I managed it. After taking off my shoes then and there with the precaution of a diplomat, I entered a silent hall, the wool of my socks swishing softly against the tatami, and then, cautiously, a magnificent traditional dining room with thin movable partitions made of translucent white paper. I crossed the room silently on tiptoes and sat down on one of the cardinal red (or purple or fuchsia, a ceremonial color) zabutons arranged around a low black lacquer table. Sitting immobile in the room like a foreign dignitary, cross-legged, or in the lotus position, or first one then the other, I kept changing my posture as the courses came and went in front of me, kneeling, looking straight ahead, my legs forming first a Y, then an L, a P, an R, an &, and finally, a complete wreck, a poor M with two branches, a pitiful hiragana, a defeated katakana.

As, apart from a few courses in calligraphy, I’d intended to take cooking lessons during this trip to Japan to learn how to cut fish properly, according to the rules of this art, Mr. Sudo of the Shueisha Publishing House, who fulfilled my every wish as soon as I expressed it and sometimes before I even managed to spit it out, took me with him one night to his local sushi restaurant. There, in this little traditional sushi bar with light wood interiors just a stone’s throw from his office, Mr. Sudo was at home. It was his restaurant, his family, his clique, his canteen. He must have filled the owner in on the somewhat unusual though by no means ignominious nature of my desires because no sooner had we entered than I found myself clad in a white apron that was quite difficult to get into (you had to put it on a bit like a parachute, first attaching the lateral straps then passing the whole thing over your head), and brought through a serving door into an extremely cramped kitchen, overcrowded with shelves and cupboards. There, after being guided through the utensils, I was asked to be good enough to wash my hands in a little floor-level washbasin, perfect for washing your feet, and, crouching down on the ground, I rinsed my hands in the running water before my host, who’d been looking on very kindly, showed me how to work the little inverted cylinder holding a syrupy greenish liquid soap. Having soaped my hands I straightened up and, coming over to the sink while giving my hands a quick wipe on my apron, I discovered two identical fish waiting for us on the counter, two small pink and shiny sea bream. I took my place beside the cook and attentively watched him work. He set about carefully scaling the bream with a large hatchet-shaped knife, holding the blade very high, very straight (I would have proceeded a bit differently, but that was perhaps just a question of style, the way two ping-pong players can have entirely different but equally irreproachable ways of holding their rackets). Then he cut off its head with a deliberate oblique thrust, from the top of the head to the bottom of the upper ventral fin. Working away with the knife he then gutted the fish with a series of delicate slashes and scrapes. He rinsed his knife under the tap. Now it’s your turn, he made me understand by threatening me amiably with the knife. I took the bream by the head and laid it smoothly on the cutting board. My knife sank into its flesh and I went about scaling it. As I progressed I could see the owner beside me, watching me work with a sorry sort of look, kindly shaking his head all the while to signify “no,” concerned and sympathetic, “no, not a chance.” When I’d finished I bent under the sink to throw out the viscous fish guts in a large garbage bag and straightened up, with sticky fingers and a slight grimace, one hand on the tender part of my back afflicted with the scruchjètta, and washed my hands under the tap. Several fish came and went in this way in front of us on the workbench, breech, sardines, plaice, flounder, which we gutted and cut into pieces while my host rounded out my cook’s training the whole time with detailed explanations in Japanese. At one moment, adding even more to the confusion, or in an effort to reduce it, the small curtain separating the kitchen from the restaurant opened and Mr. Hasegawa popped his head inside, the editor of a review called Subaru. A minuscule dictionary in his hand, he started translating the cook’s explanations into English, indicating as he went along the French names of the fish we were busy cutting up. This is a mackerel, he said. I’d have said it’s a bonito, I said. A mackerel, a mackerel, he repeated, nodding his head rapidly in confirmation (in Japanese you generally avoid contradicting the person you’re talking with too directly, and never say for example, “no, it is not a bonito,” but — when the context allows, that is—“yes, it’s a mackerel”). A big mackerel, then, I said. A big mackerel, he conceded, sinking his eyes into his little dictionary, which he went back to flipping through feverishly in the doorway. When I’d finally finished preparing my mackerel filets and was somewhat sheepishly arranging the fragmented hunks of flesh on the wooden cutting board with the tip of my knife to make four more or less respectable filets, the cook, standing there beside me in perplexity, leaned over the shapeless mass of hacked mackerel and explained to me with much respect — Mr. Hasegawa was translating — that considering their pitiful condition they were unfit for sashimi, and asked how I’d like them cooked, should they be grilled, fried? Grilled, grilled, I said (raw fish is also good grilled).