The Toyotomi Blades

15

The dinner with Mr. Sonoda had been arranged by Junko, so I didn’t know too much when Mariko asked me about where we were going. The driver, our frenetic tour guide of the day, told us that we going to the Kori-Mizu restaurant. When I asked him about the restaurant, all he was able to tell me was they served traditional Japanese food and that the name of the restaurant meant ice water, which I thought was a strange name.

The Kori-Mizu was nestled in the hills above Kyoto and the driver took a winding road to get us to it. The car pulled up to a Torii-style gate and let us out. Stone steps led up a mountainside, and at the top of a steep stairway we could see the restaurant. Tall trees lined the pathway so it was hard to get a good view of what the restaurant looked like, but it appeared to be very much like a traditional Japanese temple, built of wood and up on pilings, with thick pillars and a gently curved roof line.

The path was illuminated by old-fashioned paper lanterns with candles in them. The flickering candles gave a soft warm yellow glow. The light was further diffused as it bled its way through the thin paper of the lanterns. Despite the steep climb ahead of us, it was actually a very inviting sight to look up the mountainside and see the contrast of the lighted paper lanterns, the illuminated stone stairway, and the dark trees.

Mariko and I made our way up to the restaurant door, where we were greeted by a young lady in traditional Japanese kimono. The kimono was a thick brocade of white blending into green, with embroidered gold leaves forming a pattern that looked like maple leaves being scattered in a fall wind. We gave our name and the woman bowed deeply. She pointed out cushions where we could sit and remove our shoes. Once we had done so, she provided us with slippers. They were thin plastic slippers that had terry cloth for soles.

I saw that the floor was a light polished wood done in a semigloss finish and absolutely flawless in the way it was put together. All the wooden joinery was done with hard crisp lines and there seemed to be no filler used to cover up the inevitable cracks between boards that you’d find in a Western hardwood floor. In its own way it was a work of art and it almost seemed a shame to walk across it, even in terry-soled slippers.

The woman took us down a central corridor. Off to the right and left were individual rooms with shoji screen walls. A few screens were open and we could see small rooms with tatami mats covering the floor and low-set tables. In every room there seemed to be an ikebana flower arrangement, pottery, or some painted scroll hanging on the wall. In its austerity, simplicity, and beauty, it was traditionally Japanese.

We came to a place where the building simply divided in two. The wooden hall ended in a platform and was picked up about four feet away. Between the two sections of the building was a tiny wooden bridge. The woman took us across the bridge and I looked down and noticed that a swiftly flowing mountain stream was cutting through the middle of the restaurant. The water from the stream lapped the rocks just a few inches from the edge of the floor. I looked over at Mariko to see if she noticed this unusual architectural feature and I could see that she was both surprised and entranced by it.

The second portion of the building seemed very much like the first. The long central corridor had more rooms leading off each side of it. The woman led us to one of the shoji-screened doors. She dropped to her knees and gave us a short bow. Then she slid the screen back and invited us into the room with a delicate wave of her hand.

Mariko and I walked into the room. Sitting on the floor before the low table was an old Japanese man with a jolly round face and a shock of white hair bursting from the top of his head like a tiny fountain. He was wearing a white shirt and tan pants and was sitting on a purple zabuton, or cushion. He was drinking beer from a tiny glass, and on the table before him was an enormous bottle of beer at least eighteen inches high.

“Come in, come in,” he said in passable English.

“I hope we’re not too late,” I said.

“Oh, no, you’re right on time.”

“I assume you’re Mr. Sonoda,” I responded. “My name is Ken Tanaka. This is my companion, Mariko Kosaka.”

“Of course, Tanaka-san and Kosaka-san, please sit down. May I get you something to drink? A beer? Some sake? Something like that?”

“Maybe just some tea,” I said.

“The same for me,” Mariko echoed.

“What, don’t you drink?”

“I don’t drink at all,” Mariko said.

“And I rarely drink.”

“Young people who don’t drink. What’s this world coming to?”

I looked at Mariko, a bit concerned that she was going to launch in to a discussion of AA and the reason she doesn’t drink, but instead she just gave a small smile and sat down on a zabuton. I followed suit.

The man said something in Japanese to the woman at the door, who put her hands before her and bowed, then slid the door closed. “I asked her to bring you some tea,” he said. “Then I asked her to start the first course. I hope you’re hungry. I know I’ve been looking forward to this.”

“What are we having?” I asked.

“A pretty traditional Japanese dinner, with some unusual specialties that this restaurant is known for. Actually, the first course will be cold noodles that we dip into a flavored broth. That’s normally a dish we only eat in the summer and typically this restaurant wouldn’t be serving it this late in the season, but because you are visitors to Kyoto I thought you might be interested in seeing how they serve it here.”

How many ways can you serve noodles? I don’t know, but I couldn’t imagine how serving noodles could be a tourist attraction. The door slid open again; it was the young lady again kneeling before the door. This time she had a tray with a simple but beautiful brown teapot and two cups on it. She put the tray down by the table and put the cups before Mariko and me.

They were brown earthen cups, obviously hand-turned. Each was different and each was intended to be a work of art. The teapot was placed on the table, and with another bow to us, the young lady poured the tea. Then she repeated the entire ritual of leaving the room, getting down, bowing, and closing the door.

“Will she do that all night?” Mariko asked.

“Oh yes, it’s an old traditional way of service, but I like old traditional things,” Mr. Sonoda said.

“I once worked at a Japanese restaurant in the States,” Mariko said, “but I don’t know if I could stand an entire evening of that routine. She must do a lot of kneeling, bending, and bowing throughout the course of an evening.”

“Yes, she does. She’ll be helped by others as our meal is served, but I thought it would be fun for you to see this kind of dinner.”

“I’m sure it will be a great experience,” I responded. “Your English is pretty good.”

“I spent twelve years in the United States.”

“On business or in school?”

He laughed. “I went to school long before it was popular for Japanese to go to the United States to get an education. No, I was there on business in the sixties and seventies. I was sent there by the company I used to work for, which was Nissan.”

“Is that so?”

“Oh, yes. That’s one reason I was anxious to meet and help you. Nissan is a sponsor for News Pop, and even though I don’t work for Nissan anymore, it’s sort of Japanese loyalty to help you out just because of that connection. I’d be anxious to meet you anyway, because I understand you have one of the Kannemori blades, and that’s a subject that’s fascinated me since childhood.”

“If you were in the United States in the sixties, you must have been there just when Japanese car companies were starting out.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Absolutely when they were starting out. In fact, I was there when we didn’t know anything about the U.S. market. When we first got into the U.S. market, we opened up an office in Gardena, California, on Alondra Boulevard. For a long time that was the national headquarters for Nissan as well as the Southern California sales office.

“As you might know, in Japan we sell cars door-to-door. When someone comes to the door who is interested in buying a car, we arrange a test drive and take things from there. We were so naive about the U.S. market that we actually tried to sell cars door-to-door in Gardena. We realized that Gardena had more Japanese per square mile than any other city in the United States, so we thought it would be a perfect place to launch a Japanese car. Were we wrong.

“First, they don’t sell cars door-to-door in the United States, so when we went around a neighborhood knocking on doors, asking people if they wanted to buy a new car, they thought we were crazy. More important, the fact that there were a lot of Japanese in Gardena actually worked against us. Most of those Japanese had been in the American camps in World War II. Instead of blaming the American government for putting them in the camps, a lot of them were just as mad at Japan for starting the war. They didn’t want to have anything to do with a Japanese car. In almost a year of trying, we never did sell a single car door-to-door. Although a lot of Japanese-Americans eventually did buy our automobiles, the foundation of our success was making products that all Americans wanted to buy, not just Japanese-Americans.”

The door slid open and this time there were two young ladies, the one who brought us the tea and a second one. Instead of being dressed in a kimono, the second woman was dressed in what I’d call a Japanese farmer’s outfit, with a big-sleeved jacket cinched at the waist with a cloth belt and what looked like wraparound pants. In front of them were two straw baskets. One was empty, with a long pair of bamboo chopsticks folded across the top. The other had a large pile of long white noodles in it.

“You might want to see this,” Sonodasan said, getting up from the table. As he did so, the young woman in the Japanese farmer’s outfit picked up the basket of noodles and started off down the hall towards the center of the building at a rapid pace. This action puzzled me and I looked to Sonoda for guidance.

“She’s going to leave the restaurant and run up the mountain with that basket of noodles,” he said.

The woman in the kimono picked up her basket and chopsticks and started down the hall with Mariko, Sonoda-san, and me in tow. She got to the center of the restaurant and took a strip of white cloth from the large sleeve of her kimono. She put one end in her teeth, then she quickly wrapped the cloth around her shoulders. Releasing the end from her teeth, she tied it tight. The effect was to pull up the sleeves of her kimono and expose her arms. I’ve seen the same maneuver in Japanese samurai movies, where they get the long sleeves of the kimono out of the way before they engage in a sword fight.

She went over to the edge of the platform to the gap that divided the two halves of the restaurant and sunk to her knees. She arranged the empty basket next to her and picked up the long chopsticks. Then she stared down into the stream intently. Sonoda-san explained.

“The young woman who went up the mountainside will take the noodles and throw them into the stream in batches. The stream is spring fed and it’s always extremely cold. In fact, when snow runoff feeds the stream it’s absolutely icy. As the noodles come down the mountain in the stream, they’ll not only get washed, they’ll also be chilled. This young lady is going to pluck them out of the stream with chopsticks, and then we’ll go back to the room and eat them with a dipping sauce.”

“You’re kidding.”

Mr. Sonoda smiled. “Just watch.”

What followed was exactly as he described it. Batches of noodles came down the stream and, with an expert hand, the young woman dipped in her chopsticks and fished out the clumps of noodles from the swiftly flowing water. She put the noodles into her basket. The light from the verandah illuminated the stream and I watched very carefully, but only a few noodles escaped her expert ability to pluck them out of the icy water. It was a spectacularly decadent way to end up with a basket of cold noodles.

When the basket was full, the woman stood up and led us back to our room. She served us each a portion of the still cold noodles and gave us a tiny bowl with a sweet soy-flavored dipping sauce that had green onions in it. They were delicious and the show was an extra attraction.

“Did you spend all your time in Los Angeles?” I asked Mr. Sonoda. He slurped his noodles, Japanese style, making a great deal of noise as he ate them. I’ve never been able to do that, but to my surprise Mariko was able to pick up the slurping routine rather quickly. She doesn’t do that when we eat noodles in Los Angeles.

“Mostly. I loved it in Los Angeles, but the place I love most in the world is Kyoto. I’m glad I was in a position to retire here when my working days were over. Now I follow my interests, especially collecting old Japanese swords.”

We finished our noodle course and the shoji screen slid open and the next course was ready to be served. I don’t know how the waitress knew we had finished. I looked around to see if there was a camera or a window or somewhere she could be observing us, but there was none. Yet somehow she knew the exact time to serve the next course.

She came into the room and starting putting oval-shaped plates before us. I got mine first, then Sonoda-san, then Mariko. On each plate was a smooth round river rock. Sitting upright on the plate was a grilled fish, complete with scales, head, and tail. The fish was sort of bent in an S shape so that it looked like it was swimming upstream towards the rock.

I didn’t know what to do, but wasn’t about to ask. All sorts of studies have been done about why men don’t ask for directions when they’re lost on the road. Many of these studies are very scholarly and erudite, but I think the basic reason is that we’re stupid.

I looked at the fish, puzzled for a second, then I picked it up with my chopsticks and bit the head of the fish off. Japanese have some fish snacks where they eat an entire fish: head, tail, scales, and all. Unfortunately, this was not one of them.

Mariko, being a woman and much more sensible than me, asked Sonoda-san, “How do you eat this thing?”

Sonoda-san said, “It’s very simple.” He demonstrated. “You flip the fish on its side, hold the head down with one chopstick, and use the other chopstick to peel off the fillet.” He did exactly as he said, stripping off the fillet with one expert swift motion. “Then you eat the flesh with your chopsticks, avoiding the bones and the scales.”

As he finished his explanation there was a lull in the conversation and the only sound that could be heard in the room was the crunch, crunch, crunch of me chewing on the head of a fish. Sonoda-san looked over at me in surprise, then he looked down. There, on my plate, was half a fish. The head was bitten off and the insides of the fish, which had not been cleaned, were sort of spilling out on the plate.

In a traditional restaurant in Japan you may get to use slippers and fancy teacups and chopsticks made of beautifully polished wood, but what you don’t normally get is a napkin. So there I sat with a half-chewed fish head in my mouth, trying to figure out how I was going to get out of this situation gracefully. Of course, the answer to that is there was no way to get out of this situation gracefully.

Mariko, seeing my condition, reached in her pocket and came out with a couple of tissues. She handed them to me like a mother dealing with a child and I was able to spit the fish head out into the tissues. During my entire performance, Sonoda-san sat there transfixed, watching me totally frozen. When I was finally able to spit the fish head out, I looked up at him and sort of shrugged. That opened the floodgates.

First a few explosive snickers seemed to escape from him in short gasps. I think he was trying to be polite and not laugh at me, but I could tell it was a losing effort. The snickers started coming out with increasing frequency until finally his face exploded in gales of laughter. I looked over at Mariko and she was laughing. I looked over my shoulder at the waitress, who had not yet left the room, and she was laughing, too. After considering all my options, I did the single thing left for me to do. I started laughing, too.

The fact that I was laughing seemed to set Sonoda-san off even more. He started laughing so heartily that he was rocking back and forth on his cushion. Finally he literally toppled backwards off the cushion, flopping back on the tatami mat and dissolving into a fit of merriment. The laughter would seem to die down periodically, only to flare up again when we heard one of the other people in the room laughing. In the end, we all had tears in our eyes and our sides were actually aching.

As soon as she was able to compose herself, the waitress put her hands before her and bowed very deeply, actually putting her forehead to the mat. She murmured something to me and I could tell it was an apology for laughing at me. She left the room, closing the door behind her. My assumption was that she wanted to hotfoot it down the hallway to the kitchen to tell the rest of the staff about what the crazy gaijin had done.

“I picked this restaurant to show you some unique dishes,” Mr. Sonoda said to me, “But I have to admit that I am now the pupil and you are the master in terms of teaching me about unusual ways of eating.” That set the three of us off again.