Somewhere, there is a photo of a barely-teenage me in a dimly-lit restaurant sitting next to my Uncle Gene. His wrinkled face beams a glowing smile, and his eyes sparkle. At the moment, the photo was taken, I could feel his hand behind my head, and I knew without looking. He was giving me the ol’ bunny ears. You’re never too old to be silly.
Cancer robbed me of the chance to know Uncle Gene in my own adulthood, but I still remember the excitement of getting to join him at his favorite restaurant, Kaneyama, an exotic choice in a normally quite orthodox family of eaters. Kaneyama’s unusual feature were a few special booths for small parties off to one side, separated from each other and the rest of the restaurant by shoji-style wall panels and doors. You would take off your shoes—“Just like they do in Japan!”—and go up two small steps to enter your booth, in which you’d find imitation tatami mat floors and a table set into a footwell. The footwell allowed customers to sit on cushions with their legs hanging down like one would in a chair but still get that Japanese-style low table experience. In a traditional Japanese house or restaurant, there is no such footwell, and one does not normally sit this way. But shhhh.
Uncle Gene had to order the same appetizer every time, one that was not on the English menu, sawakani from Hokkaido. These were stream crabs about the size of a half-dollar which were quickly flash-fried in oil and served up on their own. No pulling legs off and scraping out the meat here; just eat the darn thing whole like popcorn of the sea. It was so delicious and addictive that one easily forgave the occasional scratching of the gums by the chitinous shells. This was the most adventurous dish I had eaten at that point in my life. Unfortunately, sawakani became over-fished, and Kaneyama could no longer bring in any to serve.
About a decade later, though, I lived in Akita Prefecture, a beautiful backwoods breadbasket in Japan’s northern mountains. This place is not too far from Hokkaido, I thought, there might be sawakani around here, right? My search came up empty for a time, but I did find interesting new dishes to try. Shortly after I arrived in Akita, a friend took me to a sumo-themed restaurant in the small town of Yuzawa, where they served sakura niku, raw horse meat, in sashimi style. In the years that followed, I also ate whale, squid organs, grilled intestines, cod sperm, and hatahata fish egg sac, a local delicacy I cannot recommend. Nevertheless, I still yearned to find sawakani like I once ate with my uncle.
Unfortunately, I was running short on time. After three years, my contract would be coming to an end, and a few of my coworkers asked if there was anything I would like to do before I departed. I told them of my hunt for those tiny crabs, and I was met with looks of confusion and concern. They conferred in quiet voices and informed me that there had not been any sawakani in the area for a long time. The crabs were over-fished, and the waterways were too warm and polluted.
A few days later, while at my desk in the teachers’ room, there was a tap on my shoulder. The science teacher had found a place; though, it was not a restaurant that served sawakani. It did have kawakani, though. He offered to take me there on the weekend, and I quickly accepted. Sawakani literally means “stream crab,” and kawakani means “river crab.” They surely were almost the same thing, right?
That Saturday, I met up with the science teacher and one of the English teachers and ventured to the north and then west, to an area called Kowakubi. The Japanese countryside is a joy to drive through in favorable weather. Like the limbs and bellies of sleeping giants, tall hills and mountains rise left and right, elevating their thick greenery decorated with the dappled light of dewdrop sun seeping through the gaps in the clouds. Between each rumbling of mountains lie open flat plains in which farms and rice fields make beautiful latticework bedazzled with houses and shops and old schools that also serve as community centers.
We turned off the road onto a short dirt decline. Nestled in this shady, wooded glen out of sight of the road was a large old estate house of two, maybe three stories, and a quiet kamakura warehouse beside it. Vertical and horizontal dark wood beams create an organized, geometrical face of the building, punctuated by smooth white plaster walls and curving red-painted roof and eaves. The green foliage that surrounded it was clearly watched and trimmed with care. This was more than a simple restaurant.
The aged wood curves in Shouhouen’s hallway.
I later learned this place is called Shouhouen, a traditional-style hot spring inn in what was once a Oyamada Clan village leader’s home dating back to the 1600’s. The original building was destroyed in a 1914 earthquake, and what we see today was rebuilt three years later. Near the entryway, there is a well-preserved rickshaw, lest one forget already just how venerable this place is. White sliding shoji doors guard the perimeter of the spacious banquet hall lined with tatami mats, and heavier outer doors reveal the lush back garden.
After some exploration, our small group was guided into a side dining room. Here, I met my first challenge. It’s an old building, so I knew what to expect next. Low tables. Zabuton cushions. Final destination. I was expected to sit seiza. There is no easy mode here, no Kaneyama foot wells.
The proper way to sit in a traditional environment such as this is to keep your upper body erect and sit on your knees with your legs folded underneath. This is seiza, and it hurts. You would think your legs would get numb. And they do. But they also ache after a while. How long of ‘a while’ depends on your endurance, your fitness, and, apparently, on technique. There is supposed to be some kind of magic way to position yourself over your feet or something, but I have not learned the secret.
But no matter! I would endure the seiza for the delicious crabs!
It felt like an eternity before the food arrives. If one struggles with adroitness at small talk in one’s own tongue, I cannot say it gets any easier in a second language. Still, we had a comfortable amount of time, as our legs became less comfortable, to discuss school matters, remark upon the weather, and praise the room décor.
At long last, we hear sounds of shuffling behind the doors that screen off the kitchen. The smell arrives before the food does, but it is so welcome. Miso soup with locally hand-picked mushrooms and crab meatballs, steamed Akita komachi rice, something like chawan-mushi with crab meat in a cute red and purple bowl, fried crab meat served in the crab’s own shell. Naturally, this came with sides meant to cool and clear the palate such as sliced pickled cucumber and pickled daikon radish. An excellent feast!
But then I saw the kawakani. These clearly weren’t the tiny popcorn crabs I had eaten so long ago with Uncle Gene; these were about the size of a saucer with their legs folded in! But what the hell. This was as close as I could get, and I am a much more adventurous eater now than I once was. This will be grand.
There was one more dish. On an aqua blue plate, next to some pebbles, naturally, sat an overturned crab carapace filled with… something.
It turned out to be kanimiso. Miso, fermented soybean paste, mixed with the brown meat and innards of the crab’s main body. It was on its own. Beckoning me. Daring me. It was a lone warrior on a hill, his banner planted and name given, laying out its claim to a duel with me.
So I started with the fried crab meat, which was excellent. There’s just something absolutely metal about eating cooked crab meat right out of the crab’s own hard exoskeleton. Between bites, I switched dishes and indulged in the miso soup. Even on a warm day, good miso soup just makes you feel great all over. I dipped into that chawanmushi thing and picked away at the rice and pickled sides. My legs were starting to ache at this point, but, no matter, I was having a great meal and enjoying myself and bantering with my coworkers.
But I knew I was going to have to come back to that orange stuff.
Inevitably, I tasted the kanimiso.
Colors say a lot about a food. The vibrant, saturated green of lush vegetables says “I am going to be fresh and snappy.” The neon blues and greens and reds of a rainforest frog say “don’t eat me.” The brown bits of toasted rice at the bottom of the pot say “the best flavor is right here.”
Orange is a strange color in food. It either means that something is about to be the most delicious thing you have ever tasted or that something has gone terribly wrong.
Kanimiso is this second kind of orange. Miso can have a light or rich flavor, but it is usually warming, smooth, and almost creamy in a way that one would think it shouldn’t be when you look at it. I love miso, and it does wonderful things to roasted vegetables. But the inclusion of the crab innards just took it to a weird place I could not follow. It was sour and bitter and fishy beyond my tolerance for fishiness. Worst of all, it did not go away. The aftertaste lingered like the embarrassment of being the first one called on in class when you didn’t do the assigned reading. I go back to the fried crab meat, tastes like kanimiso. Over to the miso soup, it really tastes like kanimiso. Even the lovely, steamy, produces-the-famous-beautiful-women-of-Akita Akita komachi rice could not relieve me of this lingering, pungent crab innards flavor. My poker face fought valiantly, but ultimately I was vanquished by my doughty foe.
Some ten years had built up a lot of anticipation for a reunion with the delicious little popcorn crabs my Uncle Gene introduced me to, but that kanimiso left a sour taste in my mouth.
And that is a shame, because the rest of the meal was excellent and I would love to heap praises on a lovely meal in a gorgeous old ryokan. I may have to give it another go someday.
In spite of an afternoon rain shower, we scurried across the way to the warehouse beside the main building, which turned out to be something of a museum. On display were articles and relics from Shouhouen’s history. Samurai clothes bearing the Oyamada C lan crest, scroll art, Imperial Japanese flags and banners, an early radio, straw umbrellas and mats that served as raincoats, old books with calligraphy utterly indecipherable to me, and pottery, pottery, pottery!
Among the youkai, spirit-monsters of old Japanese folklore, there is a brilliant concept known as the tsukumogami. The thought once went that when an object, such as an umbrella or teapot, reaches one hundred years old (or 99, depending on who you ask), it gains a spiritual sentience of its own or becomes an apparition. If mistreated, they might not respect the will of their owners, and if cared for, they just might get better with age. Under extreme neglect, some might become malevolent spirits, like the karakasa, a one-eyed, one-footed sentient umbrella that was known to summon a gale to blow people into the sky or otherwise so terrify humans who encounter them to such a fright that they could not move their feet from where they stood.
With that little nugget of knowledge living in my head, it was a surreal feeling looking at all these old objects around me. Was the umbrella watching me? Has that tea pot been neglected for too long? How many years left until that radio gained consciousness?
One comes to Japan with hopes and leaves with a story. Had I not asked around, on the whim of having enjoyed a dish at a restaurant with Uncle Gene years and years earlier, I would not have seen or tasted what I did on that day. I would not have even known such a place existed, much less found myself surrounded by would-be tsukumogami in a piece of Old Japan like what one sees in the movies.
Like dominoes clack-clack-clacking onto one another, small event after small event led me down a path to something unique and fascinating. A memory like that sunny-rainy-sunny afternoon is a reminder to dare to explore, to pursue one’s whims and whimsy where it may take you. And if you have a blessed chance to help someone on their own pursuit, take it.
In the rain, Shouhouen loses none of its splendor.