Tokyo Redux

The perfect meal is very rarely the most sophisticated or expensive one, says Anthony Bourdain.  Rarely is it consumed jacketed and tied, in a starched shirt dress, sitting bolt upright in a four-star restaurant.  Context and memory, Bourdain says, play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one's life  (6-7).  

My perfect meal was experienced in Tokyo, a city which, like Bourdain, I found to be beautiful, vibrant, and pleasing to the palate.  
It was a bitter cold night in late December.  The wind whipped easily through my coat that, as my mother had warned me, was more stylish than warm.  Heads down against the wind, my family of four navigated the cramped sidewalks, the flashing lights of impatient taxis, and the bustling, bundled bodies of a people only half our height.  We walked for what seemed like an eternity, before my dad abruptly stopped in front of a facade that resembled the hundreds we had already passed.  "We're here," he said.  The four of us scrambled through the threshold tired, hungry, and eager to escape the wind.  The bar was small, but cozy.  We seemed to take up the majority of the room, a party of large, loud Americans, our white faces rosy with cold.  Squeezing into the remaining bar seats, we were immediately handed warm cloths for our face and hands.  A large, pressed banana leaf was placed in front of me, adorned with pickled ginger and a lump of wasabi so hot the smell alone tickled my eyes.  My parents uttered a few words in Japanese to the sushi master, and we were off!  It began with steaming bowls of miso shiru, the eyes of large prawns peaking out at us amid the murky broth.  Once our bowls had been drained and the shells tossed to the side, roll upon roll of maki appeared on our banana leaf plates.  Prepared barely six inches away, I could literally point to the chunks of fresh o-toro, sake, unagi, and my favorite ume shiso and be eating them wrapped up in vinegar rice and nori two minutes later.  Then came the sashimi, hunks of raw fish swimming in soy sauce and finding their way slipperily to my mouth.  Cups of hot green tea, plates of edamame, and bowls of noodles kept arriving continuously throughout the meal, until I was so warm, and so full that even as I sleepily stole sips of my brother's warm sake, I knew that this is what I had waited for.  This was Japan.  This was the land of my birth.

Japan for me, was exactly what Anthony Bourdain makes it out to be in his book.  From the extravagance of visiting the Tsukiji fish market, to the choking down of natto, to the wankosoba eating contests, and to the devouring of some of the finest, freshest, best-prepared sushi known to mankind, Bourdain's account resonated with my own life.  The acute accuracy of each meal, each grain of rice that has been washed, cradled, and cooked to perfection, each hunk of o-toro, or abalone alive and wriggling only moments before you eat it, each cup of precisely steeped tea, each bite of crispy tonkatsu, or flip of okonomiyaki truly makes almost every meal one eats in Japan a wonderful, mesmerizing, delectable, perfect experience.  "No place is as guaranteed to cause stimulation in the deepest pleasure center's of a cook's brain.  No cuisine, broadly speaking, makes as much sense: the simplest, cleanest, freshest elements of gustatory pleasure, stripped down and refined to their most essential (136)," Bourdain says.  And in my experience, he is absolutely right.