Taking the fish

Back in Yamagata. Only for the weekend mind, but I spent the entirety of that cycling around on my mate Justin's spare bike gawping at the mountains, or staring at them from the back of his lady friend Michi's car. Saturday was a crisp blue day and we could see as far as the first snow to have settled on the Asahi Machi range, way out west.

Saturday night, dinner and drinks with the teachers I used to work with from Nana Chu Junior High School and my replacement, Jamaican Tamara, was really rather lovely. We went to Aramasa, an izakaye (Japanese pub eaterie) we used to go to a lot when i was there. The master is hilarious. He once showed me pictures of him asking for directions to the hospital when he got sick on his holiday to England. I guess he had nothing else to take pictures of.

We had some very typical Yamagata fare, in the shape of Imoni, an autumn taro potato stew. There was also purple chrysanthemums with soy, chunky pork rib meat with negi, a kind of Japanese leek, skewered and grilled and the house special, horse meat sashimi (raw horse meat). Hello tape worms. He also brought out a caraf of Jyuu Yon Dai, Yamagata's finest sake, a very smooth blend that is reputedly very difficult stuff to get hold of. But the headlining act on the table was the fish head, sliced in two down the forehead (do fish even have foreheads?), and served on two massive presentation dishes.




Now, I had reservations about how Tamara would cope at Nana Chu. More so, how she'd get there in the first place. I rode a bike every day, over rutted ice banks and through deep snow in winter and under oppressive temperatures by summer, 8km there and 8km back on the commute. Tamara can't ride a bike. But on this showing, she's doing just fine. I hadn't heard the Caribbean saying that people will take the bones for themselves and throw the meat of a fish to the dogs, such is their passion for it that they'll suck those bones dry of marrow. Which is exactly what she and the lovely Yoshida Sensei set about doing.



I thought the fish was done with once we'd eaten as far as the jaw line, but they continued. Tamara ate both eyes, spitting out the hard, 'eye of the eye' that collects in a hard little ball when an eye is cooked. The best bit, she claimed. I'll stick with chicken medallions thanks. Then she and Yoshida Sensei shared the jelly around the eye sockets and scraped clean the meat from the bones, and cracked them open and sucked them clean as a primitive whistle.



Thankfully my appetite wasn't affected and I happily devoured 4 donuts (I know, as disgusting as the fish demolition job) in a post dinner sugar search.