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‘Chomp’
I cringe as I feel myself bite down on the bone of a fish. It’s not that it tastes particularly bad– in fact, it has little taste at all and if it weren’t for the strange, tacky feel of it between ones teeth I might not mind it so much. Raising my hand to my mouth I pull the long strand of bone out and put it into the dish sitting in front of me. It’s filled with bones, large and small, from the pot of nabe I’ve been eating.
It’s been one of the biggest culture shocks to me since my arrival. Eating every part of the fish, regardless of how good it tastes, how many bones it has, or what fears one might possess about eating fish eyes, fish tails, or fish gallbladder. When one eats tiny fish as we often do it is impossible to de-bone them. Such fish must be eating in three or four bites, taking care to chew completely.
My host mother, sitting beside me, says gleefully: “It’s hard to eat because of the bones, isn’t it!”. I cringe a little bit, knowing full well that that is not why it is hard to eat. Rather, it is hard to eat because these bones have been splintered. Because, even after eating fish everyday of your life for 75 years, you still have no idea how to cut a fish in such a manner as to remove the majority of the bones. Rather, you suffice to take a delicious pot of nabe, with delectable onion, konyaku and other assorted substances, and insert into it the most hellish mix of sharp, protruding components I have yet to find during my time here…
Ah, yes, indeed… the way of eating that nabe was difficult. And it was so difficult that any sense of joy or taste was lost in the hour of trifling with the bones that it required.
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