Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

I hadn’t been prepared for the complete transformation: It felt like time travel. The room in the ryokan (Japanese inn) that we had checked into a couple of hours earlier now looked like a dining room straight out of 16th-century Japan. Two low tables in the center of the room were covered with dozens of small dishes of food, each more a piece of art than a meal. A woman in a pale kimono gestured for us to sit down. With a bow at the door and a couple of sentences in Japanese, she left.

“She is bringing tea,” Yoshimi translated for me. She and her boyfriend, Eiji, knelt on the cushions opposite from me, quiet and dignified. I tried to maintain a dignified posture myself, but my thoughts were racing.

After an hour in the outdoor hot spring, the onsen, I hadn’t quite come back to earth. I was floating rather than walking, and felt cleaner than ever before. Yoshimi insisted we all dress in the traditional white Japanese gowns that had been left in our rooms. She told me that our meal was being prepared while we bathed, and it would be awaiting us on the floor of our room when we returned.

The sliding door opened and the woman in the kimono bowed, entered, and served tea from a deep green pot. She asked another question; Yoshimi’s answer seemed to suggest that we didn’t need anything more. When the sliding door closed, Yoshimi and Eiji erupted into babble.

“This is very traditional Japanese food,” Yoshimi said, “but we have never eaten like this before.” She leapt up and grabbed her digital camera from the suitcase next to the wall.

Apart from a steaming jug of miso soup, the food spread before us was served cold, so the 10 minutes we spent taking photographs of each other and the meal didn’t matter much. Kaiseki ryori is a traditional Buddhist-style meal; the small portions of food are presented in beautiful ways, often imitating a shape from nature.

After our initial excitement had subsided, we looked more carefully at what was in front of us. Yoshimi explained what some of the vegetables were, which included daikon (Japanese radish) and many varieties of seaweed. Some of the dishes were so carefully arranged that it seemed almost sinful to disturb the food with my chopsticks.

As we ate, Yoshimi, Eiji, and I talked about the Japanese way of creating beauty in small places.

“Think of the middle of Osaka,” Eiji said. “If you take a general look around, you will see a lot of concrete and flashing neon lights. But walk slowly and somewhere you will find a small shrine with orange paint and careful inscriptions. Or a small garden between two stores, with each bush trimmed perfectly.”

Yoshimi finished a mouthful of miso soup. “That’s true,” she said. “We cannot make everything around us beautiful, but we can choose to look only at the beautiful things.”

“So that’s why people like to eat kaiseki ryori after all these years,” I guessed. It still surprised me that Yoshimi and Eiji had never experienced such a meal before, but then again, they were a young couple living in the modern chaos of Osaka. They dyed their hair to look less “Japanese,” and they lived for holidays spent in faraway places with untouched beaches and vast blue skies.

Almost an hour later, the woman in the kimono returned. She brought fresh tea and removed our plates. According to Yoshimi, kaiseki ryori meals follow the Buddhist tradition of only satisfying 80 percent of your hunger. After sipping our green tea, the three of us went for a walk through the ryokan and settled on the ground floor where a young man was playing a traditional Japanese instrument, resembling a flute. The peaceful music, combined with the after-effects of a good meal and my afternoon in the hot bath, made me sleepy. Eiji suggested we go back up to the room.

When we walked in, all traces of our meal had vanished. Instead, the futons had been laid out for us, with small pillows and a light cover. Yoshimi and Eiji went into the other half of the room to watch television, but I headed straight for my futon. I lay down near the edge, breathing in the fresh straw smell of the tatami mat.