“What in the world is this?” I thought to myself as I reluctantly masticated what I originally supposed to be a potato. The cold, gray, rubbery substance slithered tauntingly around in my mouth, and all I could think of was that I had unknowingly bitten into a block of fat. But wait, this was Japan. It could be something worse than fat. Squid? No, I’d had squid, and although it was rubbery, it wasn’t this rubbery–or vile. Octopus was white, and I didn’t know what eel was like, but I doubted this was it. I forced myself to swallow whatever it was. I didn’t even have the option of discreetly spitting it out into my napkin because I didn’t have one. Napkins are never a part of Japanese school lunch.
School lunch was something I chose to participate in because I knew that if I were solely responsible for the preparation and transport of my own lunch, I would surely starve. Besides, the teachers wanted me to eat lunch with the kids every day so they could talk to me and get more practice with their English. Many times, this desired aim was never realized. But occasionally, after minutes of busily eating, some students would begin trying out English on each other in preparation for asking me a question.
“Do you…do you…. Chigau.” This would go on until they felt semi-confident with the question. Then they would all defer to each other to do the actual asking. Giggles and frantic back-and forth hand waves would ensue, and nothing would be decided until finally they would play “Jon ken pon” (the Japanese version of “Rock, Paper, Scissors”.) The loser, slouching in defeat, expelling a sigh, yet smiling good-naturedly, would turn and ask me the question.
“Do you habu a boyfuriendo?”
Smiling coyly, I would reply, “Yes, I do.”
“Ooooh!” they would all croon as they looked back and forth between each other, smiling more than ever.
“Name–what name?” another eager student would ask, now dispensing with the usual question-decision methods.
“Brad-o Pitt-o,” I would reply with a smile.
“Eeh?” the questioner would say, being followed by a crescendo of “eeh?”s from the other five students sitting with me. “Uso,” they each said so quickly that it sounded like six staccato punches in the air.
Tilting my head to the side, I confirmed their suspicions. “Uso,” I echoed.
Oh how I wished that today such a conversation had kept me from discovering the horrid substance that was now polluting my body. Nobody had warned me about this. Nobody warned me about the raw squid I once ate, either, but I was in a daring mood, and I knew I was eating something raw. It wasn’t such a surprise when immediately after I had pushed a thin slice into my mouth I was informed that it was squid. True, it did make it a little harder to chew and swallow, and doing so seemed to take an inordinately great amount of time, but I knew it was my own fault. And, I had been warned about the natto. The minute I laid eyes on the stuff, I knew it had to have been a pretty desperate person who first considered it fit for human consumption. Later, I found out this was true. A samurai soldier discovered that the beans he had brought with him had been in the saddle bags a little too long, but he was supposedly starving, so he decided to give it a try, and “voila,” a Japanese delicacy was born. Now they eat it with rice and raw eggs, and of course, soy sauce, and mustard. I was told that natto smells like stinky feet. It’s not the smell that so much offends me, nor the taste, actually. It’s the lack of grace with which a foreigner such as myself is subjected to while trying to consume it. Since the beans are fermented, a thin, white substance covers them, and there seem to be little white strings connecting all the beans to each other. When you pick up the beans with your chopsticks, these gossamer strings seem to multiply and wave delicately in the air in random directions. When you put the beans in your mouth, the almost elegant strings wave all over your face, and your shirt, and your tie, if you happen to be wearing one. I spend more time trying to clean the spider-like web off my face than actually eating the beans. Which is just as well, I suppose. It goes against all my upbringing to eat fermented, rotten things. But as all the Japanese will tell you, “Natto is very healthy.”
That’s what they say about the foul, gray, jello-like substance that I ate that day, too. It looked like dirty-dishwater in a semi-solid state.
The more I thought about it after lunch, the more I was determined to find out what I really ate. During cleaning time, I waved four girls over to a chalkboard in the hall. Looking back and forth between each other, and smiling slightly, they shyly approached.
“Hi,” I cheerfully said. “I have a question.” They all nodded that they understood. I began speaking very slowly.
“Today, for lunch, what was the gray…um…it was small…” I looked at each of them, seeking for understanding. Quizzical looks were all I received. Words were failing me, so I opted for body language. I pretended that I was chewing something very rubbery, and squinted my eyes as I demonstrated the difficulty one might have while eating the mystery “food.”
“Oh,” they said, “konyaku.”
“What? Kon–what?”
“Konyaku,” they repeated. Then a girl proceeded to draw a tuber-looking item on the chalkboard. “Potato,” she said, accenting the first syllable.
“No, it was NOT a potato,” I said, a little too adamantly. I happen to be a potato connoisseur, and I KNEW that what I had eaten was most certainly not a potato. But the girls kept politely saying “konyaku” and “potato” intermittently, as though they could possibly have some relation to each other. I finally decided that my inquisition was fruitless, as they obviously misunderstood what I was talking about. I thanked them and retired to the English teachers’ room where I encountered my supervising teacher, Mr. Kawabata.
“Do you know what kon–kon-yaku is?”
“Konyaku? Unh, yes.”
“What is it?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Is it an animal?”
“Uh, no.”
“Does it grow in the ocean?”
“Uh, no.”
“Is there a dictionary?”
“Unh.” He rummaged under the long metal table which served to hold all the students’ English notebooks in which they copied endless pages from the textbook. He very quickly pulled out a large English/Japanese dictionary and handed it to me. I quickly thumbed through the pages looking for “konyaku.” Much to my dismay, the dictionary did not contain it. I handed the dictionary back to Mr. Kawabata, and he turned to a different section, soon finding an entry he thought would satisfy me.
“Devil’s tongue: a tuber grown in oriental climates; Japanese potato.”
I remained unconvinced. What I had eaten may have looked like a gray potato, but its consistency was so far from a potato that nothing short of a message borne on the wings of angels would convince me otherwise.
Until…the girls I had queried during cleaning time returned about an hour later with a book their cooking teacher had loaned them. The rather colorless book had a detailed, step-by-step illustration of how konyaku was made. First, they took “devil’s tongue,” cooked it in water until it disintegrated, and then strained it. The resulting sludge was then poured into a pan and refrigerated. After sufficient time was allowed for firming, the pan was removed, and the resulting concoction was sliced into squares. Potato jello.
How could they do it? How could they ruin a potato like that? I had prided myself on being able to eat any kind of potato, prepared any way–baked, scalloped, cubed, hashed, mashed–but “konyaku” is where I drew the line. In my eyes (and in my mouth), I considered it to be evil–and since it was made from something called “devil’s tongue,” obviously somebody else thought so, too. I decided never to eat the stuff again, and was very careful from then on to thoroughly inspect all my food.
One day, a few months after my unpleasant discovery, my suspicions concerning the perniciousness of konyaku were confirmed. A man nearly died trying to swallow it. Luckily, his quick-thinking family sucked the nefarious morsel out of his throat with the vacuum cleaner. It was a “last resort,” they said. I say the man was saved from a fate worse than death. For wherever there is konyaku, evil is sure to follow.
~Melissa writes at The Howell Herald~
I admit, I’ve been obsessing a bit about the big election. I might be getting too involved. And today, my hope surged with the speeches I heard.