for Didi
For the Japanese man, who looked as though he’d just stepped off a Kurosawa film set, the offer came as a bolt from the blue. After all, how long had he been away from home? He ate whatever was on offer, and that usually bore no resemblance to the refined culinary traditions of his youth. Hadn’t his family home stood in the hills of Minabe? He was undoubtedly a born traveller and always prepared for the unexpected. Even he could not have foreseen this gesture.
1.
Imagine: you’re asked to put a slice of lemon in your mouth and let its intense sourness work its magic on you. Before you do that, before your taste buds take control of your facial expressions, you’ve already formed a clear mental picture of the lemon. The thick, bumpy peel. The many shades of yellow, some glossy, some matt. The woody remnant of the twig that once connected it to the tree. The oval shape, with its bulbous ends. The radial division into segments, visible when the lemon is halved. Drops of juice falling one by one into the hot tea and dissolving in it with a graceful swirl. The tiny splashes, sparks of oil from the breaking peel. Lemon with fish. In a cake. Lemon in a water carafe. In countless forgotten memories of taste and scent.
Only then, after all this mental preparation, do you put the slice in your mouth. Once again, the sourness is incredibly sour. All your previous experiences with lemon are reaffirmed. And it is precisely this that means that delightful shock is missing. The shock of experiencing something for the very first time. This is now tempered by the absence of the unexpected. Tamed by the fact that, after that first time, you made a subconscious decision that, for the rest of your life, ‘lemon’ is familiar territory, where everything about it has already been discovered.
2.
Nevertheless, beneath the everyday experience of lemons, the memory of that first time still lingers. The lemon of the beginner’s spirit. Yes, that very first time! Unforgettable! So special! And wouldn’t it be fantastic the next time you pop one of those yellow slices into your mouth, to do so in the spirit of the absolute beginner? Without any expectations, and with the courage to let yourself be overwhelmed once again by the explosion of sourness?
3.
Is recapturing the intensity of a beginner the highest level achievable? Is that the end point, beyond which one cannot go? No, the volume button of ‘surprise’ and ‘intensity' can indeed be turned a little further to the right. Here’s how it works.
You think you’ve just peeled a delicious, sweet orange. However, this is actually a deceptive, lemon-like variety of citrus fruit, with a peel that looks exactly like that of an orange. A kumquat whose skin says: ‘I’m ripe and sweet’, whilst the intensely sour interior pays no heed to that superficial pretence. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, in other words. Then you take a bite of the little deceiver, and the enormous shock of reverse expectations will takes its toll.
Lemons are a well-established phenomenon. Nobody bats an eyelid at them. At least not in these parts of the world and in this day and age. Of course, that hasn’t always been the case. Far from it. There was a time when nobody knew of the lemons‘ existence. It was not part of either our individual or collective consciousness. It didn’t even have a proper name.
Imagine the unique situation where a lemon appeared in your life. Before allowing that strange thing to come into contact with the intimacy of your mouth, you’d take your time to examine it with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. You’d look at it from every angle. You’d have a sniff and give it a squeeze. Finally, you’d bite off a tiny bit of the peel (mwahh, bitter!) and then let a little lick of the juicy inside into your private parts (aahhh, sour!)
The thrill and confusion of an unsuspecting foreigner being offered a Dutch double-salted liquorice sweet for the first time – without any explanation or warning – and popping it straight into their mouth. Ha ha, it’s always fun to see the growing bewilderment!
Lemons, kumquats, and Dutch salted liquorice sweets are responsible for a wide range of flavor sensations, as well as taste confusion. But all that pales into insignificance compared to the situation where a non-Japanese person is offered an ‘umeboshi’. And – little does he know! – he pops the whole thing into his mouth without a moment’s hesitation.
Once more, let’s go through all the three factors of surprise for this particular case.
1. Lemon is very sour. Umeboshi is the epitome of sourness.
2.
An umeboshi looks like a soaked, dried apricot. So here we see the phenomenon of reversed expectations rearing its head once again. Think of the ultra-sour kumquat and the extra-salty liquorice sweet. What you see ain’t what you get!
Please return for a moment to the opening photo at the top of this text and ask yourself the following questions: What is what? What is the umeboshi? What is the apricot? Because we are discussing matters right now, you are mentally sharp, and you can see it straight away, aren’t you? But then again, do you always examine your food with such care and precision? In a hurry, the sour plum is easily mistaken for an apricot. With all the consequences that entails.
3.
Umboshi? From Japan? You’d never heard of it before. How were you supposed to know? Not only is it extremely sour, but it’s also very salty. A real exotic flavor ambush! You mean a slap in the face, don’t you?
Back to the story.
We saw the Japanese man approaching from a distance. Sitting on the edge of a rock, we looked out over the path that we ourselves had struggled to walk earlier that day. Thin air, winter, twilight. On our trek through the Nepalese mountains, we had climbed to 4,500 metres. We were due to set off very early tomorrow, at four o’clock, to climb the final 1,000 metres to the Thorong La Pass.
It was the mid-1980s. Kathmandu was a magnet for neo-hippies. At least, that’s what we thought, as impartial observers. When I look now at the few photos that remain from that trip, it’s clear that we must have overlooked two hippies at the time. That’s just how things go..
Something was moving in the rugged mountain landscape. A tiny figure that seemed to be heading our way. Sometimes it would disappear for a moment, only to reappear a little closer on the other side of a small hill or a large rock. Even from that great distance, it was clear that it was not a Nepalese porter. They usually carry enormous loads on a strap across their foreheads. This traveller, however, was walking briskly and was clearly carrying only light luggage.
It was only when he had come within ten metres or so of us that we noticed his Asian features. He was indeed not a rugged Nepali, but a energetic Japanese man. Thin, with a sun-tanned face, wrinkles at the outer corners of his eyes, and road dust clinging to his threadbare clothes. He looked as though he’d stepped straight off a Kurosawa film set, where he’d played the role of an eternally wandering rohin.
Konbanwa! Good evening! And where on earth was he walking from at this late hour? All on his own? Oh, from Japan. Been on the road for so many years already? And over the pass first thing tomorrow morning too? Yes, I’m sure they’ll have a place for him to sleep here. There aren’t many travellers at this time of year. Haven’t you eaten yet? Yes, there’ll probably still be some dal bhat and perhaps some tarkari, and certainly some strong tea.
And then something occurred to me. We had a small jar of umeboshi in our luggage. Always good to have to hand if your tummy gets upset by unfamiliar food and water that isn’t exactly clean. Shall I offer him one? Or would that be odd? Who on earth offers an umeboshi to a stranger out of politeness? Well, all right, I’ll go ahead and do it. I took out the jar, took the lid off, and, with my arm outstretched as if it were a posh box of chocolates, offered it to him in a friendly manner. You want one?
え?! 梅干し!?
(translated from Japanese: WHAT?! UMEBOSHI!?)
The tone with which he responded to my gesture suggested he was a direct descendant of a samurai lineage. The seasoned Japanese traveller was clearly prepared for anything. Except, that is, for being offered an umeboshi in these parts. He hadn’t seen that one coming.
Of all the Japanese food he had gone without for many years, or of which he had occasionally come across poor imitations. And of all his Japanese comfort food, umeboshi was perhaps at the very top of the list.
Is there a suitable word for this sort of reverse culture shock? I’ll have a look it up in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows soon. Or do any of you know the right term for it?
Later, I imagined that he might well have come from Minabe. Minabe, surrounded by ume orchards, is the cradle of the umboshi tradition. Where, after a long period of fermentation, the tart fruit, combined with salt and red shiso leaves, transforms into the marvelous umeboshi,
And I’ve also recently imagined that now, a good forty years later, he’s telling his grandchildren about Grandad’s travel adventures:
… when I was still young … and how, at the foot of the Thorong La, I came across a couple of …, yes, where were they from again? … well, they were a sort of European hippies … I’d already spotted them sitting on a boulder from a distance … but they were a very nice sort of hippies. We had a bit of a chat, and do you know what they gave me then? … you’ll never guess! … an umeboshi! … yes, you heard right, an umeboshi! … I’ve sometimes wondered since then whether that umeboshi might have come from here, whether it might have come from our very own Minabe? … Yes, that’s what those two offered me, on the roof of the world of all places … and you can be sure of one thing: it was the tastiest umeboshi I’ve ever eaten in my life! …
So much for the former Japanese traveller.
And now, back to me for a moment.
Never before, and never since, have I met anyone for whom popping a whole umeboshi into their mouth brought such a blissful expression to their face. Not a trace of a sour, pained grimace. Just a sweet, wistful smile.
Chapter 22. Shock. The Unexpected. Two identical trigrams: Thunder above Thunder. Expect apricots, get umeboshi.
Preparing for every eventuality is not only incredibly difficult to achieve; sometimes it is even undesirable. Not every unexpected event harbours danger. As always, the truth lies somewhere in between. A realisation which, in turn, comes as no real surprise.
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And if you’d like to find out more about umeboshi and the revival of Japan’s depopulated countryside, be sure to watch this video.
