I recently finished Matt Goulding’s Rice, Noodle, Fish. It is very high on that list of books I can’t shake, and will be sure to revisit it again and again throughout my life. It defies genre, being part travelogue, part history, and in great measure the kind of detailed food talk which happens between people who know food well.
I spent a few weeks in 1997 around Iiyama, a small city in the mountainous Nagano prefecture, with my oldest brother. I was pretty young. It was my first trip outside the US. He had been there for a few years, as it had turned out to suit him well in many ways. He had figured out the food culture by the time I visited, so we spent most of our time doing what Goulding does in Rice, Noodle, Fish.
We ate our way up and down streets. We ate with his friends. We ate things like horseflesh in tiny pubs lined with clay jars of rice wine, garnished with greens plucked from the ground right outside. We scouted out the best vending machines and rated cold soba by slurps and grunts. Nato for breakfast. It was such a constant blast of new colors, flavors, and ways of eating I sometimes had to take a break and wander the hills around Iiyama while my brother worked. There are temples strung in those hills like pearls.
Toward the end of our time together, we ate at a small restaurant in Iiyama serving only rice and eel. This was hard for me to understand. Why would someone only make rice and eel? How can that even be a business? But they brought us these bowls of Nagano prefecture rice, culled from the mottled emerald terraces around Iiyama, and fresh grilled eel, lightly brushed with a thick soy-based blast of umami, a deeper hint of ocean salt and weed, and a bright sweet note of something I couldn’t decipher.
I remember every simple bite. Dark golden flakes of unagi, sticky grains of rice. We had been seated toward the front of the house. Cool afternoon light through the windows, filtered again through paper screens around the tables. There were other diners seated, but it was very quiet. We didn’t talk until we left, spending our walk back to his tiny apartment wondering about the properties of eel and soy.
My brother committed suicide a few years ago. I often travel back in my mind to our time together, eating our way through the middle of Japan. He was happy then; enlivened by the felt obligation of discovery some seem to feel when they first set foot in Japan. I think he felt such a peace there primarily because of the simplicity, the theory of making food which Goulding describes so well in his book.
David was enamored of the idea that someone, like the proprietor of this small grilled eel shop, would spend their entire lives perfecting one simple element, one dish. And people would come to receive their craft and labor. I think he felt love in that, which he had not felt many other places. It was a grace he could hold in his hands, or chopsticks; something to taste and see. It wasn’t fleeting. Goulding’s book took me back to that simple glory of spending time with my brother in Japan, communing in a way we never would again. Whole. Filled. Rays of mountain light. Grains of rice. The gleam of fat in the belly of a fish. Goulding gets it right.
