Free Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo by Matthew Amster-Burton

negi. It’s popular in Japanese bars and easy to make at home, which I did, with (you will be shocked to hear) tons of fresh negi.
    Western food offers a wide variety of flavors and a limited palette of textures. If you grew up in the West, think about how many of your favorite foods are, as in the famous Far Side cartoon, crunchy on the outside with a chewy center.
    This particular textural contrast is certainly prized in Japan—witness the ubiquity of tonkatsu and potato croquettes. But the Asian appreciation for textural variety extends into every corner of the spectrum, including some shady areas most Westerners would rather keep well-shaded. As Fuchsia Dunlop writes in her memoir,
Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper:
    Texture is the last frontier for Westerners learning to appreciate Chinese food. Cross it, and you’re really inside. But the way there is a wild journey that will bring you face to face with your own prejudices, your childhood fears, perhaps even some Freudian paranoias.
    The same goes for Japanese food. For example, I went to a street fair at Nakano Sun Plaza and had a free sample of
warabi mochi.
You may be familiar with
mochi,
sometimes called rice taffy, which is cooked sticky rice pounded into a very thick paste. Warabi mochi is not that. It’s made from bracken starch and is more bouncy and marshmallowy than rice mochi. If you fell off a ledge and landed in a big vat of warabi mochi, you’d be fine, albeit well-dusted with
kinako
(sweetened soybean powder) or matcha. The matcha-dusted warabi mochi I tasted was delicious, and it was still delicious after I’d been chewing it for a couple of minutes, which is rather a common experience in Japan. On the menu at our favorite yakitori place, they list “tender chicken,” just as you’d see in the U.S., but also “chewy chicken.” Each is very much as advertised. The chewy chicken is certainly more flavorful. It is also so chewy that I amassed a wad of half-chewed chewy chicken in the corner of my mouth, like that Japanese video game where a sticky ball rolls around gathering debris and mass. Eventually I had to spit it out in the bathroom.
    Or consider the Japanese love of things slimy and sticky. One rainy day, we dashed into a soba restaurant for shelter and lunch. When we stepped inside, two women were vigorously grating
nagaimo
for
tororo soba.
Dear Penthouse Forum: I never thought this would happen to me.
    Nagaimo,
Dioscorea opposita,
is a mountain tuber that looks like a daikon that forgot to shave its legs. When you grate it, it turns to a viscous white slime called
tororojiru.
A popular delicacy in Japan is cod or blowfish milt (
shirako
). “Milt” is just a euphemistic word for sperm. But tororojiru, despite hailing from the plant kingdom, is much more semen-like than shirako. At the table next to us, two women were having lunch, dipping their cold soba into a sauce heavy with tororojiru, and slurping away. I’ve also seen a noodle dish combining nagaimo slime with nattō, raw egg, and whatever other gluey stuff happens to be on hand. People eat this stuff not because they’re on
Fear Factor
or because of any nutritional dogma. They simply enjoy it.
    I can go part way down this road. For breakfast, I enjoy
on-tama udon
, noodles in a
shōyu
-based sauce topped with a very runny soft-boiled egg. (Shōyu is just the Japanese word for soy sauce, but it has a nice ring, doesn’t it?) Honestly, I considered myself pretty texturally adventurous until I met my nemesis in the form of junsai.
    It happened at Ukai Tofu-ya, an upscale tofu restaurant in Shiba Park, near Tokyo Tower. First, try to imagine an upscale tofu restaurant in the U.S., and get all the giggles out of your system. Done? Good. The approach to Ukai is a quintessential Tokyo experience: you emerge from the subway onto a baking-hot boulevard, drag yourself across busy streets and blank walls, and then emerge, suddenly, into a garden out of time, overgrown in a deliberate