I AM AYU

         “Looking back I seem always to have been escaping from my kitchen into my workshop: cooking in order to work, rather than working in order to eat. 

                                    But sometimes I escaped from both — into the sea, into the woods, onto the mountainside.”     — Patience Gray 

Emerging sleek from the rapids I smell my hair and skin of cucumber. I am the freshwater ayu, breathing strong against the current… I am returning to the high mountain as a fish. The winter I was in Niigata, grilled ayu-on-sticks were already selling at the local market, and my Tokyoite companion, famished from skiing and flushed from the hot tub, devoured the legendary ayu head to tail, clicking the Sapporo a few times. She and I had met in San Francisco a way back and she’s now living permanently in Japan. We are good friends and I love eating with her, especially what she would prepare at her place, a shabu-shabu lunch favorite: dipping tofu cakes, savoy cabbage and shiitakes in sesame ponzu dressing after chopstick-cooking the veggies in a simmering dashi broth on a portable cookware on the table, and singing shabu-shabu to the extent the food will be cooked— it is named for that time.  This morning the rock pools at Iao Valley where I swim were perfect catchments for ayu. They were crystal clear, the pebbles had given up the mirage, the gentle cascades bubbled in whirlpool traps, as if this corridor river had come down from the sky. But no ayu can be found. But an essence springs from the water… a reason for cherry blossoms and magnolias to pine, in the downstream current my body has been shaped, the forest is my ground, but I am deep, very deep in the aquifer of the earth and the legend has found my way. I am ayu, the one that escaped.

(Illustration by author, copying the painting of Hokusai.)

PS. At the Morgan Library Museum in midtown Manhattan was an exhibit of Hokusai works, the artist who drew the famed woodblock print The Great Wave and other nature paintings of fisherfolk and the mountainside life. Pencil and sketchbook in hand, I drew one scene he depicted of two friends on a straw mat, but the perspective was panoramic and the gorge in autumn was the theme. The friends are not fully visible but according to the inscription are eating chestnuts and ayu and have a pot of wine while relaxing on a bank under a tree. It was many years since this memory, and I remember this sketch crediting Hokusai that I gave to my friend from Berlin (my national parks camping-mate) a picture of the ecological beauty of friendship, in all its forms.