Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo Read Online Free Page A

weather in Japan is odious. Kirkup, however, was writing in the 1960s, and Tara lived in a rural area with few modern conveniences. For Kirkup’s clay-walled room, I would substitute an air-conditioned apartment or perhaps the second floor of the Starbucks on Nakano-dōri. It’s disappointing that Japan has not yet invented a supercooled summer jumpsuit, but it’s only a matter of time. It could be lined with slender ice packs and stored in the freezer.
    As for the cooking, well, I admit it: weather and the ubiquity of great, cheap restaurants sidelined my grand plans to cook my way through the Japanese repertoire. As the saying goes, why buy the octopus when you can get the takoyaki for free?
    Still, it was a nice little kitchen, a strip along the wall of the dining room. To the left of the sink was a stack of appliances: refrigerator, microwave, toaster oven. Printed on the front of the microwave was a quick guide to heating times for the four items you’re most likely to heat up: rice, sake, milk, and bento boxes.
    Nearly every family in Japan has a version of the same stove, two gas burners and a fish grill. A more luxurious model might have three or four burners, but for a small apartment, two is plenty. Before the advent of the gas stove, the Japanese home had a
kamado,
an imposing charcoal-fueled stove with cooking vessels sunk into a rangetop, each topped with a wooden lid sporting fin-like handles. The kamado has been reborn in the form of the Big Green Egg and similar ceramic barbecue devices. The Big Green Egg has a big green advantage over the classic kamado:
you’re not burning charcoal inside your house.
    But back to the modern stove. A few years ago, the New York Times caused a minor stir by publishing a photo of columnist Mark Bittman cooking at home. Bittman is the bestselling author of many enormous cookbooks (
How to Cook Everything, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Mark Bittman Forgot More Recipes Than You Ever Knew,
etc.), and his home kitchen is a classic Manhattan apartment afterthought.
    “People like to cook when they’re camping and in other places where the situation is less than adequate,” Bittman said at the time. “For some reason they think they have to have a great kitchen to cook at home, but it’s not true.”
    So far Bittman and the average Japanese home cook are on the same page. But then he added, “One of the things I hate about my stove is you can’t put four pots on it at the same time, so you cook with two pots and use the oven more.”
    Boohoo! The only oven in a Japanese kitchen is a toaster oven. If you want something baked or roasted, you buy it at a shop.
    The fish grill is a clever little device. When I was a kid, I hung out with a friend who had a weird uncle. Not sleazy weird, just eccentric. The most obvious mark of his eccentricity, aside from his seventies mustache, was that he liked to cook his dinner in the broiler at the bottom of the gas range. He’d be on the floor, opening the little drawer and peering at his piece of meat or whatever. I don’t think I saw a broiler drawer between 1990 and 2012, but the Japanese fish grill is the same thing in miniature: a drip pan with a metal grate on top, which you slide under a gas flame.
    Several people in Tokyo told me they never use their fish grill, as if the reason for this would be evident, but I found that it worked great, especially for juicy, hard-to-overcook fish like mackerel, the most common (and cheapest) fish in Japanese supermarkets. I’d lean over and slide the drawer out to check on my fish, just like the weird uncle. My mustache is more groomed, but not by much.
    Later, I discovered the problem with the fish grill, in three steps:
Present your family with succulent grilled fish. (Did I mention that, for some reason, broiling is always known as “grilling” in Japan?)
Slide the fish grill shut so that no one takes a blow to the kidney while walking through the kitchen.
Three days later, open the