Eating in Ex. I will start with a story, a short one. Once upon a time, a man came to Ex from far away. It doesn't matter where. Not knowing what to eat he stopped in at the restaurant closest to his boarding house. "Bring me food," he said, and the owner brought his best, but his best was a poor best and the man was revolted by the taste of Ex, like a slough on his tongue. The drink was too hot and the insect-meat too cold; the vegetables too old and the seafood smelt like an old puddle. The man wrote a letter home telling his friends never to visit Ex because "the meals everywhere here are unbearable." Miserably he continued to visit the horrible restaurant, reasoning that if this was the standard of food in the city (and the owner insisted that it was) then he might as well stick to a place he knew. One day the owner's friend died and the restaurant was closed while he attended the funeral song. The man gloomily dragged himself to a different place to eat - and there his tongue was ravished, his eyes opened by the true food of Ex. From then on, he went to a different eating house every night and his life improved: his meals glowed in his memory like stars, and each one was as fine as a star, as rare, as numerous, and the pupils of his eyes acquired a starlike glitter. I am that man. Since those days I have become a gourmet. I recommend meals to the aristocrats, who pay me for my good taste. Whenever I feel my enthusiasm flagging, I go back to that first restaurant where the old , dirty taste of the food restores my determination. So: the times I've had eating in Ex? Three scented fruit on a white plate. Warm green dough in pots; long stick-insects standing on the end in the dough. A combination of the pliable and the brittle. In Oh near the Bay: fresh urchin meat pricked all over and each prick-hole flavoured with hot sauce, the whole thing quickly seared on hot metal and then ten urchins are served on a barbed centerpiece, one urchin per barb. The heart of a fermented root vegetable. Berries with the dew still on them. Strips of raw red fish sitting on broth so thick it made my spoon stand up. Tempura buns so frail that they shattered into crumbs the moment I touched them. The crumbs rose on froth generated by the explosion, and the froth became pink; it tasted of berries. In a café known as The Blue Flower, I've had a dozen spicy dishes of paste flavoured identically but for tiny differences so slight, so close yet so distinct, that they were like a slow gradation in tone between the earth and the zenith of the sky after the sun has gone down; and eating these pastes was like eating the sky. Seaweed nuts and honey, a strange mix. An odd light in the forest and eleven dishes of insects: insect-meat, insect-pie, insect-batter, larvae rich and puffy and the tart vinegar of the clean-blooded fish flies. Honey stew near the sound of running water. The fishers who live in the district by the Bay like to prepare shark by burying it in a box, forsooth, and letting it rot for a period of eleven days, after which they dig the fish up and eat it without preamble. It crumbles apart in one's hands and has a smoky, biting flavour. (From The life of the throat: the doings of a gourmet in the service of aristocracy, and the advice he gives to others with less time to spare than he, by Hajime Mixed-Ant.)