Breakfast, Lost in Translation
Breakfast, Lost in Translation
Natto in Japan
At my family’s house in Japan, breakfast consists of the following: miso soup, rice, a broiled fish of some kind, an assortment of vegetables and pickles, and natto. Always natto. Among the plates that litter the table there is a modest bowl of the stuff cut with mustard and soy sauce, occasionally mixed with diced onions, enough for each person to ladle a hefty spoonful or two on the last few mouthfuls of rice in their bowl.
But even this is too much for some, including members of my own family. The widespread distaste for natto, otherwise known as fermented soybeans, is understandable. Natto is sour, bitter, and stinks like rot. It is a slimy mass of brown pellets that boast the texture of mush, which is how I imagine one would describe eating the droppings of a small rodent. The soybeans are held together by sticky threads that can easily stretch from mouth to chopsticks to rice bowl, which means those unpracticed in the ways of natto may find their dining area covered in a web of silky gunk.
For the aficionado, however, there is very little in this world that is better. It is hard to describe natto’s appeal: its underarm-like aroma is reminiscent of a really stinky cheese, but it also has the soothing heartiness of a plate of beans. From a very young age I was a natto partisan, along with my Japanese mother; my brother and my American father were in the anti-natto camp, openly shuddering at what must have appeared to be a rather disgusting morning ritual.
So for a long time I thought of natto as one of those Japanese peculiarities that simply did not translate. There is a limit to what foreigners can know about a culture, a point at which it becomes incomprehensible no matter how hard they try to understand it, and natto was a culinary signpost marking the boundary between Japan and the outside world. In the no man’s land we occupied between those areas, I had been blessed with the natto-loving gene, my brother hadn’t, and that was that.
But in the case of natto, I turned out to be wrong. My brother, convinced that a food so superficially terrible in every respect must actually be delicious, acquired a taste for it through sheer will power. My wife, raised in Oklahoma City, loves natto. And when we took our seven-month-old to Japan earlier this year, she ate it happily, mashed up with some congee.
Ironically, for all the Japanese cuisine that has migrated to the West, the vast majority of which is inauthentic and inferior, natto is available here in its original form. Even in Japan it is sold frozen in Styrofoam packages, making it easy to transport to Japanese specialty stories in America. In fact, there is a Japanese fishmonger a few blocks from my apartment in Brooklyn who carries the same natto my family buys in Fukushima prefecture. A true taste of Japan, for less than five dollars, for anyone who is interested.
All you have to do is try it.