I’d been wanting to make potato-channa curry for the last two weeks, but twice the supermarket had had no cilantro. Curry must have cilantro. I’d hoped to get some today, but couldn’t, so I decided to ask Ine-chan, gardener extraordinaire of flowers and edible plants. My neighborhood has two small shops that cater to weekend visitors. Many people come on weekends from out of town to hike, fish, camp and do other sorts of outdoorsy activities. Fukudaya is the one closest to my apartment, but they are price gougers and Yamagata-san, its owner, is an evil man who doesn’t deserve my money. Ine-chan is the lovely owner of Kaneto, the other little shop ten minutes up the hill.
When I got on the van, the driver told me that my hair looked cool. It’s just fat twists, I thought to myself. Then I realized that it had been six months since he’d seen my hair because I’d been wearing a hat since October. On the mountain winter comes early and leaves late and grudgingly (it snowed all day on April 10th). When I got off the van at 8 p.m., I stopped in at Kaneto. Ine-chan and her husband were lounging under the kotatsu in the side room attached to the shop. He looked away from the television long enough to smile and wave his cigarette at me. Ine-chan greeted me, sat up and chuckled while she put her teeth in. “Pakuchi-wa arimasuka?” I asked. She thought for a moment, put on her shoes, grabbed a knife and said “Chotto matte kudasai.” She walked out the front door and disappeared into the darkness across the street.
A few minutes later, she returned with a large bunch of fragrant cilantro in her hand, earth falling off the roots and water dripping off the leaves onto the concrete floor. As she rang up the carrots and cucumbers I’d laid on the counter, she said that there was no charge for the cilantro. I didn’t understand the sentence after that, so I didn’t catch the reason why. Probably because I’m the only one who’s ever asked for it. Or because it probably just sits in her garden waiting to be nibbled on by rabbits and deer. At any rate, I would have been willing to pay double the going price for it, but she gave it to me free because Japanese cuisine doesn’t use cilantro. Arigato gozaimasu and itadakimasu!
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Pakuchi-wa arimasuka? = Do you have any cilantro?
Chotto matte kudasai. = Wait a minute.
Arigato gozaimasu. = Thank you.
Itadakimasu is a phrase said before one eats. It loosely translates to “thank you for this food.”
April 21, 2019
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