Whenever I go to Japan I look forward to trying cuisine that is often strikingly different from that I find at home. New ingredients, new tastes, textures and flavors – they’re all part of the magic of travel. With a Japanese friend as a guide, I recently went restaurant-hopping in Ebisu.  In the narrow streets around the train station I met the kinki fish for the first time.  Also commonly known in some places as idiot fish and more properly referred to as thornyhead rockfish, kinki is typically found in the northern Pacific.  Its habitat is the deep ocean, where low oxygen levels make it difficult for most species to survive.  Served whole and on the bone and with its crispy skin in place, kinki is a delicious and, it has to be said, very ugly fish.

Having enjoyed the food and being of a curious disposition, I decided to find out more about my kinki dinner guest, only to discover that it’s on a list of protected and at-risk species.   To say that spoiled my evening is an understatement and provoked this question. How can you be an adventurous and spontaneous traveler and at the same time be responsible to and aware of your environment?   I’m still thinking about that one and my encounter with the kinki fish.

Lord Flashheart, the randy fighter ace played by Rik Mayall in Blackadder Goes Forth, once jokingly complained of the First World War, “This damn war. The blood, the noise, the endless poetry”.  He could just as easily have said “the endless novels”, given how much inspiration that war has provided to novelists in recent years.

Louis de Bernières’ latest story is a sprawling 500 page family saga set mostly during and after “the war to end all wars”, as H.G. Wells described it.  It centers on the McCosh family, an affluent and somewhat eccentric clan living in Eltham, and more especially on the fates of its four daughters.

This is a soothing, comforting novel, a type of fiction that’s gone out of fashion, perhaps deservedly.  In the hands of a less gifted writer it might have turned out sentimental and silly, but de Bernières knows how to tell a story.  Reading it, I was reminded of watching Downton Abbey and that feeling of being drawn into an enchanting, seductive, and not entirely believable world.  There’s some vivid and occasionally very funny writing, and overall it’s never a strain to read, but the effort to portray the significance of the war often seems labored.  This is ground covered more subtly and effectively by the likes of Pat Barker and Sarah Waters.

Incidentally, the dust jacket of the U.S. hardback edition is one of the most attractive I’ve seen recently.

There’s a sushi restaurant in the Gotanda neighborhood of Tokyo.  It’s one of those places hidden in plain sight, easy to find only if you know it’s there, tucked among other undistinguished buildings on a featureless, busy street.  It’s small, with six seats at the counter and a private room at the back that no one ever seems to use.  It’s slightly rundown and looks like it hasn’t been modernized since it was first opened a few decades ago. I suspect it might fail any rigorous hygiene inspection.  No menu is offered and only cash is accepted.

The place is owned and run by the sushi chef and his clearly devoted wife.  He prepares and serves the sushi (usually nigiri) while she takes care of drinks, the bill, and everything else.  They’re a boisterous and hospitable pair, yelling welcomes when you arrive, farewells when you leave, and smiling all the time in between.  It feels like you’re eating in someone’s home.  Someone you can’t understand, who grins at you throughout your meal, tells you what to eat, and takes your money before you wander off happily into the night.

Sushi is apparently the simplest of foods.  What other popular cuisine consists of only two ingredients: rice and fish?  But if you listen to the aficionados, they’ll tell you it’s very difficult food to pull off.  They’ll also argue endlessly and tiresomely about which of the two ingredients matters most, but will eventually agree that it’s the pairing of both that makes the difference.  In experienced and skilled hands, like those above, that simple combination can taste sublime.

If you ask me nicely and promise never to go there, I might tell you the name of the place in Gotanda.

The meaning of kaiseki is elusive.  Some of my Japanese acquaintances use the term quite generically and in much the same way as others might use haute cuisine, to refer to elaborate and expensive Japanese food, regardless of region, type, or ingredients.  For those who use it more specifically, kaiseki describes a multi-course dinner in which the flavor, texture, color, and appearance of the ingredients are carefully combined and artfully presented on beautiful tableware.  The most pedantic of foodies go even further, distinguishing the more generic kaiseki-ryori from cha-kaiseki, the simple meal served before a ceremonial tea.  It can all get very confusing very quickly, like so many other things in Japan.

I’ve been fortunate enough to experience kaiseki at its best on a few occasions, most recently at Kichisan in Kyoto.  The picture above – a crepe stuffed with banana and yuzu sorbet drizzled with cognac – shows one of fourteen or so courses served that evening at a dinner that took nearly three hours.  It’s not the type of cuisine to suit the abstinent or the impatient.  What’s the point of preparing and eating food so elaborate, intricate and – let’s be honest – so extravagant?  It certainly has little or nothing to do with satisfying hunger, so the usual frame of reference seems unhelpful.  Of course, for the restaurateur it’s a money making proposition, but it’s probably less lucrative than many other types of commercial food ventures.   So what’s going on with kaiseki?

Unless you’re inclined to conclude that it’s just one of those victim-less crimes – the rapacious ripping off the gullible, the gluttonous, and the greedy – and need look no further, I think the answer can be found by looking at other experiences that are elaborate and transient.  Why do some people pay large sums to watch performance art or new orchestral music – events that require meticulous preparation, are expensive to stage, and that are often unrepeatable in the precise form in which they are experienced?  Can’t the appeal of kaiseki be explained in a similar way?

The cherry trees were just starting to flower when I arrived in Kyoto.  The appearance of the blossom marks the peak of the city’s tourism season, but the old, narrow streets leading to Kyomizu-dera temple were quiet and the shops still shuttered when I visited in the early morning.  The day had started grey and chilly.  By the time I had reached the Yasaka shrine a few hours later the sun had broken through and it was warm enough to have a coffee sitting outside and watch the occasional honeymooners in traditional costume walking in Maruyama park.

The spiritual and the temporal co-exist comfortably in most of the Japanese cities I have visited, but nowhere so well as they do in Kyoto.  The city’s many shrines and temples are far more than visitor attractions or historical monuments.  Like ancient parish churches in England, they feel like the heart of a persistent but understated religious culture.  In Kodai-ji and Chion-in temples and in Otani Sobyo I came across scores of Buddhists of all ages quietly praying or meditating, largely oblivious to those like me drawn to the buildings by more secular interests.  In Kyoto, a city otherwise as frenetic as any in Japan, the modern and the secular haven’t swept away a more enduring and contemplative spirit.

July 7th 2005.  I was in central London the day terrorists detonated suicide bombs on three underground trains and a bus.  Fifty-two people were killed and more than seven hundred injured.  What I remember particularly of that terrible day was an image that came to me very suddenly and that has stayed with me ever since: an image of the fabric of daily life being torn by the sudden and indiscriminate violence.  Looking through the ripped fabric, I felt I was looking into a parallel world in which everything seemed more or less familiar, but also slightly and permanently altered.  Feeling secure and safe no longer seemed possible.  In fact, security and safety suddenly seemed like childish ideas, innocent delusions shattered by the bombs as surely as the victims.  For a moment, the proximity of devastating violence created a completely new reality, a reality in which there was no longer a place for innocence.

That glimpse of a new reality cannot be sustained for long.  The thing you see so clearly for a short time through the torn fabric fades.   It’s impossible to live in the new reality because “normal life” repossesses you powerfully, at least until the next devastation rips the fabric once again.  But something small, deep, and fundamental is changed by proximity to death and injury on that scale.  Whatever you catch sight of momentarily through the torn veil – mortality, insecurity, whatever – stays with you and is never wiped away completely.  One’s life is changed, in a way that is perhaps imperceptible to others and inexplicable to oneself but that is real and profound nevertheless.

The small, subtle, almost invisible changes wrought by violence are the subject of the six powerful short stories collected in Haruki Murakami’s After The Quake.  All the stories were inspired by the Kobe earthquake of 1995 in which more than 6,000 people died.  The quake looms in every story, less a backdrop than a malign influence shaping the lives of the characters.  It’s a provocative and transformational force, causing a woman in one story to leave her husband and a man in another to declare love that had been unspoken for years.

The essence of Murakami can be found in these stories.  Here you’ll find in miniature everything that has made him one of the most impressive, distinctive, and admired novelists writing today.  It’s very difficult to isolate what it is that makes his work so compelling for so many readers.  The prose is spare and stripped down.  Reading Murukami, I often find myself re-reading individual sentences trying to discover how something apparently so simple ends up being so distinctive and powerful.  His characters, so precariously and tenuously connected to life and to the world, so vulnerable and so fragile, look to me like heroes in a violent, dangerous, and uncertain world.

“Pay very close attention.  He is telling us the story of the free spirit that is doing everything it can to escape from within him.  That same kind of spirit is inside me, and inside you.  There – you can hear it, I’m sure: the hot breath, the shiver of the heart.”

There’s something a little unsettling about disliking a book that everyone else seems to have applauded.  What did I miss?  Why did the virtues acclaimed by others leave me cold?  These and similar questions were on my mind as I read Rachel Cusk’s critically admired novel.  I wanted to like it, tried hard to understand why it seemed to attract so many plaudits, and ended up resenting both the time and effort I had invested and the trivial return I got from the investment.

If I had looked more carefully at the book’s cover, I would have noticed that most of the fulsome comments were from fellow writers.  That’s always a give-away.  What writers usually admire in the work of other writers – style – is rarely what readers think is important, and Outlook is a novel in which literary style is particularly prominent. The idea of a series of conversations being used to illuminate the character of the narrator (who’s an author teaching creative writing to wannabe authors, of course!) is an interesting one, but only if the conversations themselves or what they reveal are interesting.  That simply isn’t the case here.  Without that simple human interest, the whole effort felt  self-referential, an arid exercise in style – a writer’s book, not a reader’s book.

Some Caribbean islands have wiped away every trace of their local culture, so determined have they been to create homogenized winter playgrounds for tourists from all over the world.  It’s a short-sighted policy because it fails to recognize that many visitors want more than beaches and pools, visitors who can afford to take their dollars, euros, or whatever to other destinations offering something more distinctive.

St. Lucia, like its near neighbor Grenada, seems to be looking for the middle road.  It helps that the island is naturally distinctive, with its volcanic, hilly landscape, lush vegetation and stunning waterfalls.  The government is attempting to diversify the island’s economic base, moving into areas such as port facilities and petroleum storage.  Of course, many visitors won’t know or care about this, content with the stunning beaches, dependable weather, and warm waters, but it’s vitally important for the St. Lucians and their future.

For me there’s one simple and true test of a great literary biography.  Does it lead you (or lead you back) to the subject’s work?  By this test, Jonathan Bate has succeeded in writing an outstanding biography.  Before picking up the book it had been many years since I had read or listened to Ted Hughes, but Bate’s close engagement with the poetry encouraged me to go back to what had once been familiar work.

Bate’s compelling and persuasive account of Hughes’s work and life initially had the support of the poet’s notoriously sensitive estate.  The fact that the support was withdrawn says a great deal more about Hughes’s executors than it does about the book.

Surely they can’t have expected an exclusively “literary” study?   It hardly seems plausible that they didn’t understand the extraordinarily intimate connection between the life and the work.  More likely they were unhappy with some of the “revelations” about Hughes’s personal life.  They shouldn’t have been anxious.  Bate – a renowned literary scholar – is a scrupulously fair biographer and a critical admirer.  Even-handedness was in short supply in some earlier accounts of Hughes’s life, with many biographers (and others) eager to make him “responsible” (whatever that means) for the suicides of Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill.  Ted Hughes has had to wait a long time for impartiality.

The central premise of the book is that Ted Hughes emerged as a poet of myths and archetypes but very gradually over a period of nearly forty years found a more personal and elegiac voice as he discovered ways to transmute his tragic personal experience – most particularly the suicide of Sylvia Plath – into verse of extraordinary power and appeal.  Bate makes the case persuasively, though I still believe some of the earliest poems are among the best written by Hughes. Whatever one makes of Hughes the man or Hughes the poet, this compelling account of his life and work is going to stand as the authoritative biography – authorized or not – for a very long time.

“It’s my suspicion that no poem can be a poem that is not a statement from the powers in control of our life, the ultimate suffering and decision in us.  It seems to me that this is poetry’s only real distinction from the literary forms that we call “not poetry””.  Ted Hughes.

“I personally couldn’t care less about a bunch of bottles – but I’m sure glad Morandi could”.  Chuck Close.

I once visited Morandi’s small studio in Bologna. It was something of a pilgrimage for me because I had loved his calm, meditative paintings of simple domestic objects for many years.  There can be few painters with such a recognizable style, a style applied to such a narrow range of subjects.

This small exhibition at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) focused on Morandi’s paintings from the 1930s, a relatively unproductive decade for the painter and one in which he completed fewer than a hundred paintings. Work from that era is mostly held in private collections and only rarely exhibited publicly.  It was wonderful to see these paintings, a reminder of how an artist’s repeated engagement with familiar objects can provoke a much wider and deeper contemplation.

CIMA opened only two years ago and is a great addition to New York’s gallery scene. It’s something of a secret treasure.  It occupies the fourth floor of a nondescript building in SoHo and only visitors with an appointment are admitted.  Once inside, a large, elegant gallery, all clean, white lines provides a lovely setting for paintings and sculpture.