"I was OK with the smoked fish, which was very good - the sushi, the rice. What I was not ready for, and never will be, was natto. The Japanese love natto, an unbelievably foul, rank, slimy , glutenous, and stringy goop of fermented soybeans. It's the Vegemite of Japan, dearly loved by everyone there, for reasons no outsider can understand. There were two kinds of natto for me that morning; the traditional soy variety, and an even scarier black bean natto. If the taste wasn't bad enough, there's the texture. Theres's just no way to eat the stuff. I dug in my chopsticks and dragged a small bit to my mouth. Viscous long strands of mucuslike material followed, leaving numerous ugly and unmanageable strands running fromy lips to the bowl. I tried severing the strands with my but to no avail. I tried rolling them around my sticks like recalcitrant angel-hair pasta. i tried slurping them in. but there was no way. I sat there, these horrible-looing strings extending from mouth to table. like a spider's web, doing my best to choke them down while still smilng for the attentive Mr. Komatsu. All i wanted to do now was hurl myself through the paper walls and straight off the edge of the mountain. Hopefully, a big tub of boiling bleach or lyue woudl be waiting at the bottom for me to gargle with.
Waiting in the wings, right behind the natto, was another concoction, described as 'mountain potato'. Of this, I could handle only a single taste. To this day, I have no idea what it really was. It didn't taste like a potoato - and I can't imagine anything on a mountain tasting so evil. I didn't ask, frightened that my host might mistake my inquiry for enthusiasm and offer up another generous helping. The small, dark, chewy nugget can only be descrbed as tasting like salt-cured, sun-dried goat rectum - unbelievably, woefully flavorful - garnished by small maggotlike wriggly things, so awful to my Western palate that I was forced, through the grim rictus of a smile, to ask politely that Mr. Komatsu 'leave me alone for awhile so I can fully appreciate this fine breakfast in solitude.'
I had no choice. I thought I would die. Nothing, not bugs, not iguana, not live reptile parts, not tree grubs, nothing I'd ever eaten would approach the horror of these few not unusual Japanese breakfast items. I'm not sneering. I'm sure that natto and mountain rectum are, as they say, 'acquired tastes.' And I'm sure that over time I could learn to appreciate them. If I were incarcerated and natto was the only food provided. But for right now? Given a choice between eating natto and digging up my old dog Pucci (dead thirty five years) and making rillettes out of him? Sorry, Pucci."
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Sorry Bob you are crazy!
