tokyo, early winter.

lately gotten crisp here. just now there are yellow gingko leaves all over the streets.

last night i went to a yakitori-ya, essentially a skewered chicken dining bar. room for about 15 around a counter, a display case with neat rows of raw ingredients. a polished cypress wood counter. you sit, warm yourself with a hot steamed face towel, order some warm sake, and then are asked what grilled items you will have.

there is a sparely written menu on wooden plaques hanging on the wall. ominously, there are no prices.

you call out your order, specify if you would prefer the skewers seasoned with salt, or sauce - a thick blend of soy, sake, vinegar and sugar.

we have duck, toothsome rather than tender; coarsely-minced chicken meatballs; dark meat, white meat - but only faintly seared on the outside, with the middle still pink, and smeared with wasabi (to kill the salmonella...?) - cartilages, livers, gizzards (splayed and flattened), the cut near the backside, bunches of skin, the 'back-liver' (sekigimo, found at the crook of the back), and an unborn egg.

in the honored tradition of offal euphemisms, they don't call it that, of course. they call it chochin, which means lantern.

the gleaming half-formed orb of a yolk dangling off a skewer does in fact resemble a handheld lantern, the sort that i used to carry around at night in our garden during the mid-autumn festival. not to put too fine a point on it, it's all the best hits of poultry on a stick, a triple-flavored chicken lollipop. as well as the golden yolky globe, it also has the dark-marrowish meat and a dubiously white bit which looks like white meat but presumably includes some sort of chick-cawl as it's chewy and slightly crunchy.

we finish with rice topped with gently simmered chicken mincemeat, and a small cup of chicken soup laced with thin leek strands, sticky on the lips with collagen.

then there is this cafe, which i can only describe as New Romanticist industrial ruin. you enter a building that still houses an automobile servicing facility, climb the staircase whose corners are littered strategically with rusting ornaments and disused farming tools, stuffed with a sprig of dried herbs, or placed next to a small weathered clay vessel.

you can see the crumbling ramshackle wrought iron vaulting of the ceiling in a shade of sickly blue, reams of rust peeling luxuriously off the window frames, crud on the windows, tarnish worn smooth on the back of your chair. they've hung other assorted iron implements on the walls, evidently chosen for both their tectonic strength and weedy delicacy, monotone geometrical etchings, a handful of dead flowers placed just so next to a small anvil, a rusting horseshoe, a little twig of a vase.

we have soy and brown rice lattes laced with brown sugar, and a mealy green tea roll cake stuffed with sweet potato and red bean cream. the tableware, of course, has also only recently entered a state of delicate decay. you warm your hands on the rough stuccoed surface of the cup, you wipe your mouth with a plain flannel towelette carefully chosen for its rustic overtones. it comes on its own slightly tarnished aluminium tray.

the food, such as it is, is a blandly flavored still life. everything carefully (or is that carelessly?) arranged on gently bruised earthenware pottery: ten grain rice, organic miso soup with tofu, boiled vegetables with a sesame dip, simmered hijiki seaweed and dried beancurd strips with flakes of sea salt.