Once in a lifetime strawberry

Amaou amour

I’m writing this from the window of a cafe across from the supermarket. Outside a guy in an apron is selling amaou ichigo for ¥1000 a box, which comes to something like 75¢ per strawberry. That’s a steal. I’m trying to study but I can’t turn away from watching the steady flow: a person walks up to the grocery store, sees the line, reads the sale sign, grasps the gravity of the moment, and hurries to queue before those fleshy gems sell out.

I grew up in a house where fruit was consumed like a second meal after the main one. You’re eating a banana after dinner? But what about this pile of cut mango, and also these grapes that just got washed, and also this remaining half an apple that needs to get eaten? I spent the first half of 2019 in Hanoi, where every few days I bought a whole pineapple for 50¢ from a lady in the street, who would swiftly cleave it into thick wedges and send me on my way.

When I first got to Japan, I knew my fruit budget would be an issue. I had quit my job to do something different, which was another way of saying, I had no steady income. I frequently stood staring at fruit at the supermarket, light reflecting off the plastic sheaths and casting a shine on my dumbstruck face. Gift fruit is its own thing; it no longer surprises me to see a watermelon with a big bow on it going for $60, or a single mango in a styrofoam coffin going for $50. But even the prices of what I like to think of as “table fruit” would elicit a sound of consternation from my mother. What’s more, I routinely find myself underwhelmed after begrudgingly paying for offensively priced fruit here in Japan. 

Ichigo, however, are a category apart. 

Hakata amaou ichigo

During strawberry season I regularly walk home carrying a little plastic bundle with both hands, five gleaming ichigo arranged on a spongey crash pad to protect the fruits from bruising. The last time I was able to receive visitors from the US was January 2020, and D took me out for kaiseki. One of the eleven courses was just a giant rock of a strawberry on a bed of ice. It was the size of a toddler’s fist and came with a fork.

Amaou, the crown jewel of ichigo, are from Fukuoka Prefecture, where I lived for a year and a half before moving to Tokyo. The variety name is an acronym of the words akai (“red”), marui (“round”), ōkii (“big”), and umai (“tasty as fuck”). Biting into a good amaou, you come to realize a simple truth: That all other strawberries in Japan, maybe all strawberries everywhere, are actually stealth marketing for amaou ichigo.

The closing of the borders in early 2020 coincided with my first strawberry season in Japan. I had nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one to see. I ate a lot of amaou.

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A common problem for Japanese language learners is the number of homophones. Modern Japanese is a combination of original Japanese language sounds and imported Chinese sounds. The latter have been stripped of their tones, rendering a great number of syllables that have the same pronunciation. The sound “shō,” for example, combined with other syllables, could be associated with any of the following meanings: small, cancel, illness, correct, introduce, life. 

When your livelihood depends on linguistic precision, it is difficult and often mortifying to enter an existence of extreme verbal vagueness. Yet here we are. The air around my ears is a cloud of constant near-misses. 

So it may not be surprising that the first time I heard someone say “一期一会,” “ichigo ichie,” I thought they were talking about strawberries. This proverb, overused to the point of cliché, means “once-in-a-lifetime meeting.” The direct translation sounds a bit obvious: the human before me is so amazing and important, our having met is a once-in-a-lifetime swing of fate’s cruel pendulum. But in reality it connotes something far less dependent on planetary influence. The phrase is credited to the 16th-century tea master Sen No Rikyū and his disciple Yamanoue Souji, and has roots in Zen Buddhism. It originally meant something something like: Attend to every single tea ceremony with the utmost care, as each can only occur once. 

All meetings only happen once in a lifetime. Even if you meet the same person again—and again and again and again—it will never be the same encounter twice. Turn the coin over and read: Each meeting could be the last.

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In college I spent a semester in Delhi. After the program ended I had a month left on my visa, so I rented the room above a gregarious old man’s apartment and “interned” for the editor of an art magazine. I had no one to see and nowhere to go; I was reading Proust for the first time and thinking about how the old man would get in touch with my parents if I died of heat exhaustion in the little room. Every day after watching the editor abuse her staff, I would sit by the window of my room and drink a 40 and eat two mangos for dinner. I was broke, alone, and very, very hot; however, the mangos were really quite good.

It sounds rather bratty to say I can’t bring myself to eat mangos outside of northern India. It’s also not true. But for a few years after I was back in the US, I did sort of eye all mangos with suspicion. My mom would have piled high a plate of sliced mango and would just stare at me staring at it, until finally I reached for another of the many fruit piles. It sounds equally stupid to say I won’t eat strawberries after I someday leave Japan; it’s also not true. But some fruits really are once in a lifetime, every single time.

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PS. Achoo

Plum blossoms on 梅ヶ丘