I held the yanagiba in my hand, gauging its weight and trying to get a feel for the length. As I did so, I inadvertently glanced over at the knife cabinet to see if there were any other knives that I could test my first impression against.
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Okay, back to where I started at the beginning: arriving in Kyoto. We visited Nishiki market, ate some great food, and then began making the knife store rounds. In the first day we walked for about six hours, ate at two restaurants and visited five knife shops. They were all fun and interesting, but I didn’t see anything that really pulled my culinary heartstrings. In fact, after seeing nearly as many knife stores in one afternoon as I’d seen so far in my whole life, I was getting a bit dispirited. Most of the Kyoto shops felt more like souvenir peddlers than real blood, sweat, and steel blade forgers. Perhaps my problem stemmed from the fact that I already had eight different knives, each woven into a different time or experience of my gastronomic development. Unfortunately I just wasn’t seeing anything that felt really original or particularly essential for me. But I still enjoyed visiting the different shops and talking to the vendors there, so it was far from wasted effort.
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“This may be one of Japan’s oldest cities,” I said as Mariko and I emerged from a staircase that lead up from Kyoto’s subway station, “but it looks a lot like Chicago to me.” Across the street loomed a tall, gray cement and steel-hewn building with the high, gothic-looking columns that were, for me, reminiscent of Chicago architecture. In addition to that, downtown Kyoto streets were relatively wide for Japan, and the buildings much less dense than in places like Tokyo.
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