The Taste That Waited at the Bottom of the Jar

The miso of this present age is all much of a muchness.

Take one of the bags down from the row on the shop shelf. Turn it over, and it tells you plainly enough when and where it was made. Break the seal, and every one of them is smooth; stir it into soup, and the taste that rises wears more or less the same face. It is well made. There is nothing to find fault with.

But I know better. In the old days, no two miso ever wore the same face.

Change the house, and the taste changed with it. The house next door and the house on this side of the path might have been serving two different foods altogether. How hard the salt was pressed, how long the stuff was left to sleep, even the habits of the wife's own hands — all of it had dissolved, just as it was, into the jar.

And every one of those wives said the same thing: ours is the best.

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The autumn of 1480 (Bunmei 12). In the capital, the long war was at last beginning to burn low. I was walking the mountain villages of Shinano with salt and needles on my back.

The sun had tilted low, and I had begged a night's lodging at a farmhouse. When the wife set about the evening meal, she went to the corner of the earthen floor and heaved up the heavy wooden lid of a great jar.

What came drifting up out of the dark was a smell I had met before and still could not have put into words. The edge of salt, the sweetness of boiled beans, and something sharp, close to sake, all mixed into one. It set an itch at the back of my nose, and my stomach growled without asking my leave.

I looked in. A deep brown thing lay thick at the bottom. White grains of salt had bloomed faintly across the surface, so that it looked as though frost had settled there. Boil the beans, mix in salt and kōji — the cultured grain that is stirred in to start it off — and then simply let it sleep in the dark. That is all there is to it. And yet, somehow, it turns into this color, this smell. I could never make any sense of it.

"You've let this one sleep a good while," I said, and the wife, propping the lid against the wall, threw out her chest as though showing off a treasure of the house.

"This here is into its third year. Let it pass through two doyō — the sweltering stretch at the height of summer — and the corners come off it and it turns round and soft. Hurry it, and the taste goes rough. So you wait. You just wait. And for every bit you've waited, it goes that much deeper."

She pushed a wooden paddle right down to the bottom of the jar, brought up a scoop of the brown stuff, and set it neatly on the rim of my bowl. It came off the paddle slow and thick, drawing out a thread.

"Traveler. Give that a lick, why don't you."

I did as I was told and laid it on the tip of my tongue. Salty. But not only salty. From behind the salt, the sweetness of the beans and a savor I could not name came slowly after. It loosened on my tongue and settled in and would not leave. To a mouth like mine, that had shouldered bales of salt and walked nothing but sweat-stinking roads, it seemed to soak all the way through.

"It's good," I said, honestly, and her face broke open all at once, as though I had praised a child of hers.

"Isn't it, though. This here's a kind of far-off grandchild of the kōji I laid down the year I came here as a bride. Every year you hold back a little for seed, and you pass it on to the next lot. Then the taste runs on, all of one ground with the last. So at the bottom of this jar, you might say every year since my wedding is lying there asleep."

So the years lie sleeping at the bottom of the miso, I thought. Then the wife dropped her voice.

"While we're at it, I'll let you taste Ofuku's from next door. I had a share of it at the village gathering, and there's a little left."

From another small dish she took a scoop of that too, and set it on the other side of my bowl's rim. Even the color, sure enough, was different. Redder, darker than the first.

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Tasting the one against the other, they were indeed two entirely different things. The one from next door had the salt standing up sharp in it, prickling the tip of the tongue. But for that very reason the sweetness that came afterward stood out all the more, and it was fine in its own way. How the same beans, the same salt, the same kōji could give birth to faces so unlike each other — that, still, I could not begin to guess at.

But when I said so, the wife looked positively affronted.

"Ofuku's is hard with the salt, isn't it. She's a hasty one — lets it pass through only the one doyō. It hasn't slept enough. And besides, if the dark of the house is different, then even the same laying-down comes out a wholly different taste. So there you are. Ours is the best."

And she threw out her chest again. It struck me as so funny that I laughed in spite of myself.

The soup that night was made with that three-year miso. Two slices of daikon in it, and a scrap of greens floating by way of apology, and nothing more. Even so, with every mouthful something at the core of me came loose, and I sat with the bowl cupped in both hands, looking on and on through the steam at the fire of the irori, the hearth sunk into the floor. To a body that had come down the cold mountain road, that one bowl was the finest welcome there could be.

Before we slept, the wife went to the jar once more, checked that the weighting stone sat true on the lid, and wiped the crusted salt from the rim with her finger. She looked in on it like this every few days, she told me. If anything strange floated up on the surface, she skimmed it off at once. When the cold began to slacken, she took particular care that no insects got in. Only by being carried through both — the chill of the winter and the muggy heat of the summer doyō — did it come at last to a taste with the corners taken off it. Put the work in, and the jar answers you properly, she said, speaking into the dark. Her hands moved the way they might have over an old person she was tending.

It was the same in every village I came to. Every wife who was a wife believed, past all doubt, that her own jar was the finest in this world. They did not speak ill of anyone else's taste. It was only that what they had laid down to sleep with their own hands, they thought of as their own child. That swelling of the chest, wherever I went, I found wonderfully likeable.

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Miso, in those days, was not a thing you bought. Each house, in its own jar, laid it down little by little over years.

Boiling the beans, letting the kōji sleep — it is all waiting. Hurry, and the taste goes rough. Wait, and for every hour it has slept, the taste goes deeper. That waiting became the taste of the house. The warmth of the dark on the earthen floor, the water they drew, the hand they had with salt, and the years handed on in the seed. All of it dissolved in, just as it was — so there was no way on earth for it to come out the same as next door's.

And now?

The jars have gone from the kitchen. Miso is made in great vats, measured out to the last exactness, packed into bags, lined up in the shops. The taste has been levelled, splendidly. No house's miso quarrels with another's any more. It has become convenient. And that, to be sure, is a good thing.

Even so, one trace of those days is left to us, inside a word.

When people hold out something of their own, and do it modestly, they still say it even now: "Temae-miso — my own miso, if you'll forgive the boast —." It seems the turn of phrase was made in a much later age. But at bottom it must surely have been born out of the feeling of those wives who threw out their chests before their jars. That is what I think.

A thing made with your own hands, in your own jar — and still you cannot help but think it the best. The face of that wife in Shinano, her chest thrown out. That is what has gone on living, even now, having become nothing but a word.

Every time I hear someone say it and smile that bashful little smile, I think to myself: ah — that jar is still sleeping, somewhere.

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