After the Rotterdam residency, how did Montreal fit in as a site-specific territory?

“The project in Montreal was shaped differently because I was offered a huge space to create an installation based on a similar concept. Deciding how to use the given space also gave this project a framework and helped me develop ideas and productions, resulting in a multi-media installation which consisted of photos, videos, sculptures and a workshop area; a bit more than just a record of a personal cross-cultural cooking log. I mean, I like eating and cooking but I don’t consider myself an artist specialized in food art however using food as materials was one convenient choice, especially nowadays, having a studio could cost you a fortune.”

How did you go about getting started?

“To proceed with the project, first I had to define some ideas about Canadian and more specifically, Montreal food. I decided to have a survey in the hope of knowing everybody’s eating habits so that I could incorporate that into my cooking. The whole production is based on the survey results collected from 154 Montrealers, the results of which are attached into the resulting cookbook.

So what about your relationship with Japanese food, did you grow up learning to cook at home or after moving away?

I don’t remember when I cooked for the first time nor a special day when my mother taught me how to cook, I have no eventful memory of it but I helped around the kitchen from a young age. Simple things like serving or peeling apples for example, like everybody did I suppose. I remember having to prepare rice when coming home from school everyday. We didn’t have a rice cooker then so I had to do it with a gas stove; I think I was in the third grade. But I was quite proud of myself for experimenting with rice washing techniques and, to think of it now I don’t understand why I had to do that. She cooks well though. She is from Kyoto and is living in Sapporo since she got married so perhaps I grew up with Kyoto style cooking. My father was a bit lazy and didn’t like eating fish with bones, so my mom says. He’s from Nagano and they eat more meat (and bugs), I think. When I was in the fifth and sixth grade we had home-economics class and I remember making egg omelette, hamburger steak, curry and maybe miso soup. It’s funny that they don’t teach you how to cook traditional Japanese food. When I was a teenager, I baked almost every other day as I drooled looking at cakes and dessert recipe books. 

The first year I moved to Montreal, I went to a Japanese restaurant, a reputable one in downtown. I didn’t order sushi but I saw the plate served to the next table. What caught my eyes was the crab, you know the fake red-painted one made of fish called Kanikama, the whole stick, like 3 inches long, was served as nigiri. The chefs were supposed to be Japanese there but I thought it wasn’t so Japanese. Since then, I hardly went out to eat Japanese as the experiences often ended somewhat disappointing. At home I don’t necessarily cook Japanese food but cooking Japanese cuisine outside of Japan is not very convenient, and I’m a lazy person to begin with so I don’t like going far to get my groceries, and even if I do go it doesn’t mean that I get to find all the ingredients I need. Besides, Japanese cooking tends to require several steps of preparation, uses a lot of water, many pots and serving plates. I cook Japanese rice only occasionally because it requires too much washing and soaking time. The everyday rice for me is Jasmin, and it’s probably very un-Japanese but this “Survival Japanese Cooking” project was sort of an effort for me to force myself to cook “Japanese” more often than usual. 

So what elements of Japanese food, culture, cuisine helped or limited you in this project?

Well, it would be a spirit of eating locally and things that are in season. Another thing would be the preparation of ingredients and even the presentation. For example, cutting vegetables in certain ways to suit different methods of cooking. I think that often in Japanese cooking, the shape of each food is well kept to be distinguished. If you follow any Japanese cook book for example, cutting vegetables is written in precise detail and seems an important element. Maybe this is one of reasons we never invented mashed potatoes? 

Through Survival Cooking, did you find Japanese ingredients to be versatile? The Natto Spaghetti comes to mind…

The Natto Spaghetti is an old recipe, not sure how old but it’s been around for a while, probably from late 80′s or early 90′s. As Pasta became popular there appeared more specialty restaurants with creative menus other than just meat sauce. Prior to that, what I remember of Spaghetti was that it was always served with canned meat sauce for Sunday lunch, or leftover noodles fried with some ketchup, which you probably still see in cheap bento boxes at convenience stores. The rice bun burger from Mos burger for an example is another example of the Japanese being infamous for transforming foreign/imported food to suit to our taste. I guess when we are in Japan, we don’t see the reverse cases that often? When I was still in Sapporo, I was once invited to a home dinner party hosted by a Canadian couple. This was about fifteen years ago. There was a dish, sort of a macaroni and cheese, but the macaroni was replaced with Udon noodles, the ones which are sold pre-cooked. For a noodle nerd like me it was a shock. It seemed disgustingly overcooked and soggy and I couldn’t eat it. I just wonder why she used Udon instead of Macaroni? I doubt that she couldn’t find Macaroni. It could’ve been sort of her way of doing Survival Canadian Cooking?

Interesting, what are some other examples?

I have this vegetarian, vegan cookbook written by an American chef and got it because I just wanted to learn about vegetarian cooking but found out that some Japanese-specific ingredients, like Hijiki and Umeboshi, were used for the more health-conscious recipes. It’s nice to learn how these ingredients are prepared in contrast to Japanese cuisine. At a market here in Montreal, you can find Shiso and Mizuna these days. My friend made me a dinner the other day, a grilled salmon on a bed of rice topped with green vegetable salad including Shiso leaves in large chunks. On the other hand, at most Sushi restaurants here (and they are run by non-Japanese) they have miso soup on their menu, there is even a “spicy” miso soup, and people order them with sushi. (Well, precisely, they have the soup first then sushi) And I have to ask myself, why? For me, I never have miso soup with sushi because that’s how I grew up. Speaking of sushi, they are not bad here in general, except some occasional surprises, like a pineapple maki I got the other day. But because of that, I won’t be shocked if I get a banana maki someday I got used to these creative North American rich maki rolls that when I last went back to Japan in 2004 I was somewhat unsatisfied by the real thing. They seemed too plain!  When I went to Sao Paulo and visited Liberdade, I was excited to see some Dango (sweet rice cake with red bean paste) but the color was far from being subtle, they were bright, pink and green. I couldn’t eat them, but I’m pretty sure I’d be eating them if I stayed there long enough. It’s just a matter of time but overall it’s interesting to see the transformation of a Japanese food when brought into and adapted to another culture.

Thanks Shie.

Shie Kasai is originally from Sapporo, Hokkaido.

From the beginning, Haruki Murakami wanted to get away. He left Kobe for Tokyo, Tokyo for Europe and America. I met him five years ago and was instantly drawn to the man behind the art. Like Haruki I am a writer who wanted to escape. For me, the destinations were reversed: I left America for Europe, then Japan. These days we arrange visits around our itineraries. I landed in Tokyo three days before his interview; the following day, Haruki boarded a plane.

Roland Kelts: What’s the value of writing so far from home? Why have you written so may books overseas?

Haruki Murakami: It’s easier for you to write about your own country when you’re far away. From a distance, you can look at your own country as it really is. I wrote “Norwegian Wood” when I was on several Greek islands, and in Rome and Palermo, Italy. “Dance, Dance, Dance” was mostly written in Rome, and partly in London. The first half of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” was written in Princeton and the latter half in Cambridge. And I wrote “After The Quake” in the middle of Tokyo, in an isolated little house owned by my publisher. I guess I have a nomadic spirit inside me that I can’t keep down. Because I now that each one of those books is connected to each of the places where they were written. When I think of them, the scenes of the locations where I wrote them come to mind.

R: Why did you write those books in those places? Any reason?

H: For me, to write fiction is to have a certain kind of relationship with the imagination. This requires me to escape from daily life, at least to some extent. That’s why I want to go to a different place to do my work. Whether it’s in Japan, America or Europe, as long as I have a place where I can concentrate on my work, I don’t think it matters where I am. At the moment, northern Kauai is my favorite place to write. The fact that it rains a lot in Kauai also allows me to focus more directly on my writing.

R: Does each place affect your writing differently? Can you see how they collared your imagination in the books?

H: Good question. I don’t know, exactly. But I don’t think they really do. Once I face my desk and focus and enter into the world inside my head, no matter where I am, for me, it hardly really ever matters at all. It ends up being irrelevant once I enter my imagination, I guess.

R: So, you’re not only traveling physically, you’re actually journeying metaphysically into the self, into the imagination. You told me once that the trip into the imagination is fraught with dangers – like falling into a well, a metaphor you use a lot in your novels and stories. What are those dangers?

H: In almost all cases, the objective of a trip is paradoxical. You ultimately want to return to the starting point safely. Writing fiction is the same; no matter how far you go, or how deep a place you go to, in the end when you finish writing, you have to return to the place where you started. That is the final destination. However, the starting point to which you return is never the starting point where you actually started. The scenery is the same, and the faces are the same, and things placed there are the same. However, something fundamental has changed significantly. That’s what we discover; it’s your discovery. To know that difference is also one of your prime objectives – or at least to acknowledge that difference.

R: Does that mean that travel and making art are connected by the trip?

H: Yes, in that sense, traveling and writing fiction may be a similar experience. You first start by visiting near by places, convenient places, places everyone knows about, and then gradually, you start traveling to more distant, deeper and darker places – even more dangerous places. Just like a surfer goes farther away from the shore to find bigger waves. That’s probably in the very nature of the traveler and the fiction writer.

R: Pico Iyer told me that you are the first and only serious Japanese novelist who can “straddle East and West,” ad that your writing is part of what he calls “the global consciousness.” That’s pretty high praise. Why do you think a guy from Kobe is being called a global writer?

H: Well, I have in my own heart a world that is deep, dark and rich. And you, in your heart, have a world that is also deep, dark and rich. So in that sense, even if I’m living in Tokyo and you are living in New York, Timbuktu or Reykjavik, Iceland, it means that we each hold inside ourselves something that is the same in nature or quality, regardless of place. And if we trace that quality to a much deeper place, we will discover that we live in a common world – a world we can just call ‘story.’

R: What does that world look like?

H: It’s beneath reality, like an underground, really. And in our underground, there are long tunnels stretching outing all directions, and if we seriously intend to do so, and also if we are fortunate, you and I will be able to encounter one another somewhere down there. Actually, the word “global” is something that I can’t really understand, because we do not necessarily need to be global. We are already what I call “mutual.” If we use the connection of our world called story, I think that that’s enough to keep us connected.

R: One of the deepest connections I felt with you was when I first read the first page of “Norwegian Wood.” The narrator, Haru, is on a plane landing in Hamburg, Germany, and he’s about to have a crisis connected to the love of his youth. How do you feel when you’re on planes?

H: Every time I fly in an airplane, I recall the beginning of an old Gershiwn song called, “I Can’t Get Started.” The lyrics go something like this: “I’ve been around the world in a plane / Settled revolutions in Spain…” So that’s why every time I board a plane, I think of the Spanish civil war. And when I think of that, I think of Ernest Hemingway. And when I think of Hemingway, I think of plane crashes. And then, of course, I start trying not to think about that song anymore. But I can’t help it.

R: Planes are boring. Do you write on planes? What do you do when you’re in the act of traveling?

H: Sometimes I take my small DVD player with me and watch old Jean Luc Goddard movies. As you know, those great old Goddard movies are hardly ever shown on planes.

R: Okay, you’re about to take off tomorrow for distant lands. I hate asking you this, but here goes: What are your three favorite overseas destinations?

H: First would be Boston, Massachusetts in America, because its the most convenient and satisfying city for collecting secondhand Jazz records. Plus, there many delicious Indian restaurants in Boston – and you can find Samuel Adams draft beer anywhere in town. You can also run the marathon there – which I’ve done a few times. In Europe, I really like Stockholm, Sweden. Again, there’s a wonderful secondhand record shop there, and I visited that store everyday for three days straight. The owner is a fanatical collector of great jazz records. And here’s something unusual: The passengers on the subways in Stockholm are almost all talking on their cell phones all the time. It’s very surreal. I also love Sydney in Australia. Although most of the people there wear boring clothes, because the fashions are really casual and simple, the food and wine in Sydney is excellent. How mysterious! Also, the aquarium and zoo in Sydney are both unique and wonderful. Unfortunately, there’s not a single good secondhand record store there. Maybe that will change in the future.