Canned

An old woman opens the door at Mr. Kanso in Tokyo and that’s when you realize there’s no menu, no pretense, nothing except a wall of tins and permission to pick whatever you want. They range from three euros to twenty, depending on what’s inside—tomato soup, pickled beans, bear meat, honeyed bees, things with no label we had to ask about three times and still didn’t understand.

We went in a group, the kind of group where everyone’s in a mood, and we started grabbing. Champignon soup, olives, chicken, mussels, ham, seal. My companion pointed at the beetles—three euros—and the woman asked if we were really sure. We said yes. She clearly didn’t believe us, but she handed them over anyway.

They tasted like sewage. I mention this because the woman had warned us, and we’d ignored the warning, and now we knew exactly what sewage tastes like. It’s a specific kind of terrible—not spoiled or rotten, just wrong in a way that takes up residence in your mouth and won’t leave.

I kept thinking about the sushi place around the corner, the kind where you get fish that actually makes sense for the money. We’d dropped a hundred euros on cans. But there’s a logic to eating something deliberately bad when you’re in the right frame of mind—it feels like freedom, or at least like proof that you can make stupid decisions and survive them. The beer was good. That helped.

The next day we drove out to a plum blossom festival somewhere beyond the city with a couple of Oxford students, which is a different story entirely. What I remember most is coming back to the beetles, how they tasted, how the woman had asked twice if we were sure. There’s something in that about not listening to warnings that feels too obvious to spell out.

After that I found some cats to pet, which seemed like the only reasonable thing to do with the rest of the afternoon.