[Fukui prefecture]

“Everyone in Anama has sushi for New Year’s,” Dad declares pointedly.

Mom stands up, a here we go again look on her face.

My son looks up from his phone and starts yammering excitedly. “We’re having sushi for New Year’s dinner? All right! Fatty tuna, shrimp, flounder… and obviously herring roe since it’s New Year’s…”

“Not that kind of sushi,” I tell him. “This kind.” I hold up a filet of salted salmon for him to see.

“Aw, man! That kind of sushi?” Hearing the disappointment in her grandson’s voice, Mom forces a smile and begins to prepare the meal.

What’s normal for our family in terms of food doesn’t always make sense to the general population. Take sushi, for example.

When most people hear the word sushi, they tend to picture sliced raw fish on rice—right? Not so where my dad’s from. In a village called Izumi in Ono, Fukui Prefecture (formerly a rural outpost called Anama), sushi is a fermented dish that is made by packing salmon in malted rice with chopped daikon, carrot, and ginger, and then letting it sit in the pickle hut while the village is buried in snow.

They say we live in a world where you can have anything delivered online, but Anama sushi is one thing you’re not going to get unless you make it at home. You’ve got to look after it constantly, checking the status of the malt to figure out when it’s ready. Eventually, you get to serve it. Anama sushi is a New Year’s delicacy in my father’s hometown—a product of northeast Fukui’s bitterly cold winters and of rice malt, the hidden force behind traditional Japanese cuisine.

“Soak it to get rid of the salty flavor,” my mom tells me. I chop the salmon into manageable chunks and soak the pieces in water.

We get a break while we’re waiting for it to finish. I decide to head out to the library to return the books I borrowed before it closes for the holidays, including one on handicrafts that my mom took out.

Ever since I decided to take my father with me to Izumi in northeast Fukui, I’ve been gradually preparing to hand over my work. By the end of the year, I need to list up books to buy, making sure that the budget is proportioned correctly and doesn’t favor any particular category. After all, selecting the right books is a true pleasure for a professional librarian.

Speaking of traditional Japanese cuisine, I heard that it got added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. We’re likely to see an increase in new books exploring washoku and other aspects of Japanese food culture. When you’re picking out books for an investigation like that, going to the children’s section of the library can be quite illuminating. The serial publications written for older elementary school and junior high school students are easy to understand and study.

I start flipping through series with washoku, Japanese regional cooking, and traditional cuisine in the titles as well as everything on Fukui Prefecture to see if I could find anything about the flavors of Dad’s hometown. All of the books list heshiko, which is mackerel or sardines pickled in rice bran, as one of Fukui’s signature products. But I can’t find anything about sushi.

Just when I’m about to give up hope of finding anything on Anama sushi, a dish called nezushi catches my eye. The book says that it’s a local dish in the Hida region of Gifu Prefecture, made with salted salmon or trout as well as daikon and carrots, and fermented in rice malt. It also says that nezushi is eaten around the New Year holidays. All of it pretty much identical to Anama sushi.

If you drive alongside Kuzuryu Dam and go through the tunnel at Aburasaka Pass, you end up in Gifu Prefecture. The Etsumi-Hoku Line currently ends at Kuzuryu Lake Station, though there’s talk of extending it over to the Gifu side. It makes sense that two towns separated by nothing more than a mountain pass would have similar dishes.

Before I know it, nearly two hours have come and gone. The same thing always happens when I come to the library. I jot down the titles of the books eligible for my list and hurry home.

When I open the door, I’m greeted by an aroma that’s heady and sweet.

My mother launches a complaint instead of a greeting. “You’re late! What on earth were you doing? The salmon’s going to go bad.” I guess she couldn’t wait. She’s already started fermenting the sushi without me.

“Baba used to make the sushi back in Anama,” Dad says happily, a can of beer in his hand. He uses the affectionate baba to refer to my grandmother—his mother. “We’d pretty much always make it with trout,” he goes on. “It tastes best with river trout. When we’d use salted salmon, we’d rinse it in the river in the freezing cold to get the salt out. Hell, back then, salmon was what the rich people ate.”

According to Dad, Baba didn’t do much looking after her kids, but she put everything she had into making sushi. It’s just not something you can make without putting a lot of time and energy into it. Apparently, everyone was so busy with farm work back then that dad didn’t get the attention kids do today when he was growing up. I guess they had an old saying that “kids’ll grow up as long you feed them”—even if you pretty much ignored them otherwise.

Here’s an interesting story about Baba. Once, I was making an extended phone call to a faraway friend when the line suddenly went dead. Thinking I had accidently pressed something, I frantically redialed and started talking to her again. But the line dropped again before even three minutes had passed. Figuring the battery was going dead, I called back just to say goodbye. My friend picked up, I told her bye for now, and put down the receiver. Immediately the phone rang again. It was my mom.

“Your grandmother just died,” she said. I was stunned into silence.

She had caught cold and had a fever that wouldn’t subside, so she had gone into the hospital as a precaution. We were planning to go see her that weekend, once she was settled in. I was certain that the phone line going dead had been a premonition.

I still wonder what she had wanted to tell me—her son’s daughter—at the very end.

Apparently, these kinds of mysterious happenings were quite common deep in the mountains of Anama. I remember my dad would always grumble about strange backwoods phenomena. He’d also say a rhyme that went hi-no-tama, hito-dama, kitsune-no-hi—three words for the ghostly will-o'-wisp lights that often appeared to travelers at night. I’ll have to ask him to tell me more about it.

On New Year’s Day, we put the sushi on the grill and wash it down with hot sake. The grilled salmon sizzles as the well-pickled daikon gets seared, mellowing the tart flavors.

The grilled rice malt has this amazingly sweet fragrance. The rounded, full flavors of malted rice are something you just can’t appreciate as a child. And there’s nothing like the way the rice malt in the grilled sushi harmonizes with the rice malt flavor in the sake.

Dad’s already drunk up the sake we had for New Year offerings and wants more, so he cracks open the local Hanagaki sake he’s had shipped in from his hometown. He’s too impatient to wait for it to heat up, so he just drinks it at room temperature.

By the time sunrise rolls around, he is charmingly well-lit and ready to ring in the New Year.