I never knew why MSG was bad. Someone once told me that it caused cancer. I filed that away with the intriguing idea that deodorant gave women breast cancer, a tip from a shrewish high school fundamentalist christian acquaintance. One day, I figured, I would investigate the truth in the MSG scare and make up my mind. For now, I had too much Chinese and Japanese food to eat.

Back when I lived in Taiwan, my then-boyfriend prepared a Japanese cucumber dish that tasted incredibly good. “It’s easy to make,” he said. And he showed me how after we ate the first batch: put sliced cucumber in a plastic bag with some salty looking flakes, and let sit for a while. I asked him what the salty stuff was. He told me it was Ajinomoto. Weird Japanese stuff, I thought. He was a relatively new boyfriend. I didn’t question much.

A few years later, when I moved with said boyfriend to Japan, I noticed him flavouring with this Ajinomoto stuff again. This time when I asked if Ajinomoto had an English translation, he admitted, reluctantly and in a whispering voice, that it was MSG. I filed this way next to the crazy christian virgin’s deodorant advice and said goodbye to the yummy cucumber slices.

An article from long ago in the Guardian has finally convinced me that I have nothing to fear. I still eat margarine and butter, after all. Reckless daredevil that I am. Japanese cucumbers are back on the menu.

When I went back to Japan a few months ago to introduce my sister to that country, I had an ulterior motive. I wanted to pack in as much of my previous life in Japan into a week that I could. I wanted to buy lots of pretty Japanese things, eat lots of good food, sop up my favourite train jingles, and melt into as many onsens as I could squeeze into a mere few days. Plus, I wanted to bring back part of Japan with me to Canada. Not to share with anyone, just to revel in after my vacation was done, to extend as much Japan as I could into my boring, middle-aged life, to re-live my exciting jet-setting youth again.

The above photo is of a box of manju I bought at one of my favourite hot springs resorts in Japan, the little village of Ikaho in Gunma’s mountains. When I lived in Japan, I would drive over to this resort, take a bath and eat a gourmet lunch. Usually I stayed overnight at other, more affordable onsens in less-touristy parts of Gunma, eating whatever local specialty they had there, whether from that morning’s wild boar hunt or from the proprietor’s afternoon mushroom foraging. Or I would tend my two apple trees in Gunma, a twice-a-year trip during blossom season in the spring and harvest in the fall, that always ended with me somehow detouring through Ikaho for that bath.

Before the end of every trip to Ikaho, I would buy some manju: a Japanese pastry with red bean paste inside.* Manju tastes subtle and is thus perfect for a delicate green tea. In Japan, I usually shared my manju or simply awarded whole boxes to the people who got wind of my mini-vacation; no vacation-goer in Japan is polite unless he or she returns with souvenirs for the poor souls back home. This time, the manju was mine. All mine.

Upon return to Canada, I had this box filled with six manju. I decided to pace myself, one each for six days, eaten with a cup of the best green tea I could muster. The first five days were tremendously happy. My pre-work ritual was to shower, dress, then boil a pot of tea, seat myself down with the tea and the day’s manju, and remember Japan as I ate it, perhaps peruse one of the art catalogues I also brought over from Japan. During the rest of the day, whenever I got down, I would daydream about the next morning’s manju ritual.

When I got to the last manju, I decided that the best way to approach it was to use my dad’s letter-reading method, akin to the save-your-virginity-for-marriage method. My dad told me that when he went away to chef school in his early teens, he wasn’t like the other teenagers who ripped open letters from home immediately. He would put my grandmother’s letters under his pillow and make himself wait until, say, the following Sunday. He said it built character.

I liked my dad’s method in the past, saving the best for last, or putting off what I could have today so that I would absolutely lust over it tomorrow when I finally got it. Waiting until Christmas night, say, instead of opening presents on Christmas morning. Or foregoing impulse buys for a month until the temptation to buy was overwhelming. I thought I could put off eating the last manju, savouring the wait, until, when I finally ate, I would orgasmically explode or something.

A week went by. I checked every day on my last manju, that saucy little tease.

Finally the day came when I said to myself, Today is the day you can eat that last manju, Maktaaq dear.

What you are looking at is a rotting manju. It is covered with some sort of mould and fuzz arrangement. I am pretty certain no part of the manju was salvageable.

I did learn a lesson. The lesson is: screw patient waiting, carpe diem already!

I ate the Vicenzi Mini Snacks I got for my birthday in record time.

*Some manju have other flavours. I am partial to red bean paste because, when I was in Taiwan, they promised me that red beans helped menstruating women get their iron back.

From the March/April 1927 issue of Dennison’s Party Magazine.

Oysterettes must be those oyster biscuits Laura Ingalls Wilder’s dad survived on during that blizzard in On the Banks of Plum Creek. Anyone ever try an oyster cracker? Do real oysters go into the making of oyster crackers?

(Via the Living Venice blog)

I got the idea from Morbid Anatomy.

German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece was made for the Saint Anthony’s Monastery chapel. One of the things the boring aesthetic-based art histories never tell you is that Grünewald (not his real name) made this painting for a hospital specializing in skin diseases: its aim was basically to tell sufferers, “Shut up about your ailments, look what Jesus suffered.” From an article by Stanley Meisler in the September 1999 edition of Smithsonian Magazine:

The Antonite order operated the hospital in Isenheim largely for those afflicted by a disease known then as “Saint Anthony’s fire.”

That disease (now rare and called “ergotism”) struck down many in periodic epidemics during the Middle Ages. [According to the ergotism entry on Wikipedia, there was a 2001 outbreak in Ethiopia.] Saint Anthony’s fire set off painful skin eruptions that blackened and turned gangrenous, often requiring amputations. The eruptions were accompanied by nervous spasms and convulsions. Many victims died.

Saint Anthony’s fire came from the poison of a fungus that clung to rye and was inadvertently pounded into the flour used to make rye bread. The cause, however, was not known in Grünewald’s time. The monks treated the sick with a balm made from herbs and other plants and with prayers to Saint Anthony, who was believed to possess miraculous curing powers. The monks also tried to bolster the faith of the sick by reminding them that Christ – and Saint Anthony as well – had suffered even greater torments. Grünewald’s altarpiece played an important mystical and psychological role in the Isenheim treatment program.

The chapel burned down during the French Revolution, but not before some government officials saved the art. The painting is now in the nearby town of Colmar, where it is displayed in pieces.

Originally the crucifixion image you see above was the two top wings that opened to reveal another painting composed of two wings which themselves opened to reveal Niklas Hagenauer’s sculpture. Luke Ulrich shows how the painting originally worked in this very short video:

This other website explains the subject of each of the panels.

The top wings, or the crucifixion scene, has Jesus just off-centre, with his right arm crossing to the right wing of the altarpiece, in effect, amputated from his body, much as the hospital’s patients often suffered amputation of their gangrenous limbs.

Fun. Now eat your rye bread and be thankful no pus-boils-and-gangrene fungi is clinging to your grains.

I eat powdered milk with a spoon. Not mixed with water or anything. I just like the sweet, stickiness.

It might have something to do with the fact that I was fed formula as a baby. You see, I was a bit bite-y when I was young – my vampire heritage and all – and my mother’s doctor told her to stop breast-feeding me or else it would be curtains for her nipples.

Now, the medical profession would have you believe that breast milk pumps up a baby’s IQ and bolsters their immune system. Maybe. Maybe for some babies.

But not me. The lack of breast milk hasn’t prevented me from being immune to the common cold and dysentry. I drank faeces-laden soup and lived!

Back to powdered milk, Matt recently discovered my dark secret. He bought a large bag of the stuff and then had to go and get himself allergic to dairy products. Not just dairy, but also soy anything, red meat, crab, squid, all sugars (including my collection of twelve jars of honey), wheat, vinegar, alcohol and even duck, for fuck’s sake.

What this means is that I have to drink all the booze and eat all the chocolate before it spoils. I just finished my bowl of powdered milk and am on to my second glass of wine. I’m doing this for you, baby!

The powdered milk thing is ok; I like white powdery things. It’s when I finish off the wine and milk, that I have to work through the Campari. Now that’s gonna be torture.

When my friend Risa came over from Japan to visit last month, I kept pointing out how Japanicized the rest of the world has become:

• Every big bookstore now has a manga section.
• White high school girls attempt big socks (though they use slouchy legwarmers instead).
• Everyone and their racist meat-and-potatoes great grandmother eats sushi these days.
• The people really in the know – i.e. all of Vancouver contained within the traditional snob boundaries (King Edward and Nanaimo) – has moved on to izakaya food.
• Most coffee shops now sell green tea lattes, while some very advanced ones even have matcha tea.
• You can buy takoyaki in cultural voids like Port Coquitlam.
• Supermarkets now carry edamame.
• We even have hundred-yen stores.
• Our tv shows rip off Japanese ones – whether they’re restaurant makeover programs or silly Jackass crap.
• Snooty bars in New York have shiso- and yuzu lemon-flavoured cocktails.
• There’s a cherry blossom festival in Vancouver.

Risa pointed out that the export of Japanese culture has the Japanese rather pissed with us foreigners.

“What?!” I said aghast. “The Japanese love to show off all the cool things in Japanese culture. I mean, there are women who wait all their lives to rip off a foreigner’s clothes and dress them in the best kimono. And there are people who can’t resist feeding live fish to some naive outsider so that they can taste the freshest meat money can buy.”

“But that’s the problem,” said Risa.

As the rest of the world realizes that sashimi is damn good, there’s less tuna to go around. Now that any Russian mafioso can take his girlfriend of the week to sample fresh tuna in Moscow or any Joe Bob in Lubbock, Texas can stab his toro with his chopsticks, the big fish’s numbers have dwindled.

Thus the export of one of the hallmarks of Japanese culture, its cuisine, means that the Japanese themselves may soon be pushed out of the market. This is what has many Japanese complaining.

According to the New York Times, some chefs have experimented with venison and horse sushi. Others have studied North American abominations like our mouth-bursting everything-in-the-freezer-plus-tobiko rolls.

Hopefully this insanity for all things Japanese will bring over a few things I miss about Japan: paper stores that have nothing to do with scrapbooking, hanafuda, Ayako Miyawaki exhibits, Gegege no Kitaro, Doraemon comics, real Japanese onsens, Japanese panties (more comfortable and pretty than ours), and good customer service.

After years of curiosity, I finally watched the 1931 film M.

The Criterion copy reads: “Behind every great suspense thriller lurks the shadow of M. In this, Fritz Lang’s first sound film, Peter Lorre delivers a haunting performance as the cinema’s first serial killer, a whistling pedophile hunted by the police and brought to trial by the forces of the Berlin underworld.”

I’ve ony known Peter Lorre in Arsenic and Old Lace, Casablanca and the dreadful 1939 Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation (where he plays a Japanese man), and thus saw him more as a creepy gagster. Now I know how far creepy goes in describing him.

But what I didn’t know is that he was Jewish and fled Germany soon after the film’s release, supposedly warned by Josef Goebbels himself.

Peter Lorre was born László Löwenstein in Rózsahegy, in 1904 a part of the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, now Ruzomberok in Slovakia. By 22, he was a bank clerk by day and an actor by night (from The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre by Stephen Youngkin).

The actor fled first to Paris in February 1933, then to London to play in Hitchcock’s 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much, and, in July of that same year, he made his way across the Atlantic to the US.

The 1933 Nazi propaganda film, The Eternal Jew, used his image in M as the stereotypical Jew, and the film was finally banned in July 1934.

He also played the first Bond villain, Le Chiffre, in the 1954 Casino Royale. He inspired numerous cartoon versions of himself, in Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck episodes, in Porky Pig’s portrayal of Mr. Motto, a fish in Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hatches an Egg, the Booberry cereal mascot, Ren in The Ren & Stimpy Show, a character in Corpse Bride, and others.

Much like Bela Lugosi, he never managed to avoid typecasting as a villain and later as a parody of himself. As one critic put it, Youngkin, the author of the exhaustive biography, wonders if Lorre thought “he should have stayed in Europe and faced Hitler.”

Fritz Lang, the director, left in 1933, soon after Goebbels offered him (and he refused) the role of the director of the German Cinema Institute. The position eventually went to Leni Riefenstahl.

M was based on a number of Weimar murderers:

Peter Kürten (1883-1932) – The Düsseldorf Vampire attacked men, women and especially little girls, starting with a burglary in 1913 and sometimes stabbing as many as three people in a day. On his way to the guillotine, he asked, “Will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck?”

Fritz Haarmann (1879-1925) The Butcher of Hannover, had a Hitler moustache like Kürten, but got away with more murders because he killed vagrants and male prostitutes. He killed his victims in true vampire fashion, nipping them at the neck, and later sold their clothes and their flesh as “pork.” Once, a merchant took the “meat” to the police to air his suspicion that it was human flesh; the police said it was definitely pork.

Karl Denke (1870-1924) This organ player killed and ate at least thirty people, sometimes selling the meat on the loca market. The Mass Murderer of Munstberg hanged himself in his cell the night of his arrest. He had a full beard.

Carl Grossmann (1863-1921?) The Berlin Butcher also committed suicide in his cell; police found the remains and blood of at least four victims in his apartment; he may have killed up to fifty young women. He sold the flesh on the market, and, like Haarman, throwing away the “non-edible” bits into a river. Now, are you ready for this? He also had a hot dog stand. The extent of his facial hair is unknown.

Peter Kürten is most often recalled as the single inspiration, though someone pointed out that the children’s rhyme at the beginning used Schwarzer Mann (“Black Man”) which originally was “Haarmann” for Fritz Haarman.

One of the early sound films, M uses sound to heighten the foreboding, as detailed in a Criterion essay – in the opening shot, the children sing of the murderer and how he chops his victims; the mother’s frantic calls for her daughter over a shot of an empty attic; the murderer’s whistling before we even see him. Visually, I was delighted with the idea of the M and of the would-be victim politely and unwittingly handing Lorre his dropped knife.