Nishiki is four hundred metres of things you can eat, most of them on a stick. I have walked it perhaps two hundred times. This time I walked it slowly, because Duarte kept stopping.
He stopped at the tsukemono, which he called 'pickles' in the tone of a man who would be corrected later. He stopped at the tako tamago, the tiny octopus with a quail egg for a head, and did not eat one, and I respect that. He stopped at the persimmons.
Kaki. Hard ones you eat like an apple, soft ones you eat with a spoon, dried ones that taste like a fig that has been to the gym. I had never explained them before. Explaining a fruit you have eaten every autumn of your life to someone who hasn't is a strange, tender kind of translation.
We bought six. He ate four before Sanjō. On the way home to Lisbon he asked, at the airport, whether they'd have them at the Graça market. They do, in November, from Spain, and they are fine, and he says they are not the same, and he is right.
