On a night bus bound for New York, two Japanese people meet by chance. On the one hand, there are gentlemen and criminal police officers who have insight into many cases, and on the other hand, there are mysterious beauties who hide secrets. To get the long night, a guessing game begins. The woman has a mysterious smile on her face, and the story that begins with "I have a friend..." is also more likely to be imagined.
△Tosaburo Furuhata
In 1996, Japanese playwright Yuki Mitani had his detective Renzaburo Furuhata perform a classic "easy chair reasoning" on a long-distance bus. Nanami Suzuki plays the widow of the writer who plots the "perfect crime" with a dessert: the wife and husband share the same red bean-stuffed snack, the husband is poisoned to death, and the wife is successfully exonerated.
The "Renzaburo Furuhata" series was introduced by Shanghai Television in the 1990s, and was revived on the Internet in the 21st century with the boom of speculative fiction. In either context, Mr. Furuhata's approach to solving the puzzle has left audiences outside of Japan dumbfounded. After a little thought, he told the beautiful women around him that the mystery was on this dim sum. What the couple ate was not the round Imakawa yaki, but a sea bream ware. In the principle of courtesy, the writer handed his wife the "head" of the sea bream grilled with a fuller red bean filling, and the poison was hidden in the tail.
It is not that Mitani Yuki's brain hole is too big to design such a ruse. In Japan, eating sea bream is "eat the head or the tail first" has been a protracted debate, and there are Chinese netizens arguing about the sweet and salty bean blossoms. According to a survey conducted by J Town Net in January 2017, 65.8% of the "head faction" advocated eating the head first, and the "tail faction" was inferior, accounting for only 23.5%.
It's hard to imagine that the order in which a dessert is eaten can spark such a heated discussion. The emphasis around seabream doesn't stop there. Like all Japanese sweets named "yaki" such as tokaki and Imakawa yaki, sea bream yaki is a yellow batter made of wheat flour and sugar wrapped in the filling. Because the crust is thin and crispy, the bream must be eaten hot, otherwise the crispy crust will become soft. The "Benge" sea bream grilled only has one flavor, red beans. The old brands use red beans from the Tokachi region of Hokkaido and boil them for hours to make a red bean paste, and the skin in the bean paste is carefully filtered out, but the grainy feeling of the red beans is still retained. The grilled seabream grilled one by one by a single abrasive is called "wild" seabream ware (written as "natural" in Japanese), which has more soul than "farmed" seabream roasted at the same time.
△ Single grilled wild snapper grilled
In today's Tokyo, there is a saying of "Mizoya" for sea bream, referring to the Azabu Juban Wave Flower Main Store, Shinjuku Yotsuya Wakaba, and Nihonbashi Renyocho Yanaya. Keigo Higashino's fans should smile appreciatively at the last name.
In 2010, Keigo Higashino's serialized novel "New Contestant" was adapted to television, setting a record for the filmization of speculative fiction. Kyoichi Kaga, a criminal police officer played by Hiroshi Abe, was transferred to the Nihonbashi Police Station, and when he met the seniors in the department, he humbly said: "For this street, I am a newcomer who has just arrived." He walked aimlessly in Kodenmacho, which was filled with traditional shops, took the humanoid yaki as a souvenir to collect information on the case, and ordered three sushi platters when his cousin invited him.
△ Kaga takes the humanoid burn to visit the case
He always lined up in front of the sea bream shop in Ningyocho, but he never got his wish. In the 2018 movie "When the Prayer Ends", the series ended, and Kyoichi Kaga changed from a newcomer to an old man in the region, but he still did not taste the seabream grill he wanted to eat.
From the 1990s to the second decade of the 21st century, Renzaburō Furuhata and Kyoichi Kaga proved that every era has a detective who belongs to this era, and that good detectives are always greedy. Detective and food are actually two things that have nothing to do with each other, but since Agatha Christie, detectives have been inseparable from food on the way to handling cases.
There is a legend that Agatha When Christie writes, she eats large amounts of clotted cream, a specialty of her hometown of Devon. Her detectives, whether miss Marple in England or Mr. Poirot in Belgium, love to eat crust cream.
Poirot's more famous hobby is hot chocolate, and of course, his hobby is in the service of detectives: "No cup of black coffee can stimulate the activity of my little gray cells like hot chocolate." ”
Many of Agatha's cases revolve around these high-sugar and high-calorie foods. In Criminal Gang, the hostess and the parlor maid are poisoned by castor poison after eating a fig jam sandwich over afternoon tea. In "The Case of Rye Macky", yew alkali is added to the marmalade for breakfast. English marmalade is made with bitter orange peel and has a sour taste that is usually only loved by the elderly. The Fordschu family had only elderly victims eating this jar of marmalade, and the murderer killed two birds with one stone: not only covered up the bitter taste of paclitaxe, but also completed the trick of precise poisoning - just like eating sea bream to burn "head or tail", which is full of dietary anthropology.
△ Miss Marple - Rye Macky case
The anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz, who wrote Sugar and Power, saw the meaning of sugar and fat beyond food that touched the modern human heart and stomach. "Food as symbols serves not only different themes, but also a variety of situations. Food is an emphasis on a particular way of life, and eating this behavior has gone beyond its own purpose. ”
In the criminal investigation Japanese drama "Special Search 9", the reappearance of the sea bream grill seems to be an excellent footnote to Westminster's words. The rakugo-loving old man always entered the theater with freshly baked sea bream. Poisoned in the seabream, it killed the old man, and angered the owner of the seabream roast shop and the criminal police who were serious about the love and righteousness that had been taken care of by the old man.
Like the traditional Japanese art Rakugo, the significance of the existence of sea bream is not only in the sweet red beans and crispy crust, but also in a certain cultural imagination. The food of this commoner has carried the fireworks of the city from birth. In the Edo period, sea bream was expensive, and commoners who could not afford to eat seabream made desserts into the shape of seabream, which also symbolized auspicious omens. Steaming sweets, of course, are more compatible with winter, and the poet Michio Nakahara once wrote a haiku sentence: break open the sea bream and blow its five viscera (鯛焼を割つて五臓を吹きにけり).
In 1953, writer and rakugo critic Tsuruo Ando walked into a newly opened seabream restaurant while walking near his new house in Yotsuya, and was amazed that the tail of the sea bream was also carefully filled with red bean paste. With the happiness of sugar, Ando introduced the small shop in a column in the Yomiuri Shimbun and wrote about the words "Sea bream is delicious with a stuffed tail." Many believe that this column is the beginning of the "head or tail" debate.
This article also changed the fate of this small sea bream restaurant. The day after the column came out, there was a long line in the small shop. Because the business was so good, the owner's son resigned from the tax office and returned to help and inherited the shop. This is the story of Shitani Wakaba, now known as one of the "Imperial Three Houses" of snapper grill. Today, Wakaba's owner baton has been passed on to the third generation, and the store sells more than 3,000 seabream roasts every day. The store regarded the day of the Yomiuri Shimbun as a commemoration day, and saw Tsuruo Ando's "Sea bream is a delicious dish with filling on the tail" as a social motto, which was printed on the plate containing seabream.
△ Plate with Tsuruo Ando's famous words printed on it
It is somewhat lamentable that writers who once won the Naoki Prize are now known in this way.
It is also somewhat emotional that no matter how advanced the times are and how rich the materials are, the satisfaction obtained by sweets and sugars will not change.