We got up after 10 hours sleep, still sleepy. Looked at a country-ruffles clothing store, spent 30 minutes changing travelers cheques at a bank, bought hairpins, tea whisks, and similar bits and pieces. Lunch at a noisy ramen shop, the waitresses and cooks shouting, jazz on the loudspeakers. The noodles were good, served in enormous bowls.


We have been wondering about the food around here. Portion sizes are large, and everything has dozens of courses. My stomach often feels overfull after meals, and people press food on you relentlessly. It's not as though they don't eat a lot themselves, either. The teeniest ladies, if you watch them at meals, pack away a quart of soup, two dozen sushi rolls, a salad, and a tiramisu without blinking. This ramen shop was no exception. We were offered bowls of rice along with the ramen, but couldn't imagine cramming it in our bodies. "No rice?" asked the waitress incredulously. Nope.


In a shawl of wind, we walked across the river. A white egret fed in the shallow water, but we bustled on and around to the Miyagi Art Museum. It's very seventies looking, with cement and ceramic brick. You search for the exhibits. The special exhibit was of a man who worked in oils and pencil. In some ways his works reminded me of my grandfather's, but his sensibility is a bit autistic. Every object gets the exact same amount of attention, and groups of objects sit separately. Very unsettling.


The permanent exhibit has some good Kandinskys but all in all, not a place I need to return to. 


We rushed back to greet Susan before her concert. She was in a dressing room, vigorous and bubbling, and everyone plied her with food and good wishes. 


The performance was electrifying. I listened to her CD a few months ago, and found it too sweet to hold my interest, but this was certainly not the case with a live performance. Her personality is huge, and she holds the audience's emotions captive for the entire hour. The lady next to me wept. Afterwards, almost the entire audience bought her new CD and lined up to lean at her, hold her hand, and tell her how much she had moved them. It was amazing to be a part of that.


We met afterwards at a Chinese restaurant that was reserved just for us, maybe 12 people. It was a noisy, hilarious meal, with Susan telling stories, and other people feeding her lines just to experience her personality once again. One of the couples there said that they had been so inspired by a few of her songs which talked about the importance of listening to love when you find it, that they decided to get married. "When?" asked Susan. They consulted, poked each other, giggled, consulted again, and finally said, "June? You think June would be good?" 

Today Mariko and Nanako took us to see Lord Da-te's tomb. We drove a short distance to the base of a wooded hill, where bamboo walking sticks were available for visitors. We climbed many steps to the washing station, which you find at every temple and some shrines. A covered stone basin had long wooden dippers across the top. You dip out water from the basin, pouring water over first your right, then left, and then right hands. You swish out your mouth and spit onto the ground, then make a final dip and let the water run down the handle of the dipper so the next person gets a clean handle to use.


Lord Date's tomb was bombed out in World War II but was reconstructed at huge expense in 1979. It was garish and beautiful. Vivid paint outlined carved phoenixes, dragons, and whatnot. In the tiny museum next door was the coffin pot, a big iron cauldron, and mysteirous items like a plaster "footprint of a servant found in the ceiling." An eyeglass with crystal lenses, two reconstructed heads.


Around a tree lined path were two more similar masoleums, but, please note, not with dragons on the roof ends. The third lord had been retired by the Tokugawas and spent his life as an artist, and after him, I guess nobody rated a masoleum. There was also a cemetery for the Date dynasty children. Figure 20 generations, and 60 stones.


A shrine was near the bottom of the area, sharing land with a kindergarted full of children in orange or yellow billed caps. We stood at a row of rocks carved into figures, including O-Jizo-Sama, lord of dead children. They were all dressed in red plastic shower caps with red aprons, and as we sketched, the kindergarten blasted out some oompah cleanup music. Much later, Yayoi said that the red clothing on the stone statues were to keep them warm in cold weather. Okay.


The temple was as expected, with winding paths, mossy stelae, peaceful buildings. Lots of photos. Those two dragons on either side of the stairway? I've always wondered. The one with open mouth is saying Ah, the beginning, and represents life. The one with the closed mouth is saying Oh, the end, and represents death.


We had lunch at the bottom of the hill, in an Italian restaurant with an owner-chef who looked just like Buddha in a filthy white chef's robe. The place was small but open, with a grand piano that the wife plays, and landscapes on the wall. The food was gourmet - a fusion antipasto with prosciutto, lettuce, flower petals, and daikon, followed by spaghetti with oysters, and a divine tiramisu, all for 1000 yen, or about $12. Susan performed there last year, and we met the chef again at her performance the following day.


The divine Susan! We finally met her in the humorously ornate lobby of her hotel. She has a queenly figure, draped with dramatic clothes, amber jewelry, and has a vivid, warm, happy personality. She has us all laughing right away, with a story of how her first Japanese host family taught her the most important word to say in any situation. When dealing with taxi drivers, waiters, and important people you meet for the first time, you bow and say, "shoulder blade." This she did, and it took some time before someone dared to ask her why she kept saying shoulder blade.


Susan left to rest, and Tokiko took us in hand. She is a stooped 82 year old dowager, with flowing designer robes, a floppy flowered hat, and a raucous personality. A true grande dame. She danced for General McArthur in Okinawa, married a doctor and ran his clinic and cooked for the patients and raised three children. Then she got a job as an art director of a big department store and invited world artists to exhibit there, back when the Japanese economy was so strong they could offer huge cash incentives. 


Twenty years ago, at 60, she learned to do a kind of modern traditional dance (possibly nihon buyo, but I'm not certain of this), and has danced in Korea two or three times, and taught a member of the royal family.


She herded us to a second hand kimono store embedded in a white-walled warehouse of a department store. Stacks and stacks of kimonos lined the shelves, but Tokiko gave them a glance, poked a few, and selected out a red and white one. "Camilla will get this one," she pronounced, and so it was. Two ladies fitted her, everyone exclaimed "kawaii" (cute), and then obis were discussed at length. I was instructed to get a blue one with a design from Okinawa, which I am to wear with a brooch at the front closing.


That settled, we went to a fabric store and must have touched every one of the offerings. The japanese ladies like soft, garish fabrics but Camilla got some kimono scraps and I got a length of indigo cloth with fish on it.


Italian food! The shop was tiny, the pizza pesto and camembert, the chestnut gelato delicious. We spent over an hour there, chatting and giggling.

In the evening, we drove from the Neo Alex school after a long ESL session with the adult students there. Sendai's suburbs remind me of Tucson - homey, ugly, and workmanlike, with gardens, power lines, patched stone walls, and people walking theri dogs. We kept going down side streets and shooting out onto main streets then diving back down into dark narrow alleyways. Without warning, we pulled into a 2-car parking lot. "This is a Japanese house restaurant," said Mr. Yokose in his deep voice.


At the door we were greeted by a willowy woman in a white smock who knelt and bowed with her head on the floor in a fluid motion. Then, without apparent effort, she rose and said "dozo" to show us into a tatami floored room, one of two rooms for customers in the house. It had a thick low table with heavy legs and odd-shaped chairs. "Dozo," everyone said, but how to sit? Mrs. Yokose demonstrated - you kneel on the edge of the chair then make a sudden twist and you're gracefully kneeling with your toes tucked under the back of the chair and your knees under the table.


We sampled some sake and began the evening with a round of kidding around and threats to make each other sing songs. The feeling was avuncular on the part of Mr. Yokose. Yayoi explained later that he was feeling bad because he had invited Camilla to stay for months, but now that his wife (who was sitting there beaming) possibly has terminal cancer, he thought he might wait to see what happens when she has her exploratory operation. So, this restaurant was, in part a way to get to know us, and in part, a way to apologize. 

Our servers were the owner, a woman who'd grown up in the US and had a coarse accent I associate with urban poverty, a sharp contrast to her gracious Japanese manner. Her daughter, the willowy woman, also orchestrated the feast. They were cheerful, helpful, unobtrusive, but willing to join in the conversation if it was about food.


We started with sake, a flowery drink with a hint of rain and rice, that burned the throat. Next, three small bowls arrived at each place, one with liver paté, one with squid entrails in a creamy savory sauce, and one with fugu aspic. Fugu! Fugu! If it is prepared incorrectly, you die. This was the one place in Sendai authorized to prepare fugu, and lucky for us, it's fugu season. Each of the dishes had a light, delicate taste but completely different from the other two.


Next, fugu sashimi. They came in paper-thin slices on large green platters, along with a central pile of crisp skin slices, and around the edges, little piles of chives and big wedges of dai-dai, a green citrus fruit that translates as Seville orange.


You were suppoed to wrap the chives and skin with fugu meat, sprinkle it with dai-dai, and dip into a chive-sprinkled soy-based sauce. We all thought the taste reminded of something different. Camilla said rain, I said a dry field of grass (maybe I had too much skin in my fugu burrito), and Suzuki-san made a humorous haiku: 


Fugu in autumn
I remember my o-ba (nurse)
my fictional life.


The servers said they'd never gotten such good feedback on the fugu.The next course was te-chiri, narrow white plates with fugu tempura, dusted lightly with chili powder. Fugu is delicate enough so that all these different ways of preparing it give completely different taste experiences, but you never feel as though it is being drowned out by the seasoning. I guess that's what gourmet dining is all about.


By this time the conversation was quite cheery and Camilla, with her dramatic appreciation of the dishes, had become the darling of the menfolk.


After velvety fugu soup, we were treated to a very rare sight. The owner, a stocky man with shaved head and white aikido sweats, made sushi at a display table through a window in the sliding doors. His two knives were heavy and sharp, one in a wooden sheath and the other in a cloth. He had a wooden box of cleaned fish on his left, and a large coarsly woven straw basket into which a round wooden box of rice fitted on his right.


He began by grating wasabi from a green horseradish root, and mixing the paste with some old paste. The fish cutting was logical and precise, no doubt with ritual movements. He soaked his cleanup cloth in ginger water, wiped his knives, and began. For a flatfish, he'd cut the tail off, open it out, cut the central veins out, then loosen the skin membrane and pull it off to get the fillets clean.
Finally, a fingertip of wasabi, a small log of rice, and careful shaping. He put a double row of six into a lacquered presentation box, and we were instructed to eat with our hands because it was too soft for chopsticks.


By this time, we were all patting our tummys (pom-pom), and saying pan-pan, the sound a drum makes, or a full stomach. We finished off with two kinds of soup and an apple persimmon dish for dessert.


Ahhh. Then abruptly, everyone stood up, bowed, thanked, bowed again, made protestations of admiration and undying friendship, and we were bundled into a taxi and sent to the train station. 


We walked home from the station in a cool dark street, stopping in a brilliantly lit noisy convenience store for some teeny tofu wrapped ice cream balls.


In the middle of the night, someone fell against my face, and held it in both hands, staring. Then, with an agitated voice, she turned to Yayoi's futon, shook her awake, and began speaking, then weeping. "Oh no," I thought, "It must be very bad news indeed." But it wasn't. The lady was stinking drunk, and had mistaken our room for her own, five floors above.


From now on, we lock the door.