VSThis is a gadget that has accompanied me for years: a small silicone USB key of about 8 cm which resumed feature by feature the elongated shape and the orange yellow color of a ebi tempura – the name that the Japanese give to this emblematic dish of Japanese cuisine: a simple fried shrimp tail coated in a light crispy batter. Inedible, tossed about right and left from the bottom of my pocket, it had no other use than to store a few gigabytes of photos and utility documents. Found on an online sales site, the tool – in addition to revealing to the world my attraction for accessories in bad taste – had the particularity of arousing, at each of its releases, its small effect: sometimes, it was the curiosity and adhesion, sometimes a form of incomprehension and rejection.
In my mind, at the time, it symbolized on the contrary all the interest I had for Japanese culinary culture and the way it was transposed, in a rather cute way, in the animated films of Hayao Miyazaki and from Studio Ghibli. As an enlightened amateur, I especially associated my fake shrimp with a method of frying vegetables, fish and shellfish – called “in tempura” – very popular in Japanese bistros, and which is used to accompany noodles. soba (buckwheat), noodles udon (with wheat flour) or tendon, over a simple bowl of rice.
But it was clear that, for many of my interlocutors, the sight of this shiny-looking crustacean was more like a greasy and indigestible dish. The fault, I was told, of the bad experiences encountered in the vast majority of Japanese catering restaurants found in France, where the traditional food offer is sometimes a bit stereotyped, even misguided – and where the tempuras are mostly oil-soaked and cooked in a hurry, between a bowl of vinegary coleslaw, frozen yakitori skewers and a pair of cheap sushi. Something told me, deep inside me – and even though I had never set foot in Japan – that tempura was not yet recognized, here in France, at its fair value.
Little golden treasures
This summer, tempuras came back to haunt me. In Tempura, a film by Akiko Ohku released in theaters at the end of July, the most famous Japanese fried foods appear on the screen in small, spontaneous touches. In Tokyo, we follow the daily life of Mitsuko, a young single woman who, while waiting to be able to invite a boy to dinner for the first time, refines her various tempura recipes every day. At work in her small kitchen, we admire the languor of her measured gestures and all the application she puts into producing her little golden treasures – which we imagine crispy on the surface but always tender inside. Implicitly, we believe we can guess all the nobility that the Japanese give to these small cooked dishes; and how they can serve as a medium to convey attention or feeling.
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