These contain minced dried fish, sea slugs floating in
an evil-smelling sauce, and boiled lotus-seeds. To wash down these dainties
a porcelain bottle of sake, rice-beer, is provided.
The unhappy foreigner tastes one dish after the other, finds each one worse
than the last, and concludes to wait till the next course. This is composed
of a very great dainty, raw, live fish, which one dips in sauce before
devouring. Then comes rice, and the chopsticks of the Japanese feasters go
to work in marvellous fashion. With their strips of wood or ivory they whip
the rice grain into their mouths with wonderful speed and dexterity, but
our unlucky foreigner gets one grain into his mouth in five minutes, and is
reduced to beg for a spoon.
The next course is of fish soup and boiled fish, and potatoes appear with
the fish; but, alas! the fish is most oddly flavoured and the potatoes are
sweet; they have been beaten up with sugar into a sort of stiff syrup. Next
comes seaweed soup and the coarse evil-smelling daikon radish, served with
various pickles and sauces.
Among the other oddments is a dish of nice-looking plums. Our foreigner
seizes one and pops it in his mouth. He would be only too glad to pop it
out again if he could, for the plum has been soaked in brine, and tastes
like a very salty form of pickle. As he experiments here and there among
the wilderness of little lacquer bowls which come forth relay upon relay,
he feels inclined to paraphrase the cry of the Ancient Mariner, and murmur:
"Victuals, victuals everywhere, and not a scrap to eat!"
When at length the dinner has run its course the geisha, in their beautiful
robes of silk and brocade and their splendid sashes, come in to sing and
dance.
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