Plural Identities

Blunch 7

Going out on my bike for lunch took a month or so's break, due to a mix of holidays, being busy away working, bike gears on the fritz and the weather.  I went back to Unithai a week ago,finally, with fixed bike gears, and had an excellent pork ball soup with noodles - a rich dark soup with a touch of 5 spice I think.

Earlier this week I tried to go to Sushi Garden, having failed last time, when they were shut, despite claiming to open 7 days a week.  This time the failure was entirely mine - I had not left myself enough time to sit down and eat and make it to my Ethiopian mentee's flat on time.  So I ended up having a pasty on the bus, which was OK, but then I regretted it when it turned out my mentee had made me some lunch in her tiny kitchen.

Hubby suggested we try Sushi Garden again with a couple of friends who were supposed to be visiting us from London on Friday, but then they rang to cancel, having come down with the norovirus.  Undeterred we decided to go out anyway.  So, finally, I can do a blunch blog on it, although it wasn't lunch. 

The decor was quite cheesy - a sort of 1970s Western view of Japan - all geisha and cherry trees and mount Fuji.  The waitresses were dressed in some kind of Cheongsam Suzy Wong meets kimono outfit that reminded me of the split to the thigh outfit I had to wear when I was a student waitress at a Chinese Kosher restaurant in Hendon many years ago.  Some of the waitresses were Japanese but some weren't and the menu had a few Korean dishes on it.  I decided to order lots of little dishes izakaya style, and not from the almost too extensive, not very trad sushi menu, as it was too wintry an evening to be eating sushi we felt, although the menu did say that some of the sushi was hot.  Hmm.

The chicken tebasaki (fried wing tips) was good but the gyoza more deep fried and dry than the boiled/fried potsticker version I like.  The nasu dengaku (aubergine and miso) was not quite cooked enough.  I also chose the bibimbap - a Korean rice dish I have  enjoyed many times in Japan.  In Japan they usually offer the version where the ingredients are mixed together in a heated stone bowl, so the rice goes a little bit brown and crunchy at the edges and the egg cooks slightly.  Anyway, the Sushi Garden version was tasty, but I did miss the sizzling stone bowl bit.

Verdict - food OK, but the restaurant should be set out more as a place to come with big gangs of people from work (booths seating 6 type thing) rather than romantic tables for two.   Also,  given that in Brighton we already have Murasaki doing the  izakaya thing,  Yo Sushi and Moshi Moshi Sushi doing the wacky inauthentic sushi thing, E-kagen doing the Japanese home cooking thing and Pompoko doing the donburi thing, I think Sushi Garden would be better off concentrating on Korean food (and I suppose changing its name) as we don't have a Korean restaurant in Brighton, which seems a bit of an anomaly considering it's supposed to be the third best city to eat out in in the UK.  And while we're at it, we need a Vietnamese restaurant too.  Hubby and I were reminiscing about the fabulous meals we used to have at the Viet Hoa when we lived in the East End of London (nearly 10 years' ago now).

Blades and saddles

We (hubby and I) watched the samurai movie "The Hidden Blade", directed by Yamada Yoji last night, and were discussing why we enjoyed it so much and found Tarantino's "Kill Bill Vol 1" (which we saw for the first time the week before), also featuring samurai swords and dismemberment, so repellent and unengaging.  We are both big fans of Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs" and I remember liking, in a quiet low key sort of way, his "Jackie Brown" too.

"The Hidden Blade" came out in 2004, and "Kill Bill Vol 1" in 2003, so I don't think there are any conscious influences going either way for those specific films.  Yamada is famous in Japan for his series of big hit films "Otoko wa Tsurai Yo" (It's tough being a man") also known as the "Tora san" (the name of the central character) movies and more recently was the writer for the "Tsuri Baka Nisshi" series (diary of a fishing fool).  Neither of these series are what you might call samurai slasher epics, and are seen more in Japan as comforting family viewing, full of nostalgia and sentimentality.

It seems that Yamada, now in his 70s, is becoming more highbrow and serious in his final years, and "The Hidden Blade" is the middle film of three period samurai dramas he has done, which have been entered for Golden Bears and Oscars accordingly.  Certainly "The Hidden Blade" seemed to me to be making some observations about foreign influence and Japanese values, being set in the 1860s, when Japan was being forcefully opened up by Western powers, in the years preceding the Meiji Restoration. 

There is a moment, after the hero has tried to kill his friend (on orders from their clan) honourably in a sword fight, and the friend is in fact finished off by bullets from the militiamen, when the head of the militiamen says "we never tried our guns on humans before, so it was an excellent opportunity to observe their effect".  It immediately had echoes for me of the kind of remarks made by the Allied powers before and after dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Maybe I am reading too much into it, but I felt Yamada was asking what kind of traditional Japanese values should be preserved and which are best jettisoned in the modern global age.  Our hero, a low caste samurai, is "honourable" (respects women, modest, dislikes violence, is loyal but also vengeful)  but this ultimately means he renounces his samurai status, marries a servant girl and goes to work in "trade" (which is the lowest status class in feudal Japan).  This seems to be Yamada's preferred solution, contrasted with old, corrupt, venal and violent Japanese values but also with wholesale adoption of Western values.

And so to "Kill Bill", which is trying to say, what, exactly, about anything?  It is repellent because it isn't I suppose.  A New Yorker review puts it well:

"his use of styles and references feels increasingly arbitrary and eccentric, the scenes joined together by associations and loyalties that can’t possibly mean as much to anyone else as they mean to him [...]
Tarantino’s ambition, however, is unmistakable: he wants to impress his obsessions on the succeeding generations. The pop encyclopedist and video-store genius has become a megalomaniac, and the exhilarating filmmaker he might have been is disappearing fast."

So why am I connecting the two films?  Well, there is one similar scene.  In "Kill Bill Vol 1", The Bride goes to her old sword master to get a new sword, and is explicit with him that it will be used to "kill Bill", who was also a pupil of the sword master.  In "The Hidden Blade", the hero visits his old sword master in order to be taught a new move, and again is explicit that he will use it to kill his friend, a former pupil of the sword master.  In both cases the sword master has retired, in Kill Bill to become a sushi chef, in The Hidden Blade to become a farmer.

The resulting fights are prolonged, stylish and sadistic in "Kill Bill" and short, muddy and messy in "The Hidden Blade".  In the latter, the friend, just before dying, points out that this new move the hero has learned is in fact cowardly, as it relies on feigning a turned back, and is not honourable at all.  "The Hidden Blade" is "The Unforgiven" of Samurai movies.  Which makes "Kill Bill" - "Blazing Saddles"?  Although I am not sure it is that good.