Article 002: First Karasumi, an Old Teacup from Hagi
Summary
Some time has passed now since I finished writing this piece, and still I find myself returning to the moment I first tasted karasumi — the slow, deliberate work of cutting it thin, the unhurried minutes of chewing each piece through.
I remember that patience with unusual clarity, even now.
And in writing about the Hagi-ware teacup I have used for years, I was reminded — freshly, as though for the first time — that a vessel only grows more beautiful once you have stopped expecting it to stay the same.
Karasumi and the teacup, I think now, may not be so different. Both keep a kind of value that refuses to announce itself. You have to be willing to wait for it.
Categories
Cooking, Tableware
What follows is a single scene from a life lived inside Japan's food culture — small, particular, mine.
I hope you'll read it the way you might sit near a bed of embers: unhurried, warmed from somewhere you can't quite point to.
1. Word
- Thin-sliced karasumi, served in a Hagi-ware teacup
A letter arrived from someone whose friendship was still finding its shape, and something in me lifted before I'd even opened it.
It was an announcement from a Hagi-ware potter — notice of a kamabiraki, the ceremonial first opening of a newly fired kiln.
I checked the dates and spent the days that followed happily guessing at what the new firing might hold — which glazes, which forms, what the fire had decided this time.
I've made it a habit to go on the very last day of the showing.
A friend once tried to explain the spirit of a kiln-opening to me. The closest thing she could think of, she said, was a French vernissage.
I have never actually been to one. The comparison gave me something to reach for, but no real picture formed.
2. Considering
I wanted to bring something to the kiln-opening that wasn't the usual offering — something with a little more weight to it.
I happened to have business in Nagasaki around that time, and it was there that karasumi suggested itself.
At the shop, I listened to the full account of how it's made, and understood, for the first time, just how much patience the process demands.
But for all that I knew the name, knew roughly how it was made, I realized I had never once put it in my mouth.
To give something I hadn't tasted myself felt close to a small discourtesy. So before anything else, I bought a piece for my own table.
- Karasumi:
A delicacy made by salting and slow-drying the roe of grey mullet and similar fish.
3. At Hand
Having just heard how laborious the process was, I found myself unable to choose carelessly.
When I explained why I'd come, the shopkeeper recommended a whole pair — left and right roe sacs together — as the proper form for a gift.
For my own kitchen, they suggested, a few single halves would do just as well.
It was the shopkeeper's care in explaining all of this, more than anything, that pulled me toward choosing several of the better-shaped halves for myself.
4. Thin
I set the karasumi, new to my hands, into the Hagi-ware teacup.
Since it was my first time, I sliced it thin and ate it plain, without grilling.
I chewed slowly, deliberately, giving full attention to that single piece.
Even now I can call it back precisely: a granular, almost bursting texture I had never encountered before, and the scent of the sea opening around it.
The flesh, as I looked at it, held the same deep glow you find in amber that's been polished and polished again.
It had more bite to it than I'd expected — firmer, denser.
Before I knew it, I had already reached for a second piece.
- The bursting texture:
The particular sensation of fish-roe granules giving way, one by one, against the tongue.
5. Open
When I slice karasumi thin, I reach for a knife with a true edge.
A cut that crushes rather than parts ruins the one thing that makes the slice worth looking at — that clean, glassy cross-section.
Grilled lightly, the karasumi sends its scent through the whole room, and I find myself hungry before I mean to be.
What I had was finite, so I tried it several ways while it lasted.
I laid it over yuzuke — rice doused in hot water — and another time folded it through pasta.
6. The Teacup
- Steamed brown-sugar bread
- Walnut bread
- Coffee in the Hagi-ware teacup
The piece in the photograph was made to hold tea. My wife and I, depending on the day, decide otherwise.
How it sits in the hand
Cupped between both palms, fingers drawn slightly in, it settles into exactly the right place.
A fine network of hairline cracks — kannyū — runs across the whole surface, and when I first bought it, the glaze felt almost severe to the touch.
That hardness has softened with years of ordinary use. The edges have worn into something gentler, something closer to us, and the color itself has shifted along the way.
When we wash it, the sponge sometimes catches against that faint roughness in the glaze.
More than once, that catch has been enough to send it sliding from our hands into another dish nearby.
7. Pattern
There was a time when I cared so little about pottery that I didn't even know the word kannyū.
Worse, I mistook that whole web of fine cracks for a flaw — evidence, I assumed, of something gone wrong in the making.
I understood, looking back, that my not knowing had been its own kind of fearlessness — the kind that only ignorance can afford.
A friend, watching me misread the cup so plainly, finally explained it.
What I was looking at, she told me, was the same phenomenon Western art calls craquelure — visible in old ceramics, in old paintings — and she called it, simply, proof that beauty is something time writes.
8. Becoming
What this whole experience taught me is simple enough to say: chew slowly enough, give a thing enough time, and it will show you a flavor, a fragrance, it would never have given up otherwise.
I find that I'm grateful, simply, for having had the time to learn that.
9. Summary
「うみいずる こはくべっこう ひのまつり」
[Oumi izouru, kohaku bekkou, hi no matsuri]
Ouïe Mis Idylle, Coque Ambre Bec Haut, Vie Nos Mât Ris.
Un grain de sel, la terre éprise du temps.
Related Links
Takanoya — Karasumi Ganso
- Official site: https://www.karasumi.jp/
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References
The source I drew on for this piece is catalogued as 工 01.
Readers wishing to consult it further can find it at the link below.
Please also enjoy our video with audio.
End of Article
I hope this finds something small worth discovering on your table — and, somewhere underneath it, a little of that feeling we call nostalgia.