Egg Man

Taking trips abroad isn’t something I do—at least not regularly. Only occasionally, for reasons to do with my work, I get invited overseas, and then, of course, I’m glad to go. The year before last, I took a trip to Korea. For a symposium. I write novels, and one of my books had just been translated into Korean. This seems to be why they asked me to attend. While I was there, the person who had translated my book was by my side from beginning to end, acting as my interpreter. She was a cheerful, energetic woman, whom I called “Sensei,” since she was such a fount of knowledge, so eager to dish out opinions on all sorts of things (and she did teach literature at a university). She simply addressed me as “Saeda- san.” In our spare time, she took me shopping and sight-seeing, which I actually enjoyed. We visited the grand palaces of Seoul, a gallery café she said was frequented by poets (where I tried some traditional berry tea), a bar where I drank makgeolli (not really to my taste, though I liked the flavor of the grilled cod that came with it), and one of the shopping districts known for selling children’s clothes at knockdown prices (I really went to town on the children’s clothes. Ten pairs of socks with cute cartoon characters on them were going for only 500 yen). We went to many interesting places and tried so many wonderful dishes, but the place that left the deepest impression was a street market selling Chinese medicines and their ingredients. Sensei assured me it was a must-see. It took us some time to get there by subway. I can’t say for sure how many stops it was. The entrance was marked by a sort of gate, after which we found ourselves on a long road that seemed to stretch out forever, with closely packed shops lining either side. Some were proper shops with roofs, but others were out in the open and still others were basically carts. There were some sheets spread out on the ground, covered with bundles of twigs. Firewood, I assumed, but no—they, too, were some kind of medicine. There were also some things that looked like lumps of earth, and some round, black burnt- looking objects, the size of my fist, piled up in cardboard boxes. Whole dried turtles . . . Maybe they were terrapins. All sorts of dried berries: red berries, black berries, purple berries, yellow berries . . . Enormous mushrooms, round and flat, bigger than my face, black on the tops and white underneath. Things that looked like dried flowers, dried buds. Everywhere I smelled that odor so particular to Chinese medicine: an acrid, earthy, somewhat dusty smell. There were some live fish floating in shallow water. Long, thin, and black—were they loaches? Or maybe some kind of legless amphibian. Sensei, slightly ahead of me, waited, smiling while I took photographs of all I saw. “Well, what do you think, Saeda- san?” “I love it. It’s fascinating!” “Isn’t it? That’s what everyone says. Whenever I bring Japanese women writers here, they find it absolutely delightful.” Sensei spoke in very polite Japanese. She went on. “I once brought [and here she mentioned a certain name]. The moment she got back to her hotel, she called me up and said she wanted to come again, the very next day. We ended up coming two days in a row, and she was only here for a total of three days!” The woman she named was a very well-known writer, one of the most highly regarded in Japan, who had been a judge on a number of selection committees for literary prizes. I’d never met her. Sensei had apparently translated her work, too. “Well, I can understand why. It’s such an interesting place!” I replied, snapping a photo of a miniature shrine with a wooden roof I’d glimpsed in a gap between buildings. It looked as if it might contain a statue...