The sea cucumber. It's from the sea. It's not a cucumber. Cats are scared of cucumbers (allegedly, they don't work on mine, and god knows, I've tried, I even used a marker pen to draw eyes and mouth on them and hide behind the sofa till the cats come in), but I cower behind all the cushions when it comes to sea cucumbers. The scariest thing in my life would be the movie The Conjuring if the cast were replaced by sea cucumbers.
The scene, a Tokyo evening, a booze-dampened etch-a-sketch of neon, try the sea cucumber, it's very good. There's a point in many of these evenings where fundamentally bad ideas seem well, OK. This explains tattoos and why I always say yes to another drink. And who wants to disappoint their hosts? I'm an envoy, I am, a goddamned diplomat. Step up and do the stuff that painted the map imperial pink. Bring on the sea creatures.
Culinary bravado is a typical male downfall*, a sort of existential menu-driven self-inflicted kick in the balls.
They don't really taste of much but the texture. Oh, the texture. Now I've never actually eaten the penis of a two-week-old corpse, but once you've got that thought in your head and you've got a slice of it in your mouth and you are chewing and everyone is watching, there's no way out. All directions look the same and your inventory is a shovel. You can't shout out oh god, I'm eating a dead man's dick because you're an envoy, a diplomat, and oh no, is this some kind of Japanese game show called He So English, Ha Ha! So I chewed that motherfucking knobbled phallic echinoderm down because a boy's got to do what's a boy has got to do. Had it been an (a) eat this or (b) be repeatedly kicked in the testicles, I'd have spread my legs and cheerfully yelled (b)! (b)! (b)!
*reminds me of the time in Hong Kong. If you're familiar with Hong Kong, you'll know the night markets, and the little tile fronted restaurants that appear, with cheap chairs and tables outside, and some very good food. Anyway, we were slurping away at one, and there was a table of obligatory Aussies blokes and couple of women next to us. They ordered a dish that was effectively in a pig face floating face-off style in a lake of snot green sauce. Of course, Aussie boys being a spectacularly stupid form of the average boy, hooted and hollered, as the plate landed mid-table. You saw the blood drain out of the women so fast someone could have been making blood sausages from a menstrual tsunami. The one nearest to us slumped like a pile of wet spaghetti. I was chivalrous enough to let my wife grab her before she hit the floor.
