Japanese Farm Food

                                                                                                                                                           All Photos this Post by Kenji Miura

Finding a Publisher

Almost a year ago David Lebovitz used me as an example of a blogger who had a niche: “If you are someone who, say, lives on an organic farm in Japan, then you should write a book with 100 easy Japanese country recipes.” Last week Andrews McMeel offered me a book contract for the book I am (now) writing: Japanese Farm Food: Simple Recipes and Traditional Techniques from Our Sustainable Life. It will be published Fall 2012.

Sound easy? It wasn’t.

At the time David gave me that nudge, I was attending Food Blogger Camp in Ixtapa and seriously considering two other books before the Japanese food book. I was leaning toward getting published in Japan first with a how-to book for young cooks just creating their eating and cooking customs. I envisioned a book with master recipes such as I cook everyday in the school: stews, gratins, risottos, pasta, hamburger patties, salads, and simple vegetable preparations. And I thought I would really burrow into the core of why it is so important to get fresh straight-from-the source ingredients, be it farm, field, or sea. This is an easy book for me to write because I have been teaching and cooking this food for Japanese friends and kids for two decades. But as a first book, there is a little niggling disappointment in crafting words or staying true to my “voice” only to have some part of “me” be translated out in the Japanese version.

 

 

I live in Japan and I have contacts in Japan, so a little Slow Lunch cookbook made sense, but the Indigo Days stories kept building up inside of me and wanting to get out. I still have scads of them ready to be written. I’ve been writing about our life here in Japan since right after Christopher was born 19 years ago. And as the years wore on, my almost annual New Year Letter grew to 20 pages and about 100 recipients, until I finally turned it into this blog. But I still write a short personal note to a few hundred friends and family members, reminiscent of that New Year letter. There are some private reflections I don’t particularly want to air over the Internet…though perhaps not many. After all these years in Japan, I’ve learned to keep a certain part of me inside, that’s called self-preservation. But don’t we all do that to an extent?

 

 

 

 

 

Along with the letters, I often sent color photocopies of Christopher’s art, and imbedded color photos of the family in the letters. With the exception of my misguided attempt to detail my fix-up-the-house project and gushing that the “house looks fabulous” in the New Year 1995 letter (cringe), I usually wrote about bilingual education, bicultural kids, food, and Japanese life. And always in the back of my mind, I was thinking that someday perhaps these letters could be made into a book. I’m not so sure anymore. They aren’t as compelling as I originally thought—especially the callow early ones that would need a total rework from the “wise narrator.”

In the 1998 letter I announced my intention to write a cookbook with Tadaaki. In the 1999 one I added two more book ideas, this time in Japanese: kids cooking and international cooking. And in 2007 I put one more project on the list: a cooking show at our house that Tadaaki affectionately named and created a jingle for: “Panic, panic…Panic Cooking Show!” There is something about writing down intentions to keep you honest. So, cooking show aside, I have made some discernibly concrete progress toward shifting these food-related plans from fantasy to reality.

 

 

In the year 2000, Tadaaki and I started a house-renovation that changed all of our lives. I had been teaching about 80 students in my house during the afternoons and evenings and had reached the point where I no longer wanted to continue sharing our living space with the students. I proposed building a classroom on our property and Tadaaki countered with the wildly unexpected suggestion of moving in with his parents. My jaw dropped.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After my initial (viscerally) negative reaction, I agreed to a walk through of the farm house and was able to see beyond the dusty corners, piles and piles of stuff, and shoddy plastic “improvements” effected by my father-in-law fifteen years before. So I agreed to renovate Tadaaki’s parents’ house and devise a way to live “separately” under the same roof. It took nine months to finish and three years to recover. But that’s a different story.

In 2001, I started a Slow Food Convivium and Sunny-Side Up! Immersion Preschool/Kindergarten. And I also started reading books on writing a book proposal and query letters. And whenever I had a block of time—which was seldom since we were home schooling as well—I brainstormed on Table of Contents, title, and intro pages.

But the catalyst for launching myself whole hog into writing came with the Soba Dinner I helped Sylvan Brackett organize at Chez Panisse in 2008. I invited the editor of our Slow Food Japan magazine to come along with us; then he asked me to write a series of articles about the Soba Dinner, Chez Panisse, and the Edible Schoolyard. And that is how it started.

I poured my heart and soul into the Soba Dinner “article”—all 15 pages of it (yikes, what was I thinking?). The Alice Waters interview and Edible Schoolyard pieces were considerably shorter, but in the end it was easier for Slow Food to just paraphrase what I wrote into Japanese. Ah, the first lesson in the hollow letdown of merely being “translated,” my English words left to float without home, never to see print. A definite low point.

But those couple months that I spent writing every spare minute of the day that I could jealously snatch, left me zinging with desire to write more and more and more. And better.

So where did I turn? To Stanford, the place where my brain had expanded (once), a world where I was intellectually and personally comfortable. Home.

 

 

A year and a half of magazine writing and memoir classes later, I was deep into writing my book proposal for Japanese Farm Food. I had met a supportive, talented mentor at Stanford, a skillful and extremely helpful writing coach at Food Blogger Camp, a Japanese cookbook editor/mentor I adore and admire, an accomplished (and published) Japanese food photographer, and my wonderfully smart and creative agent at the IACP Annual Conference. And thanks to all of their guidance and all of your encouragement, I now have a publisher that I respect enormously, whose vision of my book is exactly as mine (with old cloth in the design, a collage of old and new photos and a memoir story each chapter of recipes similar to My Nepenthe); and an editor with whom I can talk easily, who also coincidentally lived for several years not too far from me here in Japan, in a similarly small town. It was that easy and that hard.

One of my writing friends wrote me recently that “there are ‘can do’ and ‘can't do’ people in the world, and it seems like you don't let anything stop you.”

I guess that’s true.

 

 

Comments

[Nina]

Thank you so much for sharing your story with us Nancy! It is a beautiful one and has so much to teach: forward movement always results in something. You kept pushing from all angles, working with what you had. That is very Japanese. =) Ganbare on your book draft!

[Jeff martin]

Hi Nancy
Congratulating you on your book and Brandons safe arrival in India and today the beginning of my first olive harvest
Tonite we will find out what 5 years labor tastes like
Jeff and Pam

[Dianne Jacob]

Loved reading about your long march forward as a writer and all the people who helped you get to this point. Proud to be one of them, Nancy. The book is going to be beautiful.

p.s. Your husband's name for your cooking show is hilarious!

[Garrett]

I am so proud of you and happy for you! I cannot wait for your book, Nancy!

[[email protected]]

Jeff & Pam: Looking forward to tasting the olive oil-it's mind-boggling, isn't it? Five years boiling down to a taste. I'll send my dates for January. Lunch or dinner at CP? And yes, thank goodness Brandon arrived safely and hope India continues to treat him well.

DJ: Thanks right back at you. Having bought the first edition of Will Write for Food years ago and also after having used it in one of my Stanford classes, I was really excited to meet you at Food Blogger Camp 2010. Your editorial help on the proposal was invaluable. And you should hear the jingle when he sings it...even funnier.

Garrett: What can I say? You always inspire me.

[Chris Narvaez]

This is juicy! It's definitely one thing to look forward to a cookbook from a chef you admire from a distance. in my opinion there's something very hit or miss about some of these coffee-table-cookbooks (Michael Mina's, TK's Sous-Vide). it's another animal when you've had a look at the inspiration pouring into it. This volume's going to be mandatory for anyone taking on Japanese. I'm totally into it, but then I'm sort of biased - keep us posted!

[[email protected]]

Nina: I loved your comment when I read it last night, but then today somehow missed responding. What an dolt. So I've been seeing your name mentioned here and there...twitter I'd say...via Slow Food perhaps. Looks like you're keeping your finger into the mix. Thanks for getting the layers of what it's all about here, and yes, after 20 years the lines are really blurred. I will never be Japanese, but weirdly, I am no longer "American." But what does that mean anyway? I'm a Hachisu and I can live with that. It does help to be able to cross borders at will. Still looking to see you back in our little area. I'm posting next about Tokanya and the shishimai dancers. Did they do those in Kanna-machi?

Chris: Thanks for your enthusiasm. I'll be running recipes and feel by you as you are the next generation. Looking forward to seeing you back here in Japan. We're doing Christmas by the way--you know you're welcome. And New Year is unforgettable in Japan (no noisemakers and no big drinking party though).

[Chris Narvaez]

dang! Yeah, i don't me to sound jaded or unpatriotic, but suddenly the Japanese New Year is sounding golden already. But I'll of course have to make do for now. Perhaps you'll document that bad-boy as it happens. Year of the rabbit coming btw! Sending you very positive vibrations (via 4 string).

[[email protected]]

Chris: maybe next year...have a good one.

[Sam Seager]

Hey Nancy, congratulations that's amazing news.

And I bet it'll be worth the wait.

Sam

[[email protected]]

Sam: Lovely to hear from you. Yes, it will be a long haul, but I'm girding my loins so to speak. How did the show go? What are you working on now? Drop a line sometime and hope you had a wonderful Christmas. We're in a lull here, a day of writing, tomorrow Matthew's birthday...mochi tsuki on the 30th...New Year's Eve dinner. Our holiday season is always full, full, full.

[melinda]

hi nancy.i found your blog through a link on alice waters facebookk page.im so glad i did.i really look forward to your cookbook.and i enjoy reading your blog.the snippets of raising your sons in japan.coming back into the country after leaving.your mother in law.i really relate to it.unfortunately i cant relate to growing food now.though i so desire to.i visited the edible school garden in berkley last year with my daughter and loved it so much. anyway i could go on...thankyou for sharing your blog.i will visit often.i live in tokyo, if i lived closer id love my daughter to go to your school.

[[email protected]]

Melinda: I took a look at your blog and like your quirky sense of style. Isn't the Edible Schoolyard amazing? I wanted to create such a space, but the reality is, it is too overwhelming to try to copy. And in the end what works here are rows in the field. At least for now, I can't envision any other way. I send email announcements with more private reflections, if you're interested in getting on that list just let me know. And I'll try to remember to let you know when we do farm events. I'm a little forgetful these days, you know. So glad you found the blog and that you like it.

[Akemi]

Nancy, I found your blog facinating. Those photos remaind me of my childhood. I just started food blog a month ago and Da Palmer email me about you. Give me a call when you are in Oregon. Good luck with your book. Freezing cold rain will have in late afternoon today, kenchinjiru sounds good.

[[email protected]]

Akemi: I am so sorry for the delay in writing back. I am in transition this month, traveling way too much. I'm leaving again for about 12 days starting on Friday, but will be in place from February to June (writing, cooking, and trying to farm). I will be in Portland in mid June to help my son pack up. It would be fun to get together, I'll check out your blog once I get packed and on the train to Haneda. I'm getting that feeling of "oh no, I do not have enough time to get everything done before I leave." I heard lots of good things from Da about you...