Plov Risotto for Twenty Neighbours

"Lamb," I said to the butcher on Thursday, the first of May, with my list in my hand. "Excuse me. Do you have lamb?"

Mr. Nakagawa of Nakagawa Meats, a wide man in a white cap, looked into his glass counter as if a sheep might be hiding behind the pork cutlets. "Lamb," he repeated sadly. "No. Chicken? Very good chicken."

In Tashkent, a man who makes plov with chicken is a man who has given up. I thanked him and turned to go, and the bell on his door had already rung when he shouted, "Wait! Genghis Khan!"

He came out of the back with a frozen block wrapped in plastic: sliced mutton, sold for a barbecue named, for reasons nobody in the shop could explain, after the Mongol emperor. I nearly hugged him. I bowed instead, very deeply, and hit nothing, which was progress.

The carrots were orange. In Uzbekistan the carrots for plov are yellow, sariq sabzi, gentle and sweet. These were a bright, loud orange, as if they were shouting. I bought four kilos of shouting. The supermarket by the station had six tiny jars of cumin, and I bought all six, and the lady at the till asked if I was opening a shop.

The rice was the problem. There was rice, of course; this is Japan. But all of it was short and round and shiny, and none of it was devzira, the rust-coloured rice from the Fergana Valley that Buvi buys by the sack at Chorsu, whose grains stay apart like proud relatives.

I stood in front of the shelf for a long time. Then I picked up a ten-kilo bag.

"It will be fine," I said.

I would later regret that sentence more than any sentence I have said in two languages.

Tetsuo solved the qozon. He came back from the shopping association on Friday with a cast-iron pot as wide as a bicycle wheel, sixty litres, black with the ghosts of a hundred autumns of pork soup, and a gas burner, and set them up in the tiny back yard among the hanging bicycles. Then he stood back and said, "Mm," and I understood that this was a speech.

On Saturday I started at two. Mio filmed from the kitchen step. Daichi arrived at half past two "to help", took a carrot from the pile, and ate it raw, like a horse.

At three I propped my phone against the saddle of a bicycle and called Tashkent.

"Assalomu alaykum, Buvijon!"

Buvi's face filled the screen, white headscarf, gold teeth, flour on her sleeve, and behind her, on the kitchen shelf, the round loaf with one bite missing, exactly where she had put it. "Sardorjon! Are you eating? You're thin. Do the Japanese have enough bread?"

"They have bread, Buvi. It's very soft."

"Soft." She said it the way you say "suspicious". Then she saw the chopping board. "What is that? Show me. Voy! Thicker! You cut like a Russian! Matchsticks, not needles! Did I teach you nothing?"

Then she saw the bag behind me, and her eyes narrowed. "What rice is that?"

"Japanese rice, Buvi. It will be fine."

"Round rice," she said, "is for porridge." She said nothing more about it, which was worse than shouting.

Daichi, who did not understand one word of Uzbek, stood to attention beside the saddle. I cut thicker. Buvi supervised the onions, the mutton, the carrots going gold in the oil, and she only shouted twice more, which from Buvi is a medal.

When the rice went in, I pushed whole heads of garlic down into it, one after another, like planting. Then the lid, and the burner turned low, and the smell of cumin rose out of the yard and went down the Shiokaze Ginza on its own. At four the tofu-shop couple arrived to "just have a look". At half past four, two old ladies I had never met sat down on upturned crates. By five, the neighbours had stopped pretending they had come early and were simply waiting.

At 18:30 I took the lid off.

Steam went up into the evening, and it smelled right. That was the cruel part: it smelled exactly like Buvi's kitchen. Under the steam, where every grain should have been standing on its own like a guest at a wedding, there was one single, glossy, united mass. The Japanese rice had held hands. It had held hands so tightly that it had become one enormous hand.

I had made plov risotto.

Mio looked into the pot. "It's porridge," she announced. Then she tasted it. "Good porridge."

Twenty-three neighbours ate three helpings each. The old ladies from the crates asked for the recipe and wrote it down on the back of a receipt. Mr. Nakagawa had four helpings and told everyone the mutton was his. Yukari scraped the bottom of the pot, tasted the crust, and raised her spoon like a judge.

"Ninety-two points!"

I smiled, and bowed, and served, and died inside.

Much later, when the yard was empty and the pot was soaking, I wrote on an orange note, alone, by the light from the kitchen window.

Japanese rice. Why

do you hold hands like this? Please

be single grains. Please.

At half past nine I found Tetsuo on the bench in front of the shop with a can of beer. I had never seen him awake after nine. I sat down beside him with a cup of tea, and for a while we looked at the dark street, and the shuttered tofu shop, and, at the end of the street, the darker dark where the sea was. Somewhere across it, according to the guidebook, was Mount Fuji. It was still hiding.

"The Registan," Tetsuo said suddenly. "At night. Is it lit?"

"Yes. Blue and gold. Sometimes there is a show with music. My father says it is for tourists, and then he watches it with his mouth open."

He nodded slowly. "And the road from Tashkent to Samarkand. Is it flat?"

"Mostly. About three hundred kilometres. Flat, then hills, then flat again. In summer men sell melons at the side of the road."

"Mm."

He asked how hot it was in August, and whether there was shade, and what time the sun came up. I answered everything. It did not occur to me to ask why a bicycle-shop owner in Shirahama wanted to know about the road to Samarkand. It seemed a perfectly normal thing to want to know.

"It was not right," I said at last. "The plov. The rice was wrong."

Tetsuo drank the last of his beer and looked at the can.

"Delicious is delicious," he said. "Right is next time."

On Wednesday, back at school after Golden Week, there was a blue note on the corner of my desk.

The whole class heard it—

Golden Week smelled of cumin

all along the street

I read it twice and thought it was a lovely haiku about the weather. Cumin: a season word, possibly. I was reaching for the saijiki when Daichi's head appeared over my shoulder.

"Dude." He had told the whole class about the plov, with photographs, on Monday. "She's mad you didn't invite her."

I looked at the note again. It was not about the weather. It was about the whole class knowing, and the smell going all along the street, and not reaching the one person I talked to every day. It had not even crossed my mind to invite her. In Tashkent, plov does not need invitations; the smell goes out and people follow it. The smell, it turned out, did not go as far as the port.

I wrote on an orange note, not a haiku, because it was an emergency: Lunch. Club room. I have plov.

She read it. After a long moment, she nodded.

At 12:40 I carried the last of it up to Room 3 in a lidded container wrapped in two tea towels, the way Buvi carries food to the neighbours. Yukari had heated it at seven, and when I took off the lid, steam came out. Kotone knelt at the low table. She ate it with a spoon, slowly, all of it, looking at nothing but the plov, and scraped the corners. Then she took out the pencil.

Next time, the right rice.

Today, this sticky kindness

is still warm at noon

From that day on I invited her to everything. The next plov. The konbini. Dinner at the Moriyamas'. Once, in a sentence that got away from me, my little brother's birthday party in Tashkent.

Before I went to wash the container, I wrote on the club whiteboard, in big letters: FIND THE RIGHT RICE.

When I came back from the tap, dripping, there were three more words underneath, in small grey pencil, which I had not known worked on a whiteboard:

and a third member.