AT THE ELEGANT HOME of a friend of a friend, the hostess served me a generous portion of sticky rice. Although I was perfectly capable of using chopsticks, I felt incapable of eating this bowl of plain, unadorned starch.
I was twenty-four at the time and had been living outside of Kobe for many months. So I knew that in Japan it’s considered good manners to finish your rice down to the last grain, and bad manners to pour soy sauce on it. But I’d grown up in the West, with long-grain rice, which I’d been free to douse with soy sauce (of dubious quality) right at the table, and
