NIGHT KITCHENS.(Japanese cooking)

The abbot's garden at the temple of Daisen-in, in Kyoto, is a rectangle of raked gravel bordered by a white wall on one of its long sides, and by the wooden porch of an old pavilion on the other, where the monks meditate. From behind the wall, a camellia bush throws off its scent. The grooves made by the rake run horizontally, like steady but freehand rulings on a blank page, until they eddy around two conical mounds, each about a foot tall. One evening last June, just after the temple had closed, I joined the sitting meditation, the hour-long zazen, held on the porch and open to the public twice a week. There were five other sitters, all Japanese, one a young mother who had her children in tow, two plump boys and a little girl, and I could hear them squirming at the end of the row (the wood creaks)--once or twice the presiding monk spoke to them in a low voice, breaking the silence. But after a while, with an impressive show of stoicism, they managed to keep still.

I had been to Daisen-in earlier that week, and at my first sight of the mounds I surprised myself by bursting into tears, perhaps because, for all its austerity, the garden is an image of release: of the moment at which, after an intractable struggle, you get permission from yourself to let the inessential go.

The temples I had come to Japan to visit were of a different sort, though they, too, had a Zen foundation. They were the workshops where tofu is handmade by artisans faithful to the old tradition. Here I should admit that, to a Western palate--mine, at least, unable, despite my best efforts at Daisen-in, to transcend an incorrigible greed for new sensations--even the greatest artisanal tofu didn't produce the kind of epiphany that my first mouthful of white truffle, or of a fruity tomato, or of corn rushed from a field into the pot did. But tofu has been the dietary mainstay of monastic life in Japan for about a millennium--it was imported from China and Korea, along with Buddhism--and it has never lost the soulful, exalted aura of its provenance. In that respect, its relation to the bean curd sold in plastic tubs at American supermarkets is that of a rice cracker to a Communion wafer. Westerners tend to regard tofu as a convenient and perhaps necessary but vaguely pathetic substitute for some less wholesome, more morally dubious carnal indulgence--a rare burger, say. They may even be a bit disdainful of a dish (as they would be of an individual) that, by their standards, lacks an identity, or begs for a disguise. Every tribe, however, has an ancestral food that its exiles yearn for, and that its children can't live without: its manna, which is often soft and white. When a tofu master offers you a slice of bean curd he has just unmolded, he is inviting you to partake, insofar as a stranger can, of what it means to be Japanese.

Okutan is a place congenial to such reflections. It is the oldest tofu riyori in Kyoto. The original restaurant was established almost four hundred years ago within the walls of the Nazenji temple, and the current proprietor, Yasuie Ishii, is the fifteenth generation of his family to preside there. He is now in his sixties, but as a young man he bought a villa and its outbuildings--a cluster of thatched pavilions--near the temple of Kiyomizu-dera, with the idea of one day opening a second Okutan. This newer branch sits on the hilly site of a village once owned by the temple's lord. Guests eat at low tables in a tatami room cantilevered over the garden--a lush glade of cherry, cedar, and maple trees. Mukashi dofu is the first course on the set menu: a dish from the monastic repertoire. A kneeling waitress prepares it at your table. She sets a clay crock on a charcoal brazier, adds two or three small bricks of momengoshi ("cotton" tofu--well drained of moisture and firm in consistency), pours some hot water over them from a kettle, and, after they have simmered for a few minutes (they are not supposed to steep, as they do in the classic hot pot, yudofu), she ladles them into a bowl. You then help yourself to a sprinkling of scallions and seven hand-ground spices, and a spoonful of enriched fish stock that contains algae from Hokkaido. The courses that follow observe the principle set by the first: exquisitely bland bean curd, devoid of the bitter or metallic aftertaste that, in the commercial product or its milk, is masked by additives; and served with a refined sauce or paste that sets off its plainness the way a fanciful bijou sets off the elegance of a couture dress. Yet nothing else at Okutan, or perhaps in Japan, rivals the purity of shima dofu--an ivory-colored attar of bean curd that arrives on a turquoise plate, with a coral drop of sea-urchin ...