inari

last night my friend Kaya invited me over for dinner with her partner at their flat in Hanno.

we know each other from London, where we studied together for two years in 2011-2012 and kept in touch sporadically ever since.

K sat me down with a cup of delicious tea the couple had brought from Britain, when they were last there.

I asked if I could help with preparing the home-made sushi we were going to eat that night, and I found my opportunity in filling inari pockets with the delicious rice-mix that Kaya had prepared.

I had to relax my shoulders after a few pockets. I always get this initial full-body tension when doing new intricate things, and I hardly notice it myself. It's in fact easier to pocket rice into inari when your ears are not stuck to your shoulders.

Speaking of shoulders. 'Vieni sulle spalle' was a sentence I heard during my week in Kobe several times, as it was one of the preferred modes of transfer of the nibling.

As it happens, K knows a luthier in Hanno, who has a workshop by the riverbank. He is one of the few in the world who has built a Violoncello dalla spalla, an obscure baroque instrument in between a viola and a cello.

It resembles viola in its size, but the thickness of the body, needed to support the register an octave below the viola, makes it look like a 1/5th or 1/6th cello. The name comes from it being played on the shoulder rather than in between the legs.

K had played it a few times before and she strung out a beautiful rendering of the Bach cello suite. The sound is hard to describe.

It's defined by resonance. There are five strings, cello tuning with a high E. But somehow the strings are tighter and in a very different ratio to instrument size than with instruments of the official string family.

The sound is closer to that of a viola d'amore, also blessed with an arsenal of both high and low strings. The total range between the open strings is vast at two octaves and a third, contributing to the resonant sound.

I had a chance to try this incredible instrument as well. Mr. Takakura had fashioned a leather strap based on his extensive research of the instrument. The strap holds the instrument at an angle with the nut facing in front and down, the bottom of my chin touching the lower side of the instrument, and the strap going behind my left shoulder as in a lute or theorbo.

The feeling of holding the instrument and the bow was very stable, but strangely introverted. Playing involved both allowing for gravity to pull the bow-hand down with generous force (good sound), but the up-bow felt as though it was pointing towards an imagined centre behind my chest or navel. Not an entirely new feeling, something similar happens when bowing a bass, on a good day. But this feeling of my hands being marionettes strung to a common centre was eye-opening and very distinct for this particular instrument I had never held in my hands before.

I imagined drinking something hot, and then bowing towards the heat that gets collected in my stomach.

K reminded me to relax my shoulders.

When pocketing the inari, I told K that the only piece of oral tradition that my family is blessed with being the vessels of are making Carelian pies that my great-grandmother made every morning for her children, being taught to do so by her parents, and they by their parents and so on. My grandfather taught my mother, who taught me and I've passed on the know-how to my niblings (as have my mother and sisters too, you should see us in the morning of christmas eve).

I've added a few tricks for taste, but so has every generation. They just teach is as 'this is how it's always been' but I think they're not giving themselves credit as evolvers of the recipe. If it were so, we would still primarily make them from barley porridge. Which I prefer, I must say.

I took six left-over inari's on my short hike the next day. I was walking in a ridge from the train stations Nishi-Agano to Agano. I had an inari on each of the six peaks I crossed.