The Kitchen at First Light

Long before daylight, the covered lanes near the castle were already loud. Omicho is a market of narrow aisles under one roof, and while the rest of the city sleeps the fishmongers lay out the night's catch on beds of crushed ice, yellowtail and squid and flat silver fish arranged in rows as carefully as jewellery. The floor runs with water. Everything smells of cold salt.

The market has been here, doing exactly this, since seventeen twenty-one, when the ruling family gathered the city's food sellers into one place a short walk from the castle gates. Three centuries later the arrangement has not really changed. Kanazawa simply calls it the kitchen, and it still feeds the restaurants, the teahouses and the households of the whole city.

The loudest mornings come in winter. Snow crab season opens in November, and the auction floor fills with shallow wooden trays of them lying on their backs, each crab wearing a small tag fastened to one claw that records the port it was landed at. The big males fetch prices that would embarrass a car dealer. The smaller females, sold in a much shorter and strictly limited season, are prized for the roe packed under the shell.

By the middle of the morning it is over. The trays are stacked, the ice has gone to water, and somebody hoses the aisle down from one end to the other. Polly sat on an empty crate above the wet floor and watched the last shutters come halfway down.