The mood was jubilant in the green room after our first show in Tokyo. Our local fixers, the promoters, the opening band, and a couple friends were coming in and out in the usual backstage post-show hubbub. But out of this hubbub, on this night, emerged a recognizable yet puzzling presence—a black-suited Japanese salaryman, bearing a gift. For me.
The man bowed his head wordlessly and offered me a shopping bag containing an enormous box, which freed him up to then present his business card with two outstretched hands. Next to his name, I read the familiar name of a cybersecurity firm that, at the time, also employed my father. Slowly I started to put the pieces together. I vaguely heard my dad’s voice—months ago—saying something about mentioning our show to a Japanese colleague whom he had never met. This must be Masa-san.
I thanked him so much for coming, and for the gift, and he nodded, bowing. There was barely time for a selfie before he quickly left.
The box Masa gave me was, first of all, quite heavy. So I set it down on a table and called over my college friend Catherine, who had relocated to Tokyo after graduation, for the unboxing. Much to my wonderment, the box contained roughly two dozen individually (and impeccably) wrapped hoshigaki—dried hachiya persimmons, no doubt of the absolute highest quality. The most pristine-looking, perfect, plump specimens imaginable. Catherine estimated that this offering would have set Masa-san back upward of 100 dollars. I unwrapped one and took a bite.
My personal history with hachiya persimmons began in November 2013, when I visited the farm in northern Italy where I’d volunteered a handful of summers before. Different things were in season this time, and the property’s persimmon tree—cachi in Italian; from the Japanese kaki—was heavy with oblong hachiyas. I was given one to taste, my first ever, and my mouth puckered immediately, overtaken first by a dizzying astringency and then by an all-consuming dryness. I thought of the French phrase gueule de bois, colloquially a hangover but literally “wooden mouth.” That’s what I had. A hachiya hangover.
A few years later, my wife reintroduced me to persimmons via the gentler fuyu variety. Where hachiyas are long and tapered, fuyus are squat and tomato-like. Their deep orange flesh, when unripe, slices like an apple and has a crisp bite and subtle sweetness. When ripe, the flesh begins to give slightly, and the flavor blossoms into sweet carrot with a hint of brown sugar. I couldn’t believe this was the same fruit I had tried in Italy. I later learned that hachiyas, when unripe, are so tannic as to be essentially inedible, and that my reaction was hardly uncommon. Had I waited til the skin was mottled and the flesh soft, I would have tasted the same sweet and floral depth I now associated with fuyus.
And so speaking of that sweet, floral depth—I don’t need to tell you, I think, that this is just what washed over me as I enjoyed my first bite of hoshigaki in the green room of Basement Bar in Shimokitazawa. But the difference of dried versus fresh persimmon meant the sweetness was intense and jammy, and the texture can only, or ought to only, be described as mochi-mochi—pleasantly chewy.
My mouth puckered immediately, overtaken first by a dizzying astringency and then by an all-consuming dryness.
These days, the painstaking steps involved in producing top-quality hoshigaki are common knowledge to any self-respecting Food Person, but at the time (2017), I was not aware that these delicate fruits were individually strung up to dry for a period of several weeks and regularly hand-massaged to encourage sugar development and guarantee that trademark texture. I knew they did this to the cows for Kobe beef, but persimmons? No wonder they’re such a treasured item in Japan—perfect for a gift.
One of the interesting things about receiving gifts on tour is that, because space— physical space—is of such high value to touring musicians, gifts are sometimes thought of as—and I really hate to say this—a burden. And yet people love to give us stuff. Young musicians give us burned CDs of their material; friendly fans bring us jars of homemade jam or goodies from the coffee shop they work at during the day; and local friends and family give us whatever they’d give us during any normal, non-tour visit. Thoughtful, lovely items that we almost assuredly do not have space for.
On domestic tours, this presents its own set of challenges, but on international tours, when every bit of luggage space needs to be economized to the absolute highest degree (lest we incur baggage fees or worse), it’s a different ball game. I don’t want to say that acquiring items on tour is totally off-limits, just that you have to have a plan. For me, that plan often involved the somewhat bottomless depths of my cymbal bag, the repository for everything that came into my possession on tour. This system finally met its match in Tokyo with the dozens of highest-quality dried persimmons conferred upon me by Masa-san: they just didn’t all fit. I gave Catherine half and padded my cymbals with the rest.
He came, possibly from Aoyama, or from Roppongi, on a packed subway car, and he had to suffer through an hour of introspective K-Records-accented indie pop.
One of the limits of my cymbal bag system was that sometimes, unfortunately, items placed there for safekeeping did get lost in the shuffle. Packing and repacking my cymbals, wrapping them with bubble wrap, loading and unloading the T-shirts I use to dampen my drums, moving the sticks and other miscellany I keep in there—it was a lot to keep track of. And so that’s how, about a year after our show in Tokyo, I found a cache of smooshed dried persimmons at the very bottom of my cymbal bag, a location not at all befitting such esteemed delicacies.
I did not feel good about this. I thought about the highly specific sequence of events that had taken place to bring Masa to Basement Bar that night a year before. A middle-aged salaryman in a sea of young Japanese hipsters, in a society highly stratified by personal appearance and adherence to subculture (or not), surely Masa would have felt at least a little out of place. But the act of my dad simply mentioning in an email that his son would be performing in Tokyo with his band could be taken as nothing less than an assignment. A mission. An imperative.
For months, Masa had this date marked off on his calendar to come to Shimokitazawa. He came, possibly from Aoyama, or from Roppongi, on a packed subway car, and he had to suffer through an hour of introspective K-Records-accented indie pop (perhaps even through our two local openers that night), to ensure he’d catch me for the two-minute handoff of a gift worthy of a visiting American colleague, or the next best thing, his son.
I imagined Masa darting through the streets of Tokyo with the (again, heavy) box of persimmons. Maybe resting it carefully at his feet as he enjoyed a piece of grilled mackerel and some rice at an izakaya, or as he slurped a bowl of ramen from an automat or chomped a few skewers of yakitori at a street-side stall on his way to the gig. Maybe he received a call at one point and had to shift the box to one arm as he fumbled in his pocket for his phone. By the way, he also had a briefcase!
He did all of this—and I want to emphasize, he couldn’t have possibly enjoyed the show. I just won’t accept that he could have enjoyed the show; he did not. He, like I said, suffered through this show, dreadfully uncomfortable in his suit (how could he not have been!), all the while protecting this absolutely precious cargo, a box of exquisite dried persimmons—a seasonal delight, a piece of cultural heritage, a synecdoche, in that moment, in this context, for no less than the entire country of Japan.
He waded through the audience, found his way to the green room, to me, bowed his head, and completed the mission. Such are the lengths to which, I learned, Japanese hosts are willing to go to make their guests not only feel special but welcome, far from home.
I can’t even imagine what he would have done for my dad.
Luke Pyenson has been given many things on tour—fresh grapefruits from a friend’s parents’ backyard in Phoenix; a Ziploc bag full of homemade cinnamon buns from his mother-in-law’s friend in Stockholm; bean-to-bar chocolate featuring green mango from a fan who’d traveled from Manila to Jakarta to see his band play. All of these left an impression on Luke, who was a drummer and cofounder of the band Frankie Cosmos. But one gift has left the sweetest memory. This essay comes from Luke’s excellent book, Taste in Music: Eating on Tour with Indie Musician, of which Luke is the co-author.
