なっとう

Natto.

A solid cornerstone of any foreigner's Japanese experience.

It is also the Japanese kryptonite to invincible Gaijin everywhere. All of their blonde-haired, blue-eyed, booming-voiced sexy might reduced to nothing in the face of four words:

“Can you eat natto?”

Posed by a Japanese national who you’d previously considered your friend; posed with a vague smile on his face and a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

While you, the uninformed foreigner, still try to hang on to your exotic power, ignorant to what’s about to be sprung on you.

Fermented soy beans.
Sickly beige and chilled into a solid mass.
The Japanese’ll serve it to you with hot sauce or mustard or soy sauce or kimchi.
If you’re truly unlucky, they’ll serve it to you with raw egg.

The pungent odor of gym socks will waft over you, and you’ll have to hold back the urge to gag. You’ll gird your loins and tell yourself that there’s no way that anything could actually taste that bad.

And you’ll be right. The danger of natto is not in the taste. The danger of natto is in the smell and the look of it; the slip-slimy consistency of the mucous-like liquid that holds it all together and trails out streamers like feathery silly putty as you stretch your first mouthful away from the mass of it.

And that is only if you can get the slide-y natto to stay on your hashi, which is as much of a challenge as overcoming the smell of it. Woe betide those who had the misfortune of being served natto mixed with raw egg and the consistencies of the two seem to synergize when combined, creating something so much slimier than the sum of its parts: a slippery slurry that you can only ever hope to eat with hashi if you combine it with rice to lend it a bit more substance.

But if you’re lucky to be eating it straight, or with some of the stink of it masked with mustard or hot sauce, as you celebrate your victory over consistency and triumphantly bring the tenuous hashi-full of it to your mouth, you feel streamers of slime settle sickly across your chin. Looking down, you realize that they’re not only resting wetly on your chin but are running like long life lines back down into the styrofoam package of natto on the table before you.

ネーバ　ネーバ

neba-neba. The unique Japanese expression for describing the slime-y, wet-web-like consistency of natto and one of my favourite random Japanese terms.

Those same slime-y strands are also now linking your hashi in your outstretched hand back to your mouth, and out of necessity you learn the action that all Japanese practice from birth: the fervent tornado spinning of your hashi hand through the natto strands to wind them up and free your face and your hand from the hair-thin umbilicals hanging down from them.

neba-neba.

Whatever you do when eating natto, it should never be eaten with anything else. The slime that comes off the fermented beans in natto is an parasitic, virulent thing that may just possess the vaguest inklings of sentience. Should you introduce natto-slime-covered hashi to any other sauce or liquid, the slime will spawn and multiply, and perfectly fluid sauces will quickly begin to manifest the same viscous, mucous trailers that natto has. And each further food you introduce this contaminated sample to will take them on, too. No matter how far the slime moves from its parent beans, it never seems to dissipate—seeming instead to only grow more powerful by the introduction of fresh liquid.

In the end, I’m convinced that eating natto comes down to a determination to succeed in a war of wills rather than a gastronomical motivation towards deliciousness. The only foreigners who eat natto are those with something to prove: the ones who, when that gleam comes into a Japanese friend’s eyes, and a sly grin creeps across his face, relish the ensuing crestfallen slump when they are able to proclaim “はい！なとがだいすきです！”

And then there’s folks like me, who got told once that natto was good for you, and in a draconian adherence to hearsay and folk wisdom that might just border on the alchemical, have decided to eat the stuff for breakfast every day.

But not with raw egg.

That would be just weird.

I call this 'Bachan Brand natto. It's the best I've found, and it's all I eat.

Air holes in the top of the individual styrofoam packages so that the sentient slime doesn't suffocate.

What natto looks like in the package.

Soy sauce and hot mustard. The best way to go.

Dressed and ready for mixing.

Whipped up to the desired frothy consistency. I'm not sure why Japanese folks do this, but it seems to make it easier to catch larger blobs of natto with your hashi, and it does a little something to control the neba-neba. That being said, even when it's frothed up, you've still got to slurp the stuff like ramen noodles!