Fourteen minutes past two and the market is at full volume. Kuromon doesn't do quiet. Knives on wood, gas burners hissing, someone shouting a price in a language I'm only half following. I like places that don't perform for you. This one just keeps working, whether you're watching or not.
The scallop stall gets me first. Shells lined up on the grill, butter pooling in the curve of each one, smoke going straight up into the fluorescent light. A vendor doesn't ask, he just hands me a sample across the counter, speared on a toothpick, still too hot. I eat it standing, like everyone else here. Nobody has a table. Nobody seems to want one.
There's a rhythm to eating like this. Quick, unceremonious, a little messy. Gostoso. Butter on my fingers, salt on my lips, the camera hanging heavy and useless around my neck because my hands are full. I get the shot after, once I've licked my fingers and wiped them on my jeans. The vendor laughs at this. I laugh too. We don't share a language beyond food and gesture, and somehow that's enough.
What strikes me, walking slow through the covered alley, is how generous the whole place is without trying to be. Nobody's selling an experience. They're just selling scallops, and eel, and tamagoyaki cut into neat yellow squares, and the experience happens anyway, as a side effect of people being good at what they do. I think about how much of travel is this: not the thing you came for, but the thing someone hands you while you're looking the other way.
I stay almost an hour longer than I planned. The light outside, when I finally step back into it, feels too bright after the market's close fluorescent glow. My stomach is full. My film roll is down by twelve frames. Osaka at midday doesn't ask you to slow down, not like Lisbon does, not like some quiet hill town might. It asks you to keep moving, keep eating, keep your hands a little sticky. I don't mind taking instructions like that.
