Noon in Kyoto means Nishiki fills up. The aisle is barely two people wide and somehow everyone still finds a way to stop, to look, to point at something in a barrel they don't have a word for.
The pickles come first, by smell. Vinegar and something sweeter underneath, daikon maybe, stacked in wood that's gone dark with brine over who knows how many years. Then the skewers. A woman hands mine over on a square of paper, no bag, no fuss, just a small bow and back to the grill. The paper goes soft in my hand almost immediately. I eat standing, because there's nowhere else to do it.
The roof here is low, arcade-style, glass panels gone amber with age, and the light that gets through is diffused, almost underwater. My camera stays in the bag longer than usual today. Too narrow, too many elbows, and some moments don't need to be kept, they just need to be eaten standing up in a hallway that smells like soy and charcoal.
An older man beside me orders the same skewer twice. Doesn't say why. I don't ask. There's a rhythm to a market like this, stall to stall, barely room to turn around, and you either fight it or you let it carry you. Che bello, not loudly, just to myself, because the whole lane is too loud to hear anything said softly anyway.
I think about how many hands this street has passed through at exactly this hour, for exactly this reason, for centuries probably, and how little that has to do with me passing through it once, on a Tuesday, with wet hands and a paper going soft.
