My dinner with LittleK

I had driven 2031 miles, it was rainy, it was cold. Littlek greeted me at the door wearing a brocaded kimono. Beautiful, I said. She smiled, bowed, led me inside. Supper was ready. But it was on the floor, or more precisely, laid out upon this foot-high end table. I sat down. She placed in front of me a small porcelain bowl filled with warm rosewater (to wash my figertips in). Smilling graciously, she poured tea, an authentic brew called soochang bing, or bong, I believe. The kind that smells like old straw soaked for six months in a horse trough. Delicious, I said, closing my eyes the better to savor its rare bouguet. She smiled again, I feared; then she removed the lid from another porcelean pot and with a matching ladle served a dark thick purple soup into tiny, again porcelean, bowls. A tinctiure of iodine hoovered on the air. We picked up miniture matching spoons, too short to sup from. The idea, evidently, is to bend the head far back and pour the contents of the spoon into your mouth, as if feeding an infant. I worked on it and got a few mouthfuls down. Best boiled sewage effluent I ever tasted. What is it? I asked. It's a sort of Japanse boullabaise, she said. She said it was called maru tamayaki. Really good! I said (wondering what kind of marine life was hidden in the soup). I dipped the little scoop deeper into my little porclean bowl and came up with something dead white, a languid invertebrate substance. Testicles of octopus? Placenta of jellyfish? What's this? I asked. She answered Tofu, soybean curd, you'll like it. She swallowed a spoonful of the stuff and watched me. I smiled and placed the wet tofu in my mouth, swallowed quickly before I lost courage It went down easily, I guess, although I felt a queasy tremor of protest from my stomach, Delicious, I exclaimed. I groped again into the beet-dark soup and fished up maybe a dying squid--limp strands of purple pseudoflesh dangling like tentacles from my spoon. I looked at littlek, she was watching me. Kelp, she said. You mean seaweed? She was getting pissed off now and turned to me saying, It ever occur to you that maybe your' not as smart as you think you are? Nobody could be that smart, I says back at her.