The peaches and grapes are long gone; we're seeing the last of the nashi. Today I spotted the first bag of mikan in the store. In Japan, where you can track the seasons by the produce that turns up in your local grocer, the first mikan mean that winter is undeniably on its way. The little tangerines are still green this early in the season, but soon they'll turn bright orange and they'll be everywhere, stacked in crates and twirled into red net bags at ever supermarket and vegetable stand. They'll be a constant presence until New Year, when mikan fury will whip into a frenzy as everyone stocks up for the holiday.
I am convinced that the only proper way to eat a mikan is to do it while sitting in a horikotatsu. For a few years we lived in a house with a horikotatsu, and it is no exaggeration to say that my family spent most of our waking hours huddled around that thing, partly because the rest of the house was so damn cold. Now the kotatsu is a decadent invention, wherein the low family dinner table is fitted in wintertime with a small heater on its underside. A thick padded quilt drapes over the whole structure, and a final tabletop is set on top of that. So when the family gathers around the table to eat or read (sitting on their knees in seiza, traditionally), they slide in under the quilt and are wrapped from the waist down in communal warmth. It is unbelievably cozy. A horikotatsu, however, is even more delicious. In a traditional tatami-mat room, several of the tatami mats can be pulled up to reveal a hole about three feet deep. In the bottom of this hole is a small heater. The table (complete with its quilt) is dragged over the hole, and so instead of kneeling, the lucky family can sit with their feet dangling into the warm hole.
We would don thick quilted house-jackets (called hanten) to keep our upper bodies warm while our legs and toes were deliciously toasted and vying for space. Since the wind was practically whistling through the cracks in the walls, you had to be really desperate for sustenance or a bathroom break to leave the comfort of the warm enclave. And inevitably, if you did get up, a chorus of voices would go, "Oh, while you're up..." And so in self-defense we instituted the mikan bowl, a formidable lacquer bowl that could hold no less than 20 tangerines. The trick was to time your bathroom breaks so that you didn't have to be the one to refill the bowl from the box that sat chilling out in the arctic entryway. The other trick, of course, was to be the first one at the table to spin the mikan peel off in one unbroken spiral, because that, folks, is just how it's done.
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