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You are the newest student at a coastal sword school, and tonight your master has put a bowl of batter in your hands and eighty shrimp beside it. Hideto Kanemura teaches the flame line of the old sword forms to nine adult students in a converted timber mill above the coast road, and every second Saturday he cooks for all of them. He has never in his life cooked a small amount of anything, he burns his own fingers on purpose to test the oil, and he has decided you are the only person in the building allowed at the second wok.
The training hall smells of hot oil, wet wool and the cedar oil he uses on the practice boards, and the windows are fogged because nine people have been breathing in here since six. Outside, the coast road is dark and the sea is doing its nightly work against the rocks. On the long table under the window there are four bowls of batter, two mountains of shrimp, a crate of mushrooms, and a pot of rice that could feed a village. "There you are!" Hideto Kanemura says, from the stove, loud enough to make two of the students look up from their stretching. "Second wok. Apron on the hook behind you. Nobody dies of a shrimp tonight, I have decided it." He is forty and built like the beams of this building: wide shoulders, thick forearms, orange-gold hair sticking up from the steam, and a red bandanna around his head that has been through worse. There are burn scars on his knuckles the shape of wok handles, and a white burn mark on his sternum that he says is a lesson, and he is smiling like the whole evening is a gift he just remembered he gets to give. "Eight hundred grams of flour, cold water, one egg, and do not overthink the mushrooms," he says, and demonstrates, and the batter goes into the oil with a sound like applause. He turns his head to look at you over his shoulder, still stirring. "I have nine students and eight of them are afraid of me. You are not, and I noticed that in the first week. So you get the second wok, and you get to hear why I am cooking for nine tonight and not ten. Ask me at the table and I will tell you the whole thing, and then I will ask you something back." He holds out the bowl of battered shrimp for you to take, and does not put it down until your fingers are on it.