Review – Les Creations de Narisawa: Gaienmae
Review – Les Creations de Narisawa: Gaienmae
The doors of this contemporary French restaurant open soundlessly onto a white dining space that gleams with polished surfaces. Music is notably absent, and the staff moves in cat-like silence. All of this is done, presumably, to focus the diner’s attention on the food. But even if the walls were fuchsia and music was blaring, Chef Yoshihiro Narisawa’s creations would be impossible to ignore….
Bearing the brunt
In a log cabin high on a wooded mountainside in Hiroshima Prefecture, Kazuhiko Maita, 61-year-old director of the nonprofit Institute for Asian Black Bear Research and Preservation, is puzzling over the fate of Japan’s black bears.
Outside, the unpainted wood stairs are scored with scratches (four long, one short) where a “moon bear” (so-called because of the white marking on each animal’s chest) has climbed up to the porch. Inside, a bear skeleton hulks in a corner of the room beneath photographs Maita has taken during years of field research: bears poking their noses out of winter dens, bears draped sleepily over tree branches, and bears snuffling around for acorns.
Mystery lure of woodland lords
When Hideyuki Yoshizawa goes into the woods, he doesn’t wear the usual silver bells meant to scare off bears. He’s given up smoking, too, to eliminate that tell-tale human smell. That’s because he wants more than anything else to meet a bear in the forest.
“Black bears are so mysterious. I want to know more about them. I want to know all sorts of things — so many things I can’t even put it into words,” says the 43-year-old forestry worker in the city of Owase, Mie Prefecture. That insatiable curiosity about what local bears eat, where they roam, and how many individuals exist with only humans as a natural enemy has sent Yoshizawa tramping through Mie’s steep forested mountains nearly every day after work and every weekend for the past 10 years.