The guy at the counter is unfazed by my request for a third batch of gyoza, the plump pouches of porcine joy he’s been cooking all evening and, for all I know, his entire life. The seats are uncomfortable, his kitchen could do with a damn good scrub and I invariably burn my mouth on the blistering little parcels, but I return time and again to this Formica counter in Fukuoka, with its fug of frying and cigarette smoke. I arrive all the more hungry from my inability to remember its precise location. “Near the bridge” is the useless annotation in my notebook. Fukuoka is a city of bridges.
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