Rules of the Orange

For the first fifteen minutes or so, I want to think this is some kind of Zen lesson I’m not ready for yet. After all, I only just got to Japan. I’m missing practically everything. In the grocery store, there are carrots the size of a baby’s arm, barrels of pickled things that I still won’t recognize when I leave the country six years later. I end up eating a lot of boil-in-a-bag spaghetti.

So I’m keeping an open mind. For the past fifteen minutes, Atsuko has been peeling this orange with single-minded concentration such as I have never before seen, and she’s only about halfway done.

This should have been simple. When I walked into the office, Atsuko offered me an orange.

Of course, she did not simply hand me an orange. That would be rude. You never pour your own drink, and if someone offers you food, they offer you the finished product. There are rules of hospitality.

And so she goes to work on it. The thick outer peel only takes a couple minutes. I have no idea how she tears it off in such even pieces.

But this is where we would all finish, right?

Atsuko starts in on the white inner strands. One by one. With perfect poise, moving like later I will see her move when she does the tea ceremony.

This is the proper way to do things, plain and simple.

When the larger pieces are off, she takes a toothpick and works on even the tiniest flecks of white, leaving behind only a completely orange orange.

In Japanese, the word for orange is “orenji.” The fruit has never lost its gaijin, foreigner, status in the three hundred years since the Portuguese first brought them here. It’s as out of place as I am.

It takes Atsuko about a half hour to be satisfied with the orange before she hands me a section.

Never for a second am I bored watching her work, making a neat and flawless pile of orange peel.

And it is the best orange I have ever tasted. Not because of the flavor—in fact, much later I will meet a man who explains Japan's fertilizer industry to me and who almost makes me afraid to eat the rest of the time I’m in-country.

But Atsuko's orange has been the recipient of complete attention to detail, an absolute and utter respect for the food and for the gift it involved.

And that was well worth watching.

Her hands moved like there was nothing else in the world for them to be doing.