I've been trying to write this recipe down for eleven years. Not continuously; I have not spent eleven years exclusively on this task. But it has been a recurring project, something I pick up and put down and pick up again, like a book I keep meaning to finish. The problem is that Rice Balls doesn't behave the way a recipe is supposed to behave. It doesn't have quantities. It has intuitions. I watched my college roommate Darius make it in 2003, in a kitchen that was warmer than any kitchen should legally be, with no measuring cups in sight, explaining each step in a tone that suggested the steps were obvious to anyone who had thought about it for more than thirty seconds. I was taking notes in a small notebook. The notes, which I still have somewhere, say things like "some of the thing" and "until it looks right" and, memorably, "you'll know." Reader, I did not know. I still don't know. But I can tell you exactly what it tasted like, down to the temperature and the way it felt on the back of my throat, and maybe that's what I've actually been trying to document all along.
The first time I tried to make Rice Balls myself, I made three fundamental errors, two of which I could identify and one of which remains a mystery to this day. The identified errors were: I used the wrong kind of pan (my confidence in the wrong pan was absolute and misplaced), and I skipped a step that seemed unnecessary but was, I would later understand, load-bearing. The unidentified error is harder to describe. The dish I produced was not wrong, exactly. It was recognizable as the same species as what I was trying to make. But it was missing something, some quality, some depth, some fundamental rightness that I could identify only by its absence. I served it to my college roommate Darius with a confidence I did not feel. College roommate Darius ate all of it, which is the kindest thing a person can do in that situation. When I asked what they thought, they said "it's really good" in the specific tone people use when something is fine. That tone haunts me still.
What I remember most about Rice Balls, the thing that no recipe has ever successfully conveyed, is the way it changes temperature as you eat it. It starts one way and arrives at your core another way, and somewhere in that transit something happens that turns a meal into an experience. The people who make it best seem to understand this intuitively. They talk about it the way musicians talk about feel: technically indefinable but absolutely real and immediately recognizable when it's there.
My therapist says I use food writing to avoid processing things, and I think today has been an excellent example of what she means. I came to this page to write a recipe. Instead I wrote approximately a thousand words about Grandpa Sal and a grandmother's apartment in Kyoto that had somehow become a restaurant and the specific quality of light in 2003, and now I need to go for a walk. The recipe, the actual recipe with the parts that would help you, is in my notes, which are in a notebook, which is in a bag that is not where I am right now. I'll add it when I'm back. Or tomorrow. I'm doing my best.