Spring Awakening

At a culinary retreat on the Japanese island of Kyushu, seasonal flavors are in full bloom.

- By Rebekah Peppler

STEAM ROLLED OFF the copper-ringed wooden bowl and the sweet aroma of freshly cooked rice rose toward us. I leaned in for a taste. The grains were tender, pleasantly sticky, and subtly brightened with rice vinegar. Our host, Prairie Stuart-Wolff, showed us how to wet our hands with lightly vinegared water and gently shape the rice into small balls that would become temari sushi.

Once shaping, we draped a fresh kinome, or sansho-pepper leaf, over each pillow of rice and topped it with a slice of sea bream so translucent we could still see the herb beneath it. I sneaked a bite: earthy, herbal, delicate, sweet. It tasted like spring.

We were standing in the open, wood-paneled kitchen of Mirukashi Salon, a hyper-seasonal culinary retreat set in the hilly countryside of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands. It was March, and I had come with my partner, Laila, in hopes of catching the first buds of Japan's famed cherry-blossom season.

A steady drizzle had greeted us the day before when we stepped off the train in the nearby city of Fukuoka. Early springtime, Stuart-Wolff told us, is a turbulent season in Kyushu. “We get a lot of rain. We get a lot of wind. Spring is fighting to really bloom.”

Prairie StuartWolff, founder of Mirukashi Salon.

Stuart-Wolff has a calm, assured air. Ask her a question (I asked many) and she has a ready and thorough answer. That hadn't always been the case, she told me. When she first moved to Japan from Maine in 2007 with her now wife, Hanako Nakazato, Who is a 14th-generation ceramist, she didn’t speak a word of Japanese. Since then, she has not only learned the language but has also become steeped in the island’s culinary traditions—its recipes, techniques, and knowledge—and now passes them along to visitors.