It is a grilled fish, the suzumedai, about ten centimeters long. Full of small bones and thin in the flesh, which is why few places bothered with it.

Then, toward the end of the Meiji period, enormous numbers of them came into the Genkai Sea. There were so many that boats could not get through, so the fishermen scooped them up, and then had a problem: nobody wanted them. They salted them and set them aside for want of anything better to do. Grilled later, they turned out to be fatty and good.

The name has two explanations and neither is dignified. One says it is a worn-down form of abutte kamo, let's grill it and chew it. The other says that grilled, it tastes like duck, and that abutta kamo means exactly that.

The method matches the origin. Salt it, leave it overnight, and put it over a direct flame without scaling it or gutting it. Scales, innards, all of it goes into the mouth. It only became a Hakata specialty in the Showa years, when high-end restaurants started serving it to regulars. It reaches the market from March until the end of summer, and it carries the most fat in early summer. Something nobody could get rid of turned into something people ask for by name.