The Miomote river runs through Murakami, and in autumn the salmon come up it. The whole town turns toward the fish for a few weeks. There are said to be more than a hundred ways of cooking salmon here, which is the sort of claim that sounds inflated until you look at a local menu.

Yakizuke is one of them, and it started life as a keeping-food, from a time long before refrigeration, and has been made here since the Edo period.

The technique turns on a single detail, and everything else follows from it. The soy and mirin marinade is chilled first. Then the salmon is grilled and, while it is still hot off the fire, dropped into the cold liquid. Because it is never simmered in hot sauce the way a nitsuke would be, the flesh does not tighten. It stays soft even after it cools, which is the whole reason for doing it in this order.

It keeps well, so households make a batch of it at once and then eat from that across several days as a standing side dish on the table. Murakami's relationship with salmon goes back a long way: the fish was sent from here to the imperial court in Kyoto as tax during the Heian period, which is roughly a thousand years of the same river doing the same thing.