The moray is a fish people avoid on sight. Wide mouth, sharp teeth, a body that moves like a snake. In this province it gets cleaned and deep-fried, and people order it without hesitating.

The bones run through it in an awkward pattern and are hard to draw out — there are a great many small ones, threaded through the flesh at angles. A cook is said to need several years of practice before he can take one apart properly. That difficulty kept the fish local: Susaki, Hewa in Tosa, Kure in Nakatosa, and not much beyond those.

Fried, the collagen just under the skin stays thick and sticky, while the flesh underneath is white and mild. Households used to set the same gelatine into a cold jelly, and it goes into sukiyaki here as well. One piece gives you two textures that have very little to do with each other, and the interesting half is the part attached to the skin.

When fish was carried inland from the coast, cut moray went along as something to trade with. Up in the mountains it was valued as food for women recovering from childbirth. A creature nobody wants to look at turned out to be what people ate at the point when they needed it most, which is roughly the opposite of how food usually earns its reputation.