When I was around six years old, my family started going to a Japanese restaurant near our house, a place with the type of fare usually found in suburban Japanese restaurants in Southern California: chicken teriyaki, shrimp tempura, yellowtail sushi rolls. What I remember liking best, besides the neat little compartmentalized trays the kids’ meals came in, was the tsukemono, just a few bites of crunchy, salty pickled cabbage that arrived in a little dish before the rest of the meal. I also liked the box of candy given out at the end of the kids’ meal, chewy pieces of unindentified sweetness wrapped in edible rice paper. Once I was brave enough to eat a single orange pearl of salmon roe from my dad’s plate. I thought it was weird.

These were the humble beginnings of my life in Japanese food.

Twenty years later I moved to Japan to teach English at a public school in the solidly suburban town of Ogaki in Gifu Prefecture, proud of my long history of sushi-eating, excited about the prospect of eating real Japanese food -- and completely unprepared for the assault of new flavors, textures and fish parts I was about to encounter. Eight months later, I am obsessed. I wander around the grocery store for an hour, just looking. I daydream about the chestnut ice cream topped with warm pumpkin I ate on a street in Kyoto in early autumn. I can only be persuaded to leave my apartment, some days, by the prospect of a good meal at a new izakaya. And I only want to write about food. I want to tell people about all the incredible things I’ve eaten, want to make them understand why I love the food here as much as I do. Mostly, though, I want to remember. After my two years here is up, I’ll move back to Los Angeles and I know -- despite the fact L.A. has the highest population of Japanese people in the United States, despite the existence of conveyor-belt sushi restaurants and Little Tokyo and Torrance -- there is going to be so much I will miss.

So that is why Delicious Coma is here. To document my two years of eating, while learning about and celebrating what it is, exactly, I’m eating. A couple months ago I had a dream in which I had woken up from an extended coma to find all my friends from the U.S. around me, there to welcome me back to the world. I realized it was obviously a metaphor for my time in Japan, my car-less, responsibility-less, well-paid, low-stress time in Japan. So yes, it’s true I’m living in a coma at the moment. But what a delicious coma it is….