Honmoroko lives in Lake Biwa and essentially nowhere else. It is one of the lake's endemic species, and the local literature says plainly that you will have trouble finding it anywhere outside these shores. It is a small fish, a member of the carp family, and it is regarded around the lake as the finest-tasting member of that whole family, which is a large claim in a country full of carp.

To eat it this way, the fish is threaded onto a skewer and grilled plain, no salt, no sauce, nothing. Then it is dipped in dorozu, which is miso mixed with sugar, mustard, and vinegar into something thick and cloudy. The name means mud vinegar and it looks like it.

The season runs from autumn through spring, and the fish are at their best when the roe is in them. Winter roe-bearing honmoroko have been treated as one of the lake's treasures for a long time.

Because they are small you eat everything, head and bones and all, in one or two bites. The taste is faintly sweet and then faintly bitter, and the smell is of a fish cooked in its own fat over a flame. It is the bitterness that I remembered afterward, hours later, which is not usually how these things go with a small grilled fish.