A handwritten sign goes up outside the shops along the coast road: raw whitebait, today. On other mornings there is no sign, and that absence is the whole character of the dish. Shirasu are the young of sardines and anchovies, translucent, barely an inch long, and they will not keep for a day. What you eat raw was in the water a few hours ago.

The boats work a drag net, encircling a shoal and pulling it slowly in. From the first of January until the tenth of March they do not fish at all, because young sweetfish are moving through the bay then and would come up in the same net. So the calendar of the town has a hole in it, and everyone here knows exactly where the hole is.

Most of the catch never reaches a market. The fishermen boil and dry it themselves and sell it from the front of the house, soft and just-boiled or dried down into small salted drifts. On rice, the two versions look nothing alike. Raw, the fish are glass; boiled, they are opaque and white, and only the black dots of the eyes tell you it is the same creature.

So you order according to what the sea has done that morning. No sign means the boiled kind, which is not a consolation prize but a separate pleasure. It is rare to eat somewhere that admits, in writing, on a board by the door, that today it cannot give you the thing you came for. Kamakura does it every winter.