A coloring page of ayu no shioyaki — sweetfish, salted and grilled on skewers at the river’s edge. Three fish lean in over a small wood fire set among the stones, each one skewered in a curve so that it looks as though it is still swimming upstream. Behind them the shallows run over rocks, with pines and hills on the far bank. It is one of the fixed images of a Japanese summer, and there is a lot of water and stone here for anyone who likes a page they can take slowly.
🗣 Conversation Starters — for care activities and family time
“Have you eaten ayu grilled like this? Where was it?”
“Did you ever fish a river? What did you catch?”
“Tell me about a summer day you spent by the water.”
What is ayu?
In English it is usually called sweetfish (Plecoglossus altivelis), a river fish of Japan’s clear upper waters, 20–30cm long. Japanese has two older names for it that say more. One is kōgyo, the fragrant fish: a fresh ayu smells faintly of melon or cucumber, and the smell comes from its diet — it scrapes algae off river stones with comb-shaped teeth, so its flavour is the flavour of that particular river. The other is nengyo, the year fish, because it does the whole of its life inside twelve months: hatched in autumn, carried down to the sea, back up the river in spring, grown, spawned and gone by winter. It appears in the Man’yōshū, the eighth-century poetry collection, and it is at its best in June, July and August.
How is it grilled?
The skewer goes in near the tail and weaves through the body in an S so the fish holds a swimming curve on the fire — that shape, not the fish itself, is what tells you at a glance that this is ayu shioyaki. Then salt, generously, all over. The step that is easy to miss is keshōjio, “make-up salt”: a thick pinch pressed onto the tail and fins, which would otherwise burn away before the body is done and take the shape with them. Cook it slowly over charcoal, set back from the coals rather than on top of them, until the skin crisps. Cooks argue about rock salt versus table salt; treat that as a matter of preference rather than a difference anyone has measured.
Why is ayu fished with another ayu?
Because it will not take bait the way other fish will. A grown ayu holds a patch of stones as its own feeding ground and drives off any other ayu that enters it. So Japanese anglers use tomozuri, “friend fishing”: a live ayu is put on a line and swum into a rival’s territory, and the resident charges it and is caught on hooks trailing behind the decoy. The name is a joke at the fish’s expense — the friend is the bait. It is a method built entirely on one animal’s temper, and it is the reason a river in July is lined with people standing still in the current.
