kanankas: The Last of the Bialys

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

The Last of the Bialys

Not included in my recent cataloging of Eats Back East was my visit to Kossar's on the last morning we spent in New York City. I trekked down to Kossar's - a short three blocks from where we were staying - to pick up a baker's dozen to bring back to California. On July 4, a month since we've been back, and I've just taken out the very last bialy from the freezer. Who knows when I'll get to have a good decent bialy again.

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kananka is Japanese, but you won't find it in a Japanese dictionary. It's a speech fragment that's used a lot, that most native speakers would regard as air, and take for granted.

Certainly I did, never gave it a thought. I'd have to give credit to Diane and Marianne, my housemates in Tokyo where I went and lived for six years after college. My housemates, a Tasmanian and Scot, picked up on the speech, and they started to attach kananka's to the end of their sentences like they would hear out and about. Or just use it by itself, between the two of them clacking away. "Kananka?" "oh, yes, domo thank you, kananka, hai kananka."

The best translation I can give to kananka is "something like that." It follows usually a choice of something, such as tea, and it's used in an invitation to the other party, but the use of the term makes the invite essentially polite and nonbinding and allows for a variance; in case you hate tea and will have only espresso, but wouldn't want to say that so as not to offend your host ... or something like that. That's my socio- psycho- linguistic take on it anyways.

So that's what kananka is about, and it's quintessentially me, I figure, a jumble of this and that. I do like tea, but there are days when I crave a latte and why not, if that is what I like?