For full article see: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2018/02/01/arts/artist-asako-iwama-explores-relationship-food-language/#.WvJPli-PDqQ

Food and the desire to eat has always been mysterious to Asako Iwama. When the artist and cook was a young child, she could not understand why she had to eat. Her earliest memories of food are of her grandmother’s cooking in a strange yet fascinating kitchen far away from home.

​“My father is from Kamaishi in Iwate,” Iwama says. “My grandmother lived in a tiny one-story house with a kitchen. I grew up in a conventional postwar residential development, but my grandmother’s house was old and her kitchen looked like it was made of patchwork. She would prepare fish there, bought at 5 a.m., freshly caught, from the fish market just 300 or 400 meters away.”