Today we had lunch at Yarl in Brickfields. Housed in an unprepossessing building, this is a Jaffnese eatery, with a big line of clay pots from which you can fill your banana-leaf-lookalike tray. All very tasty. Particularly notable were the varai (a dish made of grated coconut and spices), the paruppu kadaiyal (a kind of dhal, with ghee and spices), and the thin, light poppadoms, which came with an amazing salty dried chilli.



Afterwards, the Indian Miniature Paintings exhibition, another DiverseCity offering. This is housed in the Netaji Subash Chandra Bose Indian Cultural Centre, not far from our curry place.

The works, by a contemporary artist known only as Ami, were delightful. Plants, leaves, and fabrics are rendered in glowing colours and exquisite detail, and the whole collection is redolent of the lush opulence of classical India.

And wholly unabashed. This is not a culture that shies away from sensuousness. These are love scenes between Krishna and Radha. The background birds and lily ponds reflect their delicacy, the torrents and thunderstorms their passion.

By way of transition from India to Japan, we popped in at Gelatomio. Cempedak and coconut for me. Kind of Southeast-Asia-meets-Italy.

And thence to Kubo and the Two Strings. This is quite an artistic triumph. The animation is spectacular, the story gripping. The frames are breathtakingly beautiful, the main characters lovable.

And as this reviewer notes, "after the gorgeous visuals, the second thing that stands out most about Kubo is its deep preoccupation with the power of storytelling -- of writing your own story, of choosing your own ending".

Half-way through, however, I started wondering: Were any Japanese involved in making this? Because it's totally the outsider's view of Japan. Every foreigner-beloved aspect of Japaneseness is there, from origami to sashimi, from samurai to torii, from maple leaves to whale soup, from shamisen to noh masks. It's the cultural appropriation that bothers me more than the non-Japanese cast, to be honest. The result is beautiful, but inevitably artificial (if that's not too strange a thing to say about an animation).

Irreproachably Japanese, on the other hand, are the white peach mochi and "leaf pie" we bought from Minamoto Kitchoan on the way home.