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Abstract: Elusiveness can itself be elusive. This article considers why matsutake draw over-the-top excitement as an elusive commodity even in years of prolific harvests. In 2010 Japan, an unexpectedly copious domestic matsutake harvest prompted a precipitous drop in the mushroom's price and made the mushroom readily accessible. The article traces the sources of consumer excitement that year, showing how matsutake commodity elusiveness is itself produced through contingent coordinations among trees, fungi, weather, pickers, mycology, popular media, and consumers. It suggests that, in 2010, media outlets and consumers resolved the contradictions of this elusiveness-celebrating matsutake's elite status as an elusive commodity while enjoying its accessibility-by treating the bumper harvest as a euphoric anomaly.
Keywords: commodities, consumption, elusiveness, Japan, matsutake, multispecies relationships
This special issue builds from the simple observation that elusiveness can reveal as much as it eludes. Yet because, by definition, elusiveness points to that which cannot be understood or attained, it also poses an ethnographic challenge: how can we track that which endeavors to escape? This first article takes up this question by exploring some of the unresolvable contradictions that inform human commitments to matsutake commodity elusiveness. Focusing on these contradictions helps us track matsutake elusiveness because it draws attention to a key (but also inconsistent and incongruent) way that humans account for the uncontrollable dynamics of multispecies relationships. As illustrated in subsequent articles by Matsutake Worlds Research Group (MWRG) members Michael Hathaway, Elaine Gan, and Anna Tsing, matsutake growth depends on forms of attraction and coordination between human and non-human beings, and thus on processes that are not fully understood by humans and that lie outside human control. Building on my collaborators' findings, this article argues that to maintain their commitment to matsutake elusiveness, Japanese consumers must account for the unpredictability of matsutake availability in self-contradictory ways.
Consider what happened in 2010. When I arrived in Japan in October of that year-the middle of the domestic matsutake season-I found matsutake buyers and sellers waxing euphoric over an unexpectedly large domestic harvest. Japanese news and popular media widely discussed the daihosaku (bumper harvest). People whom I interviewed reported that prices of matsutake from Nagano and Iwate prefectures (the two largest suppliers) were 30 percent less than, if not half of, recent years, creating...