Like so much of the exuberant food imagery that I’m drawn to in anime, the katsudon in “Yuri!!! on Ice,” a series about a competitive figure skater in his early 20s, appeared as a less detailed but somehow more vivid version of itself. A Japanese rice bowl capped with golden slices of pork cutlet, held together with barely cooked eggs and translucent onions — textures exaggerated, colors saturated, aromas made visible — occasionally twinkling in soft focus, as if seen through a Vaseline-greased lens. “Is this what God eats?!” one character asked another, trembling, cheeks flushed, eyes wide with the shock of its pleasure. What I love about food in anime is the truth in its hyperbole.

I meant to watch just one episode of the 12-part first season when it came out last fall on some streaming sites. My friend Whitney had told me I’d love it, but I didn’t realize how much: I stayed up and watched them all, more and more charmed and hungry. At first, Yuri is anxious. And he makes mistakes when he’s anxious, and he tortures himself over those mistakes. When he’s celebrating a win, or stuck in a professional slump, he finds comfort in katsudon. “Yuri” devotees from all over the world were quick to recreate his favorite dish at home, posting photos of their versions online like ephemeral fan art. They styled the dishes faithfully, with an addition of peas (at the fictional hot-springs inn that Yuri’s parents run in Kyushu, the dish is served with peas). By the time I finished the series, I wanted to do the same, so I asked Whitney to come over for dinner.

The foundation of the dish is tonkatsu, a deep-fried breaded pork cutlet that became popular in Japan by the early 20th century. Tonkatsu may have started out as an imitation of European-style cutlets — thin, flimsy slices of veal and lamb, sautéed in butter and served with a fork and a knife — but Japanese cooks soon owned it, revised it and deviated from the European recipes to develop their own style. By the 1920s, restaurants in Tokyo specialized in thick, evenly crisp cutlets, made from pork and deep-fried, often in lard. They served these in slices, so people could grasp them with chopsticks. Tonkatsu is now omnipresent, under heat lamps and behind glass at convenience stores, and on boards with shredded cabbage at high-end restaurants. In a Japanese home, it wouldn’t be unusual to have one or two in the fridge, like a leftover piece of fried chicken.