More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Most bureaucrats would, from time to time, come up with a convenient ‘misinterpretation’ of the situation – would decide, for example, that a female journalist was approaching them not because she needed something to write about, but because she was attracted to them.
At her height, though, it was easy for her to look stocky, and she took care that her weight never exceeded 50 kilos.
She made sure that the cleaning and washing was done before her mother got home from work, and would cook the rice and make the miso soup.
There may have been no elaborate home-cooked recipes, but neither was there any of the tense atmosphere that had prevailed when her father had been around.
she’d made all the decisions about her university studies and her future career alone, and seen them through.
Reiko and Rika shared the experience of holding, throughout their girlhoods, a sense of unease towards the kind of family that the rest of the world idealised.
They clearly had a powerful need for Kajii, and had presented her with significant sums of money, and yet in the presence of third parties, had repeatedly made disdainful statements about her.
One of the witnesses, a female care-worker for the elderly, was interrogated in a manner that many felt to be sexual harassment.
The classes were rather like an extremely opulent pastime, permitted only to wealthy housewives and women with high salaries.
Among that group of stylish women attired with impeccable taste, Kajii, in a tight-fitting dress that accentuated her voluptuous figure and would have been more suitable for a ritzy date than a cooking school,
Women who love to cook are so delighted when someone asks them for a recipe that they’ll tell you all kinds of things you haven’t asked for along with it.
‘It wouldn’t surprise me if she used her sticks of butter for you know what . . .’
I only want to spend my time with people who know the real thing when they see it. People who truly understand the value of the real thing are few and far between.
Kitamura’s lack of professional ambition concerning anything other than shaving as many seconds as he could off the time he spent at work was so brazen that by this stage everybody practically respected him for it.
In this industry, a casual utterance, a misjudged confidence, could cost you your life. Ensuring that your true feelings were well masked, inspecting each and every one of your actions and keeping yourself in check became a matter of habit.
taking no fixed employment and instead making her living as a professional mistress, protected by the peculiar network of rich, older men she’d established.
She was well known for refusing to meet anyone from the press, and was apparently particularly icy towards female journalists.
From early childhood, everyone had had it drummed into them that if a woman wasn’t slim, she wasn’t worth bothering with.
In principle, all women should give themselves permission to demand good treatment, but the world made doing so profoundly difficult.
Rika herself, however much she was praised by others, however highly her work was esteemed, was unable to feel satisfaction with any aspect of her own self.
She could understand thinking that a person’s appearance and personality didn’t matter, that it didn’t even matter if you were being deceived – that you just wanted a soft, warm-bodied member of the opposite sex to call your own.
There was something intensely graceful about her entrance, as though the curtains had been raised and the princess had emerged to present herself, which felt at odds with the bleakness of the setting.
With her voice faintly trembling, Kajii launched into a diatribe on the poisonous effects of margarine.
‘I want you to use salted Échiré butter. There’s an Échiré shop in Marunouchi Station. Go there and look at it, properly, before you buy it. The current shortage is a perfect opportunity to sample first-class butter from overseas. When I’m eating good butter I feel somehow as though I were falling.’
You’ll sense the individual grains of rice coated in butter, and an aromatic fragrance as if the rice were being fried will ascend to your nose. A rich, milky sweetness will spread itself across your tongue . . .’
‘If I speak to you again, it will most likely be after you’ve decided that you will never again let margarine pass your lips. I wouldn’t like to waste my time on anyone except those who know the real thing when they see it.
it seemed that with every bite of butter and rice, her taste buds were developing new capacities, pleading with her for more.
Kajii’s prose had seemed to her ever so turgid, but now, since her butter awakening, the odd phrases here and there would fall into her like droplets.
the articles Kajii wrote about butter had a hot-bloodedness to them that differed from the rest.
Tucking into a delicious meal cooked for you by a girlfriend young enough to be your granddaughter, before falling into an eternal sleep . . . Was that really a death tragic enough to merit the fuss the world was kicking up about it? Even Rika’s attempts to put herself in the victims’ place couldn’t diminish the deliciousness of the spaghetti in front of her.
