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Reiko might have been a close friend, but their familiarity didn’t assuage Rika’s guilt about visiting her new marital home empty-handed. Reiko’s reply came immediately, along with a cartoon rabbit sticker – it seemed that after having given up work last year, her silly side had finally returned: If you’re sure, then would you bring me some butter if you can find it? There’s a shortage this winter, and I can’t get my hands on any. But if you can’t it really doesn’t matter! I’d rather you got here quickly.
Perhaps, she thought, perhaps without realising it I’ve been starved of these expressions of affection, of the warmth of another human body.
Even after Reiko had given up her job, the busy nature of Rika’s work made it hard to find time to meet. In theory, Rika had Tuesday and Wednesday to herself each week, but she didn’t know any of her colleagues who actually managed to take proper days off –
The way that Reiko spoke made it seem as if her baby already existed in the world, Rika thought – as if they were all just waiting for it to appear in the room. It was the previous summer that the obstetrician had told Reiko it was likely that stress was to blame for the fact that two years into her marriage she still hadn’t conceived, and Reiko had promptly quit her job in the PR department of a major film production company, which was so hectic that even finding time to make medical appointments had been difficult.
While out walking in the jungle, the young boy, Little Babaji, encounters a group of four tigers who steal his clothes and possessions. In their new finery, the tigers become distracted arguing over which is the grandest. Forgetting all about Little Babaji, they begin snapping at one another, biting each other’s tails until they’ve formed a ring around a tree. Clamped together, they start chasing each other round and round, going so fast that they begin to melt into a yellow butter. Babaji’s father finds the butter and brings it home, and there the melted tigers are slathered on hotcakes,
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I think the moral is that you shouldn’t let your vanity make you so competitive that you’re driven to self-destruction.’
‘I know people say this all the time, but this honestly makes me think I need a wife. You’re a lucky man, Ryōsuke.’ Rika felt genuine envy for Ryōsuke, who sat in front of her with a carefree smile. He seemed to exude such a sense of ease, his skin glowing and his expression relaxed.
At work, too, Rika noticed that the married men of the older generation had a certain leisurely quality about them, in spite of how busy their days were. It seemed that most of their wives were homemakers.
she could see the power such women bestowed upon their families. Every night, those women would clean out the toxins that had built up in their partners’ bodies and souls over the course of the day – toxins that, if left untouched for too long, would eat a person away. The elder male colleague of hers who had died unexpectedly at home last month had been single and lived alone. An image rose up in Rika’s mind...
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‘I bet Kajimana eats an absolute ton! That’s why she’s that huge. It’s a miracle that someone that fat could con so many people into wanting to marry her! Is her cooking that good, or what?’ Ryōsuke said. A chill ran down Rika’s spine. She saw a frown flit across Reiko’s brow and then disappear. Reiko had always been even more sensitive to misogyny than Rika herself was. But it wasn’t that Ryōsuke was particularly insensitive. What he’d just given voice to was, Rika supposed, the standard response of the average man.
The reason the case had garnered so much attention was that this woman, who had led several men around by the nose and maintained such a queenly presence in the courtroom, was neither young nor beautiful. From what Rika could see from the photographs, she weighed over 70 kilos.
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. These kinds of lines appeared frequently in Manako Kajii’s blog.
What the public found most alarming, even more than Kajii’s lack of beauty, was the fact that she was not thin. Women appeared to find this aspect of the case profoundly disturbing, while in men it elicited an extraordinary display of hatred and vitriol. From early childhood, everyone had had it drummed into them that if a woman wasn’t slim, she wasn’t worth bothering with. The decision not to lose weight and remain plus-sized was one that demanded considerable resolve. And yet, Kajii had given herself that permission.
In principle, all women should give themselves permission to demand good treatment, but the world made doing so profoundly difficult. The women labelled ‘the highly successful ones’ whom Rika encountered through her work showed that ever so clearly. All of them seemed terrified of something. They reined themselves in to a degree that verged on asceticism, were abnormally modest, and seemed desperate to protect themselves.
‘I learned from my late father that women should show generosity towards everyone. But there are two things that I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine.’
When I’m eating good butter I feel somehow as though I were falling.’ ‘Falling?’ ‘Yes. Not floating gently upwards, but falling. The same feeling as when the lift plunges towards the ground floor. The body plummets, starting from the very tip of the tongue.’
This was a different kind of deliciousness to that – a more blatant, forceful deliciousness, that took hold of her from the tip of her tongue, pinned her down, and carried her off to some unknown place.
The previous week, Rika had thrown out her packet of margarine, so despised by Manako Kajii, with the burnable rubbish.
the articles Kajii wrote about butter had a hot-bloodedness to them that differed from the rest.
Fish roe and butter makes for a truly exquisite pairing! By adding butter to pollock roe, with its clusters of firm little orbs just like miniature egg yolks, you take away any unpleasant fishiness from the roe, instead producing a sauce with an inexplicable fullness of taste that forms a perfect coating for the carbohydrates, setting off their plumpness and texture like a dream. Perhaps best of all is the pretty pink hue of the roe, like a gorgeous spring evening (you may know by now that pink is my favourite colour!). The butter and rosy-coloured roe combination coats each and every
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She looked to have spent good money on both her ingredients and her tableware, her choice of which reflected her conservative-leaning taste, but it seemed safe to say that she lacked a refined aesthetic sense, and was untidy by nature.
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?
I know it can seem cruel. We’ve come to use the word “evolution” as though it were a resolutely positive thing, but all it means is that the species best-adapted for a particular environment survive, and the others die out. Like how people often say that our print media here in Japan will gradually be driven out by the digital forms, like you see happening in America. That can hardly be called progress, can it?’
‘That’s the thing – not at all! That sort of man isn’t looking for a partner with whom they can communicate equally, to share their life with. Nope, what they want is a capable hostess, who’ll listen to them wittering on. Those women do exist, but most of them are employed by the party hosts. Professionals, in other words.
A friend of mine who edits cookery books for a living said that they’ve started having complaints about recipes that leave things to the individual’s discretion. She thinks it’s because people are increasingly worried about making mistakes, and losing faith in their own judgement – they don’t know what “a good amount” looks like for them. When in fact, cooking is all about trial and error.’
‘There is nothing in this world so pathetic, so moronic, so meaningless as dieting.’
‘You people working in the media all graduate from good universities, and yet you don’t know a thing, do you?’
was less that he understood the taste of the dishes I prepared, and more that he simply wanted to take his meals by my side. He used to often say, “I’d sooner die than end up living a solitary life eating takeaway bento boxes by myself.”’
For Kajii’s victims there seemed to be only two types of meal: the warm, comforting kind eaten at a dinner table clustered with dishes lovingly prepared by a woman’s patient hands, and the sad, lonely takeaway meals for one. Why so extreme in their thinking? Even if they were alone, even if they were eating food from the convenience store, it only took a little bit of imagination and application to transform the moment into a pleasurable one.
She was tired of living her life thinking constantly about how she appeared to others, checking her answers against everyone else’s.
‘Do you not think you need to learn to love yourself more? That way you’ll come to realise that it’s a waste to diminish yourself by going on dates with people you aren’t matched with. Your estimation of yourself is too low.’
Still, the consternation that her weight gain had elicited in the people around her seemed to her extreme. The changes to her body hadn’t caused them any trouble, and yet people’s reactions were critical, even fearful.
Ramen that she’d waltzed out to eat after having sex – the experience wasn’t, as she’d been imagining, an extension of the sensuality of the physical contact. No, the taste was one of freedom – the kind of freedom that could only be savoured alone. Kajii could pursue her desires so wholeheartedly precisely because she wasn’t tied to anybody. For the first time, Rika understood what Tokyo meant to a woman like her, who’d abandoned her hometown, and who had no fixed employment or friends. As someone born and brought up in the city, Rika was unable – for better or worse – to escape the sense of
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‘Oh, this is delicious! It’s like it’s got nectar inside,’ Reiko exclaimed on her first sip. She was right – the milk tasted like sunlight spreading out across the tongue. Rika let out a sigh of satisfaction. She knew that it was just her imagination, but somehow Reiko already looked slightly softer and rounder, which made her happy.
And yet, she couldn’t help but feel that her mother had been waiting for her father to die. The indolent lifestyle he led as a form of accusation had continued to cause her suffering.
She couldn’t sense any of the curiosity, irritation and envy toward Kajii that the people around Rika all displayed. In this town, where it was impossible to hide anything, Kajii had just been an unremarkable sort of a girl who ate a lot. That was the sum total of his knowledge about her.
I couldn’t suppress the irritation inside me. He’d presented himself as someone so helpless, fretting about his diet of ready-meals, yet here was someone serving him proper home-cooked food, and all he did was find fault. This is why people like you stay single, I thought to myself. The longer I kept a smile plastered across my face, the harsher the words inside my head grew.
‘Cooking is enjoyable, but the moment it becomes a duty, it grows boring. The same is true of sex, and fashion, and beauty. When you’re forced to do something, it becomes a chore, and the pleasure disappears.’
‘But why, when you’re so full of that life force, were you attractive to those half-dead people then?’ ‘I wonder. Ghosts are souls who can’t cross over to the afterlife, aren’t they? They float around in this one, attaching themselves to the living.’ ‘What you’re saying is so bizarre, and yet I feel like I understand it.’
The idea that a single home-cooked dish could save a person was a delusion. But how much suffering, how much bondage did that delusion cause for women? To think that a badly made meal like this could have saved somebody’s life was arrogant and self-obsessed in the extreme. However hard she tried, Rika couldn’t have erased her father’s loneliness. Playing the good daughter on that day wouldn’t have altered the situation a jot.
‘I’m not remotely domestic myself, I just like eating. I’m happiest when I’m cooking for myself.’
‘This might sound rude, but I think your cooking has really improved. Until now, the things you’ve made tasted like you’d cooked them well according to the recipe, but this one somehow has a Rika sort of flavour.’ ‘What kind of a flavour is that?’ ‘Strong and assertive, but delicate at the same time. The kind of taste you don’t get bored of.’ ‘I actually amended the recipe this time. I felt like I wanted a tiny bit of natural sweetness, so I added a drop of honey.’
‘Under Kajii’s influence, I was eating lots of very heavy, orthodox dishes, but recently I’ve started to understand my own tastes better. I like relatively classical flavouring but with an extra something to pep it up – a bit of spice, or something to give a hint of acidity or bitterness. I also really like simple recipes, with not too many flavours.’
Rika understood: this was how Kajii’s victims had died. The thing they had treasured had been cruelly shattered. She had to face it this time: Kajii was a killer. It didn’t matter whether or not she’d murdered her victims with her own hands. Clearly, there resided within her a violent loathing of other people. Rika hadn’t been able to see it until she herself had been struck off.
Reiko spread open a concertina pamphlet, and Rika read aloud: ‘People who are permitted to abstain from fasting are: those travelling, the ill, pregnant women, children, women on their period, people who find their will bending, and people who break their fast by mistake.’ Rika burst out laughing. Reiko nodded, as if to say, ‘Right?’ ‘So, basically, anything goes.’
Ramadan is about creating an understanding of the feelings of the underprivileged, and the aim isn’t hardship or reducing consumption. There are a lot of misunderstandings about Islam in contemporary society.
‘Wow. It’s enough if the people who can do it, do . .
Allah desireth for you ease, He desireth not hardship for you”,’ Rika repeated. ‘Right. If God exists, He wouldn’t take joy or satisfaction in the sight of suffering. Which means, you don’t have to get through everything alone. You don’t have to always be growing as a person either. The far more important thing is just to get through the day.’
What is the truth, though, really? What is a lie? There’s such a small discrepancy between the two. Given that, what’s so wrong about choosing whichever path seems more appealing to you? What’s so wrong about coating barren, flavourless reality in oodles of melted butter and seasoning it with condiments and spices? That’s my way of getting by in life, which has come about quite naturally. A kind of evolution, rooted in history. Do you really believe that everything deserves to be confronted in its true form? Does this world really deserve to be inhabited, as it is?
