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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.
Rika had never considered that kind of life for herself, but 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 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.
Over 150 pounds?? Rookie numbers
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.
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.
principle, all women should give themselves permission to demand good treatment, but the world made doing so profoundly difficult.
In a statement in court, Kajii had asserted that her body had a special value, that she granted her lovers a fantastic experience, and that as such, it stood to reason she’d be rewarded financially.
Men are inept creatures. They can’t build a life for themselves without the support and kindness of a woman.’
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.’
‘Nobody has to be fully satisfied by just one thing, and nor do they have to aim to be like everyone else. It’s plenty if people can enjoy things a good amount, and be satisfied with their life overall. Enjoying a cigarette after a meal is okay, and putting on a little weight isn’t anything to merit fussing about.
‘There is nothing in this world so pathetic, so moronic, so meaningless as dieting.’
‘For what purpose, exactly, do you want to lose weight? Are you worried about not being attractive to men? Because in that case, you have nothing to fear. Men are naturally attracted to shapely, full-figured women. When I say men, I’m of course referring to real men, who are emotionally mature, affluent, and capable of generosity. Men who favour women with bodies like skinny children are the ones with no confidence in themselves. They’re without exception servile, sexually and emotionally immature, with no capacity for financial generosity, either.’
But these people can’t even tell the difference between butter and margarine! For women like me, who are only interested in the real thing, it’s unbearable.
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?
What was it that Makoto wanted if not a woman slender as a board who never said anything troublesome, didn’t tie him down, and wasn’t in any way too much for him? Would he not, in fact, drop her with surprising abruptness if she failed to meet even one of those requirements?
Solo female diners must be few and far between at Joël Robuchon. What would the people working here think of her?
looking back on her twenties, she felt she’d ‘lived a life like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s’. ‘Were you making your living as a prostitute?’ the lawyer for the prosecution had snapped back, to which Kajii had responded with great composure, ‘I lived as Holly did. I belonged to nobody, either spiritually or physically. I was “travelling”.’
Listen carefully to your heart and your body. Never eat anything you don’t want to. When you take the decision to live that way, both your mind and your body will commence their transformation.’
‘My arms, my breasts, and my bottom are packed to bursting with all my favourite food. My body is made up entirely from steaks from the New York Grill, sukiyaki from Imahan, and the Gargantuan Chaliapin Steak Pie from the Imperial Hotel.
Maybe, if she weren’t receiving so much criticism from the people around her, she would be fine with the way she looked.
‘Can we be friends?’ ‘I don’t want friends.’ As she shook her head of glossy hair, a smile floated across Kajii’s face. ‘I don’t need friends. I’m only interested in having worshippers.’
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.
‘Nowadays I think that maybe it would have been all right to be a bit of a burden to the people around me. Young people like you are paying the price for people like me gritting my teeth, bearing it all myself and not showing any weakness. I didn’t ask for help, and that stopped other people around me from asking for it.’
From over the counter, she glanced at Shinoi’s profile. Had his wife stood in this same place and looked at him? The room wasn’t that large, and yet he seemed terribly far away. The kitchen was a lonely place, she thought.
she turned around to face Shinoi behind the counter. Looking at him from here he seemed far away. She felt the depth of the rift that opened up between the person cooking and the person not.
Now Shinoi spoke in an emotionless tone, different from before, ‘You’re saying that even a man with not a single person in his life who cares about him has an obligation to take care of himself properly? That’s a pretty exacting view.’
Red flag
would argue that even thinking that way is a form of wordless violence. Refusing to look after yourself because there’s nobody around to care about you is a form of violence towards somebody. To my eyes, you’re not living a reckless sort of life, but if you truly don’t care what becomes of you, then that’s really sad.
I believe that Kajii’s victims could have been happy without a woman, if she hadn’t been around. Even if there was nobody to care for them, they could have cared for themselves. Or they could have looked for help. That’s not that difficult a thing to do.
When they heard that someone was full-figured and liked cooking and eating, most men imagined someone quiet and domestic. Someone whose interior life would not surpass their own. But did that reasoning really hold up?
Mothers around the world didn’t put in the work of coming up with and then cooking the day’s menu because those foods were what they themselves wanted to eat, but because they were thinking of their family. From a certain moment on, Kajii had started making the food she wanted to eat when she wanted to eat it. She no longer heeded the physical condition or the palates of the men she was with. That was why her food had the wild deliciousness of something attained through black magic. She could enjoy the act of cooking because it didn’t pain her in any way.
Taking her cooking as an expression of her affection towards them, they’d happily eaten it. Wasn’t the same true of Makoto? She’d made him a single bowl of pasta and he’d mistakenly assumed she was forcing her affection on him, hinting she wanted to get married, and rejected her as a result. But that was pasta Rika had made for her own sake. That was why it’d tasted so good.
‘It’s like we’re all being controlled, so that when you come across a person who’s shaken off that control you feel irritated. I’m sorry for telling you before that you should diet. Seeing you becoming softer and rounder and more relaxed made me anxious. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I felt like you were moving away from being the prince you used to be, whom I’d loved.’
‘Thanks for ordering the humidifier, and thinking to leave the bath water in. If I was here by myself my throat would most likely have got all dry and hoarse. The person who gets to live with you doesn’t know how lucky they are.’
So sweet
She could feel Reiko’s breathing through the duvet. For a while they stayed hugging, until Reiko said, ‘You’re so heavy!’ and Rika said, ‘And you’re so mean!’ and the two of them laughed.
Girlhood
‘As for whether she was mature, she always seemed a bit babyish to me. She was a slow child, who ate vast amounts like a cow, and never seemed quite all there.’
Oh
I’ve got your back. And let’s book a holiday, a proper holiday, the two of us. I’ll take time off. Your relationship with Ryōsuke is important, but that’s not all that you are. If it gets too hard, you can always come to me.’
But while the men you dated were attracted to your body and your caring and maternal qualities, those were all attributes that benefited them in some way. They wouldn’t share your worries and your pain, would they? They always wanted something from you.’
A flabby, round face with greyish skin stared out at me. Through his fingerprint-smeared glasses, our eyes met. A faint smell of semen and artificial flavourings stung my eyes, and I felt the nausea rising up from the pit of my stomach.
....excuse me?
She’d make loads of different dishes that she’d set out on the table. It reminded me of when my mum was still well. It was a lot of fun, eating with her.’ ‘She must have been a wonderful woman.’ ‘Nah, she was ugly as anything. Fat, too. Fat as a pig.’ Saying this, he snickered, and I felt a shiver running down my spine.
The AUDACITY
A desire that I didn’t usually confront suddenly flashed before my eyes as if lit up in fluorescent lights: If only Rika were a man.
What did it mean to be loved, in any case? Was it to be needed? Why, then, when I was helping people in this way, did I feel this hollow and miserable?
‘If I did kill anybody,’ Kajii said, ‘then my method was the same as yours. I simply stopped making myself available. I withdrew the lavish care I had been providing for them up until that point. Somewhere in your heart you’re glad that you killed your father. You were relieved to find out he’d died, were you not?’
She wanted him to be dead beyond doubt. If he’d somehow managed to survive in a compromised state, it would have been even more restrictive for Rika and her mother. ‘I was the same. When they died off, one by one, I felt a weight lifting from my shoulders. That’s one less person to take care of, I thought.’
Once I had found their incompetence, their reliance on me adorable. I believed, up until that point, that I liked pleasing them. Yet I suddenly saw that it was always just me, working away frenziedly, all alone.’
‘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.’
‘The kind of wife that the men on those sites are looking for is, at base, a woman with no sense of life about her. Their ideal partner would be a kind of ghost.’
Ryōsuke, it seemed, rarely ventured inside the kitchen, and he couldn’t tell her where anything was.
Men.
‘I don’t have a single friendship like that – one which has nothing to do with what both parties are getting out of it.
This pure-souled woman, whose next move nobody could read, needed Rika more than anybody. Rather than sink down to Kajii’s depths, Rika wanted to ascend to Reiko’s heights. Now, suddenly, it struck her: it wasn’t Kajii who was really alive – it was Reiko. She’d been so close to her all this time that she hadn’t even noticed.
But actually, thinking that she could solve their problems was sheer arrogance – just as she’d been unable to do anything to save her father in the final stretch of his life. Her loved ones’ issues were their own domains, as individuals, and not places that she could go stomping into.
