Japanese for Travellers by Katie Kitamura

Author:Katie Kitamura
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2006-04-02T05:00:00+00:00

The furred smell of food filters through the air vents of the train, and then hunger comes upon me. A lazy hunger, bored and ever open to the suggestion of food advertisements spilling from the slow-turning pages of a magazine, the sight of a young woman, seated across the aisle and unwrapping a chicken cutlet sandwich. I watch her hungrily – the dainty movement of her fingers, the intimate rustling of cellophane pulling loose, the breaded edge of the cutlet, pressed between two thick slices of bread – then swallow and look away.

When, shortly before the end of the journey – the cutlet sandwich long eaten and the woman having stood up to dispose of the grease-stained wrapping – the food trolley comes round, manoeuvred down the aisle by a uniformed girl, pastel-coloured cap set on head and skirt pleated to the knees, I purchase a bento box, a can of hot green tea, and a box of chocolate-covered almonds. And as I eat, slowly, deliberately, the bento box balanced on my lap and the can, still warm, resting along the window’s ledge, the familiarity of the food recollects the meals of my childhood in America. Those meals began in a time when my parents, more newly immigrated, clung steadfast to the food of their mother country, and extended through to the time when, the urging of American life and cooking having overcome us all, the influence of Japan was reduced to a simple side dish – a cucumber and seaweed salad dressed in vinegar, a plate of Japanese pickles – and then disappeared altogether.

And if returning to Japan can at times be so pleasurable, then that is because the food itself exists within a whirling mix of Western and Eastern influences, holding up at one end the purity of the traditional Japanese meal, and at the other a kind of lusty, degraded mix of flavours. And so, looking down at the meal that rests on my knees, moving my chopsticks from the fried chicken to the rice and pickles, methodically demolishing a soft-whipped mound of potato salad before setting down my chopsticks to shell the salted soy beans, I recollect those times in my childhood – the processes of recollection grown so inverted that, to recall my childhood in America, I am obliged to travel to present-day Japan – when the influences of Japan and America were equal, and there was no indication that that easy balance would ever grow loose and be forgotten, only to be tardily recollected so many years later.

But it is in a little temporal peculiarity, in a puzzling act of contortionism, that this meal, even as it flickers back into the past, also remains firmly entrenched in the telling of the present. And if as I eat, one part of me is shuttled back into the past, then I am simultaneously touched by matters closer at hand, reminded of the way that in our family, eating has of late grown altered again, and hunger become a new thing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.