The House of Nire by Morio Kita

Author:Morio Kita [Kita, Morio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kodansha International
Published: 1984-04-24T17:00:00+00:00

Supper was a simple affair, usually some kind of fish broth made with slices of salmon. “Broth” gives the wrong impression since it was not thickened with stock, nor did it have the traditional garnishings of vegetable to please the eye; it merely consisted of bits of raw salmon boiled up with slices of crudely chopped onion, and was so salty that most people would have screwed up their faces eating it. But the children always seemed to enjoy it enough to ask for several extra helpings of rice. Perhaps this was because the servants seemed invariably to be from the Yamagata region, and salty dishes are the pride of the North. The food consequently was full of salt, and the children had grown accustomed to it. Today, however, of the children only Aiko and Shuji were present; the eldest son, Shun’ichi, was apparently away somewhere, and their father was at some medical staff meeting.

Ryuko got through her meals at a great pace. So long as there was nobody who had to be treated with respect, no guest of higher social rank than herself, she would get the business over with hastily and even crudely. She would also start clearing away the dishes while others were still eating, and the bits of salmon she had left would be scraped unceremoniously onto the children’s plates. This lack of courtesy, reflecting a total indifference toward others, was no doubt one more aspect of her aristocratic cast of mind. She was now passing the dishes they had finished with to the maid, and telling her to serve the jelly in the other room once she had disposed of them.

Ryuko referred to the other room as “within,” but this word now lacked the tremendous implications it had possessed in the old days. It simply referred to a living room of the same size as the one they were eating in, one of eight mats or about twelve feet square, the kind of living room one would find in any middle-class household. The only special thing about this room “within” was that one of the doors of the deep built-in cupboard, used in normal households for storing bedding, opened to reveal a treasure of Kiichiro’s that had escaped the fire: a large, old-fashioned, mahogany wardrobe which seemed to have been made exactly to fit that space. It had rounded doors and innumerable drawers, and was very large. Ryuko referred to it as “the Western wardrobe” and, a true chip off her father’s dubious block, she had wanted to have the living room designated as “the Western Wardrobe Parlor.” But the length of the name prevented it from catching on, and nobody used it except Ryuko, who liked it a great deal and was always looking for opportunities to direct people to the second right-hand drawer of the Western wardrobe, or to some other part of its geography.

The jelly arrived in a bowl so large that it looked as if it would be difficult to get a good grip on it even with both arms.

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