Wasabi for Breakfast: Two Novellas by Fumiko Kometani

Author:Fumiko Kometani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 2013-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

19

Two months later I got a call from John saying that Ichiro was staying with him. I thought I must be dreaming. He told me Ichiro was really enjoying himself. Apparently, the boy had called Oharu-baasan and asked for John’s phone number. It turned out that Ichiro had a friend in high school who’d moved up to Tokyo with his parents; he was a rather unusual kid in that he’d always dreamed of being a chef. According to John, Ichiro had been really jealous of him because his parents were supporting him in following his dream. That was one of the reasons he’d run away. Another was probably that he’d helped his cousin Shimpei and seen firsthand that he was doing fine as a chef with his own restaurant.

Ichiro intended to enroll in the same cooking school as his friend, so he’d been staying at the friend’s house for a month. Feeling uncomfortable about freeloading for so long, however, he decided he should rent a cheap apartment for himself and go to school from there. So now he was staying at John’s place to learn about what it was like to be independent.

Well, John and Ichiro are cousins, so for John, it was kind of like suddenly having a younger brother around; it would probably be a very good experience for him, since his real younger brother can’t even talk. Ichiro said he would earn his rent by working part-time. And as for food, he figured that since he’s going to cooking school, he’ll probably get something to eat every day.

According to John, Chizu was really grateful to him. She’d come up to Tokyo recently and met with John and Ichiro and, unbeknownst to Tatsuo, had given her son some money to pay John for his living expenses.

After she’d gone home, Ichiro apparently told John, “My mom’s not at all mad at me for running away; she accepts my decision and says that I can do what I want as long as I take responsibility for it. My dad’s another story, though—she says he’s still furious with me. What’s worse, even though I’m here imposing on you, he has this strange idea that the reason I’m not coming back home is because you have a bad influence on me. I’m really sorry about that. My mom’s really mad at my dad for thinking that way.”

Then John told me, “Uncle Tatsuo can think whatever he wants—it doesn’t bother me a bit. It’s not like I’m ever going to need something from him anyway. He’s the embodiment of ego. He gets mad when his son won’t do what he wants and then shifts the blame onto me. He doesn’t see that it’s his fault.”

That was when I realized that Tatsuo was the type of person who curried favor with people he thought would be able to help him get ahead and treated everyone else—those younger than him and people without any particular status—as if they were worms. He was always frantically trying

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