Japan’s Cuisine in Literature: The World Must Be Depoetized | EUROtoday

This workplace novel just isn’t even a line outdated when the phrase “lunch break” is already talked about. You should eat consistently: within the morning, at lunchtime, and if you cannot get sufficient, even within the night. And if you happen to do not eat, you discuss meals. The state of affairs is especially precarious in shared workplaces: Colleagues then poke their heads by way of the door and ask about having lunch collectively. Nitani, a gross sales consultant at a label firm, has had sufficient. He would like to eat dietary dietary supplements within the type of tablets and proceed working. But he can not escape the social constraints and is confronted with the query: Is there an excellent life with unhealthy meals? And what’s the good life anyway?

This culinary Bartleby is the protagonist of Junko Takase’s novel Really Good Food, for which she received the celebrated Akutagawa Prize in 2022. This places her within the firm of different internationally profitable authors reminiscent of Sayaka Murata and Hiroko Oyamada. In her novel, she focuses on a private triangle: the aforementioned Nitani and his colleagues Ashikawa, who has an amazing ardour for cooking, and Oshio. Nitani and Oshio recurrently meet after work for drinks after work, the place they discuss life, work and particularly Ashikawa.

She arouses the displeasure of her colleagues as a result of, in a working world geared in direction of perseverance, she dares to go house when she just isn’t feeling effectively. Sitting in entrance of the beer, they each make a plan: to complete off Ashikawa.

Things ought to be completely different. Ashikawa’s weak point, which makes her a sufferer within the first place, arouses Nitani’s romantic curiosity. Before he is aware of it, he is relationship a girl who forces him to eat effectively as an alternative of heating up one other prompt soup. Nitani ended up in his hell. Because questions of style cover extra existential variations: Do you compromise into the grayness of on a regular basis life, or do you courageous moments of sticky over-saccharine? He decides on a cowardly type of opposition. While he waits patiently on the floor, his hour comes after everybody has left the workplace. Then he grabs the pastries that Ashikawa brings for the shared workplace, squishes them and throws them away. When in the future the colleagues change into conscious of the crime, the novel describes this as a small legal finale.

Takase creates the story of a person who’s overcome by existential fatigue. One motive for his despair is a literature course he by no means began. He directs the ache that this wound sends in direction of Ashikawa, whom he includes in an undeclared proxy warfare of life plans. She contrasts this together with her all the time pleasant, virtually aggressively well mannered nature, on the lookout for happiness in truffles and desires of a middle-class married life. So they carry out in partnership with one another, merely not letting go of the social railings, defiantly and in the end with enigmatic unanimity. In this constellation, Oshio is assigned the place of mediator, in whose first-person perspective the novel adjustments chapter by chapter. She stays within the blur between the couple, altering positions, on the lookout for her personal house.

Nitani’s radically sober angle to life glazes the complete textual content: a ghostly atmospheric vacancy dwells on this novel. Everything appears banal, the work, the conversations, the lives of the characters, even the legal case that’s being carried out right here solely reaches the peak of crushed cupcakes. Linguistically, this, translated into German by Yoko Ann Hamann, leads to a program of depoetization: This language has a relationship to the world like prompt soup to a cooked meal – the poetry of empty carbohydrates. The studying expertise initially seems to be a bit soupy, however that solely appears logical within the realm of this meals contempt Nitani: Once the world has been disenchanted, all that is still are microwaves and microaggressions.

“Really good food” seems to be a giant deception, which the writer’s announcement textual content works diligently to create. What initially reads like a love triangle romcom for foodies seems to be a mirrored image on what the great life is. Food: This is only a code for a society that wants the sideshow to convey the principle factor to the stage. The novel is barely loosely in dialog with a gift by which meals is turning into a fetish in a society that’s turning into singular and Japan has lately change into increasingly the main focus of worldwide culinary specialists. He is way more interested by meals as a social method by way of which the temperature and texture of social wishes could be informed.

It is lastly Oshio who will get out of the poisonous triangle of workplace colleagues. She owns the ending and truly the complete novel. Without the creator’s trick of all the time leaving the narrative subject to her, the textual content would lack its heart. On Oshio’s narrative shoulders, Nitani and Ashikawa are allowed to battle with how a lot rejection societies can tolerate and the way a lot adjustment they want. Giving perspective to this doubt is the good literary transfer on this small world.

Junko Takase: “Really good food”. Novel.
Translated from Japanese by Yoko Ann Hamann. Dumont Buchverlag, Cologne 2026. 160 pages, hardcover, €23.