5 Questions with Katherine Tamiko Arguile
Born and raised in Tokyo, Katherine Tamiko Arguile is a Japanese-British-Australian arts journalist and author. She migrated from London to Adelaide in 2008, where she now lives beside the sea. A graduate of Cambridge University, she has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide.
Her award-winning short stories have been published in anthologies in the UK and in Australia and her debut novel, The Things She Owned, was published in 2020.
No.1
To start things off, tell us how Meshi came to be. What inspired you to write the book, and what kept you buoyed along the way?
To paraphrase John Lennon’s lyrics, Meshi is what happened while I was busy making other plans. I was hoping to travel to Japan in 2020 to do some research for a different nonfiction book I’d started working on, but we all know how that year turned out. Faced with a world at a sudden standstill, and still reeling from the release of my debut novel, The Things She Owned, in May 2020, I decided to write what I thought would be relatively straightforward, and the idea of Meshi came to be.
I’d always been keen to convey the beauty and subtle complexities of Japanese food culture, and growing up in a food-obsessed family which has been in the business of selling tsukudani (an Edo-era delicacy) for six generations, my initial intention for Meshi was a food-focused memoir, seasoned with light-hearted, often funny, family anecdotes and recipes. But as I began to write, what emerged was something different, something more confronting. With COVID rampant and my newsfeeds full of panic, separated from family and friends in Europe and Japan, light-hearted stories no longer cut it for me. I wanted to write from a more elevated point of view to make my unusual life circumstances make more sense, relating them to a bigger picture that would be pertinent to readers, regardless of cultural identity. I was finding appeals to our shared humanity comforting at a time of deep societal divisions across the globe, and wanted to offer a little of that in Meshi. But the most extreme shift came as suppressed memories began to surface as I wrote.
My mind, seeking to protect itself, had buried them so efficiently that when they emerged I found myself reliving the emotions I’d felt decades ago when I was abruptly amputated from my native country and sent to a rural boarding school in Northern England at the age of eleven. People often talk about writing as a form of soul-mining and writing Meshi was exactly that for me. There was a great deal of grief to process, and there was a lot of writing and deleting and starting again, but even though it was painful, it was necessary and cathartic.
No.2
You’re also an arts journalist and coffee shop owner, as well as a novelist, with roots in London, Tokyo and Adelaide. How do you think your life experiences have shaped the writing of Meshi, and your writing practice more broadly?
Born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and English father, spending my formative years there and then being exiled from my native country has had the biggest impact on my identity as a writer. My English father often asks me when I’m going to stop writing about Japan, but I don’t think I’m through with it just yet.
Juggling so many different jobs to help support my work as an author can sometimes be frustrating, as many writers will understand. My city coffee shop has been badly impacted by Covid, so I’ve recently acquired a fourth job working at the University of Adelaide, mentoring students with their academic writing. At the same time, I’m aware that getting out there experiencing different working worlds can feed the compost I use to sow seeds for new writing. Making coffee and talking to customers I’ve grown to know over the seven years I’ve been in business is a real pleasure, despite the pre-dawn starts, and a relief from the cerebral, solitary business of writing. While I’d like nothing better than to be able to focus all my time and energy on my writing, the work I do outside of that somehow feeds into it all so I’m certainly not complaining.
My first two degrees were in art, art history and theory, so being able to draw on my experience as an art historian by writing about visual and performance arts as a journalist is deeply satisfying. Watching extraordinary contemporary dance performances, or spending time walking through the wonderful Art Gallery of Australia to review the Biennial of contemporary Australian art quenches my thirst for inspiration. One of these days I’d love to work on an ekphrastic novel, so watch this space.
I lived in London for eighteen years before I migrated to Australia, working at a corporate job where I’d regularly work fifteen, sixteen hour days six, even seven days a week, leaving little time or mental energy for writing. Coming to Australia gave me the opportunities I needed to be the writer I’d wanted to be since I was a child, and I feel a deep gratitude to the writing community here, and to the support given to emerging writers which isn’t as accessible in the UK. Australia hasn’t quite made it into my long prose yet—even though I’ve lived here since 2008, it hasn’t filtered through anywhere except in the occasional short story, so I’m looking forward to the new creative horizons that will open up when it does.
No.3
I’m sure Liminal readers would love to hear about your debut novel, The Things She Owned (Affirm, 2020) as well. How do you think writing that led you to writing Meshi? Do you see the two books as connected in any way?
While The Things She Owned is a work of fiction, it is—as debut novels often are—strongly drawn from life experiences. My late mother was an extraordinary, charismatic woman who suffered a great deal as a child in Tokyo during the Second World War, and although she was far from being the abusive mother I depicted in the character of Michiko in the novel, my mother had been wired by her war trauma in ways that were difficult to understand when I was very young.
In Japan, maternal affection is expressed differently from the way mothers express love to their children in Euro-centric societies: there are no verbal declarations of love and few hugs or other physical demonstrations of affection, generally, beyond the age of seven or eight. Instead, love is expressed through the things a mother might do for her child. I never had a hug from my mother, but growing up, I felt the love in the food my mother prepared for me. As I grew older, she and I bonded through the food we prepared and shared together.
As food culture is especially vibrant in Japan, continuing to cook and eat Japanese food was my way of remaining connected to my culture, especially once I’d been sent to England and my parents had moved to Hong Kong. It became even more important to maintain that connection after my mother died in 1995, and I write a great deal about that in Meshi.
In The Things She Owned, Michiko cooks to repair the psychological damage she inflicts on her daughter Erika, who is a chef. There was a great deal of eating and cooking in the novel—something I hadn’t intended, but couldn’t help, as a food-obsessive myself—and when readers expressed how much they loved those parts of the book, I knew I had to write more about Japanese food, and that was the seed from which Meshi grew.
Anyone who reads The Things She Owned will see threads that connect it to the things I write about in Meshi; that’s on a macro level, where they can contextualise some of the novel within the framework of Japanese culture I offer in Meshi, but on a micro level they may well see a few echoes between my own life experiences and the fictional narrative of The Things She Owned.
No.4
In Meshi, you use the term ‘hafu’ to describe yourself. Can you tell us what the term means to you, and why you use it as a descriptor for yourself?
‘Hafu’ is the Japanese phoneticisation of the word ‘half’. When I was a child, I was sometimes called ‘ainoko’, a Japanese term that could be likened to ‘half-caste’; and is somewhat offensive; I was born at a time when mixed-race children born to Japanese mothers could not be registered at birth, barring them permanently from citizenship. It might be for this reason that a few of my half-Japanese peers resist the use of the word ‘hafu’, adding that it suggests we are somehow diminished, that we have only half a Japanese identity, rather than half the Japanese genes.
[But] I’ve always used it to define myself, mostly for convenience, as when I’m in Japan, it’s the easiest way to explain why I speak accentless, colloquial Japanese while wearing a face that most people in my native country don’t recognise as being in any way Japanese.
I’m a member of a Facebook Group called Hafu Japanese, with seven and a half thousand members and going strong, and the consensus in that group is that Hafu is what we are—we are half Japanese and half another ethnicity, after all—and almost everyone [in that group] is happy with [using] the moniker.
No.5
Tell us a little bit more about the recipes you feature in Meshi—alongside them you weave an intricate story about your life, exploring meaning and memory with food as an anchor. How were the recipes developed?
So many of them came into my consciousness organically. Before I was sent away to England, I’d be in the kitchen watching my mother cook, and whenever I stayed with my grandmother, I’d learn more dishes to add to my repertoire. I was seven when I started cooking under my mother’s instruction, and I learned to measure out ingredients for basic dishes by eye. Method is key in Japanese cooking—for most dishes the precise quantities are less important than the way things are cooked.
Washing and steaming rice or making a miso soup may sound fairly straightforward, but miss a few tricks and tips and you’ll end up with a sub-standard result. Those tricks and tips have been passed down through the generations, sometimes through stories or rhymes. When teaching me the quirks of steaming Japanese rice, my mother would say:
Hajime choro choro naka pappa
Akago naite mo futa toruna
Which roughly translates to:
Cook slowly to start, then boil on high heat
Don’t ever remove the lid, even if the baby cries
Cooking utensils specific to a particular dish or style of cooking are important too. Although you can make Japanese food without them, dishes like tamagoyaki (the sweetened egg on rice you get in sushi shops) and oyakodon (mother child bowl—Japanese rice topped with slices of panko-crumbed, fried pork escalopes cooked in dashi-enriched egg) are often enhanced by using a specific style of pan. My mother was an accomplished cook, and she had every utensil imaginable. I don’t have any siblings, so when she died, I inherited all of them, and still use some of them decades later. When I’m using her sesame grinding mortar and pestle, or sprinkling shichimi seven-spice from the same tin container she was using in the 60s, I feel deeply connected to her.
When I first went to university, she began filling a small notebook with a washi paper cover with the recipes she cooked most often, the ones I’d beg her to make the three times each year I was able to see her after I was sent to boarding school. She died before she could fill up that notebook, but I still have the few recipes she did manage to write down. She had a gift for drawing, and loved to draw food. The pages she filled with recipes and illustrations are precious, and some of those recipes made it into Meshi.
I sometimes wish she were still around to see the book I’ve written, and I miss her most when I’m eating a Japanese meal we used to share. After she died, I had a dream of sitting down with her at a table in a strange, quiet room above a central Tokyo railway station. We didn’t talk at all in the dream; through the windows you could see the cold, rainy night outside, and we sat and ate from a steaming yosenabe hotpot together. It was the last dream I remember having of her and I think of it as her farewell to me before she travelled further into the ether.
In a way, Meshi is my tribute to my mother and to my Japanese family. If she knew how much the Japanese food she made helped me stay connected to my native culture after being exiled from it, I know she’d be relieved; that despite my grief over the loss of my Japanese self, and my even greater grief over her death, as long as I have the food that formed the scaffolding of the human I became, she’d know I’ll be okay, wherever life takes me.
YOSENABE (WINTER HOT POT)
Serves 4
This is a warming, communal dish that’s fun to eat and easy to prepare, since most of the cooking is done at the table. You will need a butane gas–powered portable mini stove, which you can find in most Asian supermarkets. Traditionally, you cook yosenabe in a semi-glazed earthenware pot with a lid called a donabe (‘do’ means ‘earth’ or ‘clay’ and ‘nabe’ means ‘pot’). They come in different sizes and shapes to suit whatever purpose they’re being used for – a donabe to cook rice is different from one you’d use for yosenabe. The one used for yosenabe is wide and fairly shallow in comparison, usually with small handles on each side for lifting, and a close-fitting lid. There are so many ways you can put together a yosenabe meal – every family will have its favourite selection of ingredients and dipping sauces: firm-fleshed fish, like salmon or monkfish; slices of kamaboko fish paste; soft-boiled quail eggs; chicken meatballs; small chunks of roasted mochi; any kind of leafy green; prawns, squid and other seafood. The choices are endless. This is the one my mother used to make.
INGREDIENTS
100g thinly sliced lean pork loin (you can also use strips of chicken thigh or pieces of fish, such as
salmon)
6 leaves Chinese cabbage
8 large prawns, uncooked
300g firm tofu, cut into 4cm cubes
8 fresh shītake mushrooms
Handful white enoki mushrooms
½ daikon radish, peeled and cut into 2cm slices
2 Japanese spring onions or slender leeks, cut diagonally into 5cm lengths
1 bag shirataki noodles, drained (sold in the refrigerated section of most Asian food stores)
1 bunch chrysanthemum leaves, mustard greens or spinach
For the nabe broth:
4 cups dashi stock
7 tbsp shoyu
1 tbsp mirin
1 6cm square dried konbu (kelp)
1 tbsp cooking saké (use Chinese cooking wine or dry sherry if unavailable)
METHOD
For the nabe broth, you’ll need a donabe or heavy-based pan (preferably wider than it is deep) that you’ll be cooking the ingredients in at the table. Wipe the square of dried konbu with a slightly dampened clean cloth and add to the pot together with the rest of the broth ingredients. Cover the pot with its lid and set over a low heat on your kitchen stovetop to begin with. Make sure the broth doesn’t boil while the konbu is in it; turn the heat off occasionally if you can’t lower it any further.
In the meantime, prepare your dipping sauces (see recipes on the following pages) and all the ingredients you’ll be cooking in the yosenabe, arranging them attractively on large serving plates, which will go on the dining table so the nabe can be topped up with more ingredients as needed: cut leafy greens into bite-sized pieces; arrange the tofu cubes in a separate bowl, together with a slotted spoon that will make it easier to retrieve the tofu from the donabe without them falling apart.
Arrange the sliced pork on a separate plate, with its own set of cooking chopsticks or tongs.
Lay the table for everyone who’ll be sharing the hot pot: chopsticks, rice bowls, two dipping bowls for the sauces listed on the following pages, a small plate in case space is needed for extra cooked yosenabe morsels, though we always tended to put whatever we’d plucked from the nabe straight into one of our dipping sauces so we could eat it while it was still hot.
Once all the raw ingredients are prepared and the table is set, carefully transfer the donabe with its broth onto the portable stove in the middle of your dining table, and set the flame to medium low. If the contents start boiling wildly, turn it down a little; if the contents are looking listless and are taking too long to cook, turn it up.
Put a selection of all the ingredients into the pot so they can start cooking. Be mindful that some things, like the daikon and the shītake mushrooms, taste better the longer they simmer in the broth; others, like the prawns and the thinly sliced pork, are quick to cook, so care should be taken not to leave them in the pot for too long.
Serve a bowl of rice to everyone at the table; you can keep a suihanki rice cooker switched to ‘warm’ on the table, ready for top-ups. Then leave the rest to everyone else; they can select whichever morsels take their fancy from the donabe, dip them into their choice of sauce and eat with a mouthful of hot rice and maybe some pickles, too.
For Katherine Tamiko Arguile, the Japanese food her mother cooked was a portal to a part of her that sometimes felt lost in the past. In Japan, food is never just food: it expresses a complex and fascinating history, and is tied to tradition and spirituality intrinsic to Japanese culture.
Exploring the meals of her childhood through Japan’s twenty-four sekki (seasons), Katherine untangles the threads of meaning, memory and ritual woven through every glistening bowl of rice, every tender slice of sashimi and each steaming cup of green tea.
With rich, visceral prose, vivid insight and searing emotional honesty, Meshi (‘rice’ or ‘meal’) reveals the culture and spirit of one of the world’s most beloved cuisines.
Get it from Affirm Press here or at all good bookstores.