In the Kitchen
Nina Culley on Food and Fiction
Mango season is my favourite time of year. No matter where in the world we are, you’ll find Mum and I in the same position: sitting cross-legged under a whirring fan, cutting half-ripened mangoes with a paring knife. Then we dip the freshly-cut slices into prik nam pla (chilli with fish sauce) and prik glua (chilli with salt and sugar) until our stomachs scream. Dad will ask why we continue to torture ourselves, but we find ourselves unable to answer him between blurry tear-stained eyes and chilli-induced breaths.
When Mum was pregnant with me, mango and namprik (chilli sauce) was what she often craved—she’d eat it on the deck while trimming the borders of Women’s Weekly, cut-outs of tart recipes she’d later layer with chilli and soy sauce. Like many Asian migrant mothers, she spends hours in Asian grocers, gets excited by a fresh snapper at the seafood market (you can tell by their clear, bright eyes) and tucks oil-stained plastic containers of galangal and shrimp paste into my luggage whenever I visit. She can recite the names of more celebrity chefs than she can of my friends, often distinguishing them instead by the herbs or fruits growing in their front gardens: Cora becomes ‘curry-leaf girl’ and Daniel, ‘paw-paw tree guy’. Between paperbacks by Oscar Wilde, James Patterson and Lee Child, our bookshelves are crammed with faded recipe books, bookmarked by scribbled notes from old episodes of Iron Chef. Mum reads these recipes with the same ardent passion as Nigella Lawson discussing bread and cheese; while she may not be your traditional storyteller, if she’s talking food, she’s Dickens.
On a trip to London, I picked up a copy of Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen in a used bookstore with Mum in mind. It wasn’t the minimalist hot pink cover that grabbed me but the word ‘Kitchen’ in clean, monospaced font, that made me think she’d like to read it too. I thought that I might be able to tell her about it when I called her later, along with an anecdote about the bland lentil dahl and chip combination I’d had for lunch.
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Tucked in a booth by a café window, next to the darkening of the encroaching evening, rain sliding down the pane, I found commonality with Mikage Sakurai, Kitchen’s protagonist. It was from Mikage that I learnt what constitutes a ‘flawless’ katsudon: ‘good quality meat, excellent broth, the eggs and onions handled beautifully, the rice just the right firmness to hold up in the broth’. Mikage’s katsudon, not unlike Bong Joon-Ho’s jjapaguri in Parasite, is a deceptively simple yet meaningful dish. Mikage’s katsudon is the ‘Everything Bagel’ from Everything, Everywhere All At Once, Haku and Chihiro’s onigiri in Spirited Away, the jam bread from Boy and the Heron, and my mango and chilli sauce. There’s an undeniable momentousness buried in these foods when examined thematically, yet it’s the personal connection they foster that provides initial meaning.
During my wanderings through bookstores, I regularly discover new stories where food assumes a central role—there are food detectives, time-travelling coffee shops, manga with neon covers illustrated with splashing bowls of miso or noodle soup. Over the years, I’ve found myself devouring stories which feature food: Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata), In the Miso Soup (Ryu Murakami), The Kamogawa Food Detectives (Hisashi Kashiwai) and Pachinko (Min Jin Lee), to name a few examples. Some of these novels include actual recipes as if their fictional chefs are generously passing down their specialities, their rituals, and their legacies. Of course, it goes without saying that Asian literature doesn’t revolve solely around food—we’re not all David Chang or Eddie Huang. Literature published in Asia is a heterogeneous landscape: meditations on life and mortality, historical retrospections, vampires—and everything in between. But as someone who was brought up Asian and taught to love food, I can’t help but notice food more often, and will pause, without fail, to vicariously savour the sesame oil on cucumber salad, the glossy green of pandan desserts piled behind convenience store windows or the hearty broths within the pages of my favourite novels.
The central location in the novella in Kitchen is unsurprisingly the kitchen. Within its familiar confines, themes of loss and ensuing connections emerge, manifesting in the meals thoughtfully prepared and shared. Here, Mikage struggles with the passing of her grandmother, the last remaining member of her family. Seeking solace, she finds herself drawn to the hum of her own refrigerator until she’s invited to stay with her grandmother’s friends, Yuichi Tanabe and his mother, Eriko. Their kitchen offers Mikage an immediate sense of peace: ‘But here was a kitchen, some plants, someone sleeping in the next room, perfect quiet … this was the best.’ Her affection for kitchens is established from page one (‘the place I like best in this world is the kitchen’) and this passion later leads Mikage to make a career out of cooking; the kitchen becomes a space where she feels most confident in the face of instability.
Mikage’s character is not particularly remarkable. She only truly becomes alive when she interacts with the food she encounters, like a conduit through which the ordinary kitchen metamorphoses into something special and dreamlike. Through Mikage, Yoshimoto hones in on the ineffability and warmth of food through prose that is paradoxically deadpan yet tender, stretching food scenes like clingwrap over leftovers, delicately measuring the passing of time by the canteens the characters encounter or the number of teas they drink. When Mikage temporarily moves in with Yuichi, they each find comfort in their shared sense of isolation: Mikage is now effectively orphaned, while Yuichi spends much of his time alone as his mother works evenings at a local nightclub. Yoshimoto navigates this isolation by using food to spur character interaction, conflict, and development: it is the contemplative late-night dinners and the sounds of chewing, slurping, and the clattering of plates that create space for connection, a way in which Mikage, Yuichi and Eriko can consider their fears and grief.
Even Yuichi’s mother is not exempt from this sense of loneliness. During a flashback where Eriko visits her terminally ill husband in the hospital, she brings him a pineapple to breathe life back into the room. Yet, in a moment of quiet contemplation as the pineapple’s frond brushes against her face, she realises: ‘... in this world, tonight, only the pineapple and I understand each other … we were the only two living things sharing that loneliness.’ The symbolic nature of the pineapple is different across cultures. It represents hospitality in Thai culture, while in China it signifies good luck. For Eriko it’s a physical reminder of life and connection.
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Growing up, Mum didn’t read me bedtime stories, commend me on my grades or wrap me in hugs. Even now, carefully curated menus on tea-stained scrap paper that she tucks inside Aldi catalogues replace my mother’s ‘I love yous’. Between discounted hams and Belgium’s finest biscuits you’ll find scribbled mentions of sago, som tum and steamed barramundi topped with coriander and lime. She prepares my favourite meals, offering seconds and thirds and forths. She’ll also frequently ask if I’ve eaten, giving me worried up-and-down looks and the extra scoop of rice if I say that I haven’t. Sweet tea and rice are her cures for headaches and heartbreak; extra padding if you have both. Now, as an adult who has moved away from the family home, I send pictures of my well-garnished green curries atop Thai-branded jasmine rice, because it is our way and in that way, we continue dining together. Likewise in Kitchen, Mikage demonstrations affection by scrubbing Yuichi’s and Eriko’s kitchen benches and filling the fridge with their preferred snacks. Eventually food becomes each character’s love language. ‘When I think about it now, it was because of my cooking that the three of us ate together as often as we did; it was a good summer,’ Mikage thinks to herself as she recalls how she first taught herself to cook.
But when Eriko is murdered by a patron at the nightclub midway through the novel, it’s this sharing of food that returns Yuichi to life’s rhythms. He and Mikage split bread and coffee, and she becomes his lifeline: she whips up dishes for him and listens as he drifts off to sleep, to the sounds of the dishwasher. Here, Yoshimoto uses the familiar cadences around cooking to address life’s challenges and changes. The pounding of a mortar and pestle, the purr of a crowded restaurant, or the in-betweenness of an underground subway food court has always offered me that sense of comfort too. However, for the ones doing the cooking, such as in the case of Mikage, it’s sometimes the only way in which they can find expression.
Food and the comfort it brings ends up subsuming sex in Kitchen. Though Mikage and Yuichi begin as friends, they eventually foster a deeper love through the meals they enjoy together. Perhaps because both characters are numbed by grief, this love isn’t necessarily romantic or sexual; in fact the characters refrain from sexual contact altogether (‘even though we’re standing side by side, even though we’re closer to each other than anyone else in the world, even though we’re friends forever, we don’t join hands.’). Mikage prefers to sleep on a fold-out bed near the hum of the fridge and eat sweet and sour pork and Chinese dumplings with Yuichi until late. Towards the end of the novella Mikage makes the decision to pursue a romantic relationship with Yuichi and it’s the katsudon that she orders on a business trip that catalyses this. As she waits for the owner of the eatery to prepare her order, she calls Yuichi and complains about the food she’s been eating: ‘it’s tofu, tofu and more tofu’: ‘savoury custard, tofu baked with miso, fried tofu, citron, [and] sesame seeds’, i.e. ‘monk’s food’. At this Yuichi tells her that he’s starving as the inn he’s staying in only serves food that he hates. Later, feeling guilty for ordering a meal without him, Mikage admits that [she] ‘couldn’t destroy Yuichi’s picture of us starving together’. She decides to order him his own katsudon, travelling in a taxi past midnight and presenting him with the cold takeaway container in a climax that underscores the centrality of food over the bedroom. Ultimately it is this particular dish with its balance of flavours that subliminally speaks for Mikage: ‘Yuichi eating his katsudon, me drinking my tea, the darkness no longer harbouring death. And so it was all right again.’
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Before I’d fully realised it through literature, it was Zhang Huan’s 12 Square Meters (1994) which kindled a passion for how food can be politicised through and alongside art. In Huan’s piece, the Chinese artist coated his naked body in honey and fish oil and sat on a pedal stool in a public latrine, completely immobile for an hour. By subjecting himself to the stench of the toilet and the swarm of flies that clung to his sticky body, Zhang was demonstrating how he had accepted his identity and his circumstances, which were at that stage characterised by poverty and struggle. A few years earlier, Rirkrit Tiravanija, one of my favourite performance artists, adopted a less physically demanding approach. Untitled Empty Parenthesis (1989) saw Tiravanija showcasing the remnants from a green curry, later expanding this concept in Untitled (Free) (1992), where he transformed an emptied office into a kitchen, inviting gallery visitors to partake in a Thai green vegetable curry he would serve. Continuously pushing the limits of conventional galleries, Tiravanija’s work, such as Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Green (2010), transforms these spaces into hubs for communal engagement and consumption, particularly as the installation would include a large-scale mural drawn on the walls over the course of the exhibition that referenced protests against Thai government policies.
We can see that food motifs can be used to represent acceptance and political resistance, as well as the preservation of culture, where food are symbols of memory, emotions, history, power, and consumption. Food has also been used as political symbols outside of the art world, such as in the 1938 Rice Bowl Movement, where Chinese-Americans orchestrated ‘Bowl of Rice parties’ to raise money for millions of Chinese civilians suffering from disease, violence and starvation amid the Second Sino-Japanese War. Rice was used to decorate banners at fundraising events within the crowded streets of San Francisco’s and New York’s Chinatowns. Around the same time, pad thai was invented in Thailand after then-Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkhram sought to forge a unified national identity and address rice shortages. It’s still a culturally significant now (and a great way to tell the quality of a restaurant’s food). Food can be depicted in similar ways within literature to examine cultural complexities and promote meaningful discourse towards engagement and revolution.
In Kitchen, both the food that the characters eat and the kitchen space they occupy hold deep meaning. The kitchen itself is simultaneously a site of domesticity and independence and can generally indicate the economic status of a household. Mikage’s description of her ideal kitchen (‘dirty with vegetable droppings all over the floor’) alludes to a modest upbringing, which is further illustrated when she expresses surprise at the frequent purchases of new technology by Yuichi and his mother. Conversely, in Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, food acts as a barometer of the family’s ascending generational wealth—namely the presence of rice, first a scarce treat before becoming a routine element of the next generation’s diet. More than just a reflection of equity gaps or food politics more broadly, food choices mark cultural identity in that we are shaped by what we choose to eat, what is available to eat, and how a dish is prepared. It is through the ubiquity of food and cuisine that the multiplicities and histories of Asian identities finds expression and elucidation, becoming both a link to the past and a connection to ‘home’, anchoring people—migrants or otherwise—to traditions and family.
In Michelle Zauner's memoir Crying in H Mart, this ‘home’ is found through H Mart, a popular Korean grocery chain in parts of the United States. The giant vats of peeled garlic, as well as freedom from the single ‘ethnic’ section in western grocery stores connects the writer to her recently deceased mother, as well as her Korean identity. When I first picked up the book, I reread the first page so many times I can still recite lines like: ‘H Mart is where parachute kids flock to find the brand of instant noodles that reminds them of home.’ My version of this is the jumbo packet of Mama brand shrimp tom yum noodles. It takes me forty minutes, there and back, to visit one of the only Asian grocers that stocks the creamy shrimp flavour I like, so I buy a basketful, later going home to cook it, emptying the seasoning sachets into boiling water swirling with lemongrass and lime leaves. Once the bowl is garnished with bok choy, lime, and extra chilli, I’ll take a picture for Mum, and wait for her text back saying ‘look like the real one’—the ‘real one’ here being the bowls of noodles you can buy from any corner stall in Thailand. In the subsequent pages of Crying in H Mart, Zauner recalls food courts with their tray stations, bubbling soups, and rice cakes as the perfect place to be a wallflower while slurping black bean noodles and thinking about the people you miss. Curling up with a novel that takes its time describing dribbly sweet and sour pork or the steam that rises from yunomi teacups produces a similar olfactory experience, at least for the imagination. The cosy kitchen that Yuichi and Mikage make ramen in late at night in Kitchen may very well blur into one of your own, and no matter where you are, you’ll be able to ‘taste’ your own version of Mikage’s katsudon.
Food serves not just as a connector but also a powerful metaphorical divider in literature, and if done effectively can have a disparate or unsettling quality. In narratives such as Kitchen, Eriko’s murder plunges Yuichi into a spiral of hunger and detachment, driving a temporary wedge between him, Mikage and their community. ‘Even when he was standing next to me, I had felt as if Yuichi were in some other world … and the other world was darker than the place where I was. It was like the bottom of the sea.’ It is only when Mikage cooks him a feast—deep fried tofu, steamed greens and sweet and sour pork—and later delivers him the takeaway katsudon, that Yuichi begins to reclaim a semblance of normalcy.
Meanwhile, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian delves into central character Yeong-hye’s visceral aversion to meat, which acts as a catalyst for the gruesome events that later take place within the novel. Across three sections, Yeong-hye’s unwavering refusal to eat meat assumes a symbolic dismissal of patriarchal hegemony and societal norms, which to some becomes regarded as an act of defiance or insubordination that must be tempered. Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism is later tied to her sexuality, deemed deviant and improper by those eager to discard her. This blend of food and corporeal representation crafts the novel into the body horror domain, which is not dissimilar to Zhang Huan’s performance works. Yeong-hye’s somatic metamorphosis after she rejects meat, food, and eventually society evokes a profound sense of her humanity being systematically stripped away, layer by layer. In this sense, the woman doesn’t eat her food and therefore she is no longer one of us.
We can also see these dynamics play out in Sayaka Murata’s transgressive short story collection Life Ceremony. Here, Murata positions food as alien, while challenging their definition(s) and using its symbolic power to question cultural norms and conventions. For example, the story ‘Eating the City’ explores peculiar norms around food and foraging, while ‘Magnificent Spread’ comments on the ways certain types of food can be unappealing depending on how you were raised and the personal and societal rules that dictate which foods you consume, echoing broader societal tensions about which cuisines or foods are considered ‘normal’ or ‘gross’, interrogating the implications for when food divides rather than connects.
While western perceptions of Asian food have evolved past romanticisation and ostracisation (I won’t bore you with that all-too familiar lunch box story), stereotypes linger. Still, the increasing availability of translated and reprinted stories from writers in Asia show us that food is multifaceted, especially as it propels plot, shapes character depth, and reflects cultural nuances. Above all, food consistently emerges as a nexus for connection. And so, alongside Mikage, I find myself regarding the caked black lineal on kitchen floors—the mark of a well-oiled, well-breathed kitchen—with awe. The next time Dad asks why I choose to give myself mouth ulcers from the mango and nam prik, I’ll tell him it’s not just about the mango.
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Nina Culley is a writer, critic, educator and horror enthusiast based in Naarm. She’s the Communicatons and Studios' Director of Melbourne Young Writers' Studio/Story Studios Australia where she also teaches creative writing. You can find her works and criticisms in Kill Your Darlings, Aniko Press, Mascara, Timeout, and other places.