Recently published in paperback, this is a delicious book in more ways than one. It is so unusual and so beautifully written that you’re drawn effortlessly into lead character Rinko’s life. There are no chapters and you spend the entire book inside her silent world. You could say that very little happens. After all, the story is seemingly simple; Rinko returns to her home village and sets up a restaurant. Yet so much happens within the brevity of the piece and this together with the descriptions of the food, the cooking and the menus she designs is as inspiring as it is enchanting.
The story begins with a shocking discovery. Rinko returns home from her work at a local restaurant to discover her apartment emptied of everything. This includes her boyfriend of three years, the money they’d been saving and all her kitchen tools, among them the hundred year old pestle and mortar she inherited from her grandmother. She has no choice but to return to her village and the mother she turned her back on over ten years ago as a fifteen year old girl. With that jarring shock of discovery that everything she’s ever owned and loved is gone, Rinko searches for things and as each is remembered and described, there’s little actual mourning as she matter-of-factly closes up her life in the city and boards a bus to her home village, where she starts again. Everyone deals with grief in their own way and Rinko loses her ability to speak. It is, of course, food that is her saving grace, teaching her about life, living, grieving and moving on. Living with her mother with whom she’s always had a difficult relationship is again illustrated through food and the different ways of eating and cooking. Choosing what to eat becomes a language itself and one that Rinko uses to communicate with. When Rinko decides to open up her own restaurant in the village, she discovers more about the healing powers of food and the transformations possible through cooking with love.
There are so many powerful descriptions of emotions and food in the book that it is pointless to try to describe them to you; you’ll have to read it. As Rinko cries through making a pomegranate curry for her old friend Kuma, you feel you can actually smell, touch and taste the meal she’s making. Your mouth will water. When she cooks for the Mistress, the matchmaker’s clients and the young girl who wants a boy to fall in love with her, the menus are delicately tailored and the stories behind them weave in and out with the tales of each individual, so many of them a moving history.
But this is also about family and love and taking care. About realising that love shows itself in numerous ways and not always in the obvious. Rinko’s relationship with her mother is engaging and painfully realistic. As hidden secrets are revealed and Rinko learns to trust herself and her talent, I defy you not to be moved by the ending. I cried on the tube on the way home. Luckily it was London and so naturally nobody noticed, but I couldn’t help it and I’m not sure anyone can get to the last bit with dry eyes. Oh and do check out the author’s blog [which Google will automatically translate for you]. She offers daily recipes of Japanese cuisine that will inspire you as you read.
ISBN: 978-1-84688-149-7 · £11.99 · Paperback
