Japanese Studies

ISSN: 1037-1397 (Print) 1469-9338 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjst20

Romancing Food: The Gastronomic Quest in Early

Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature
TOMOKO AOYAMA
To cite this article: TOMOKO AOYAMA (2003) Romancing Food: The Gastronomic Quest
in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature, Japanese Studies, 23:3, 251-264, DOI:
10.1080/1037139032000156333
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1037139032000156333

Published online: 03 Jun 2010.

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Japanese Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3, December 2003

Romancing Food: The Gastronomic Quest in Early

Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature1

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TOMOKO AOYAMA, University of Queensland

This paper examines four pre-war examples of gastronomic fiction: Murai Gensais
Kuidoraku, Koda Rohans Chinsenkai, Tanizaki Junichiros Bishoku kurabu, and
Okamoto Kanokos Shokuma. Notably, these stories of gastronomic quest are not necessarily
about what Brillat-Savarin called gourmandise, in contrast to gluttony and voracity. In many
cases the quest goes totally against Brillat-Savarins physiology and heads towards destructionof the body, the economy, and romantic and other relationships. The majority of pre-war
Japanese gastronomic fiction seems to ignore or reject heterosexual love. The passion for food
may be associated with eroticism; but the stronger that passion is, and the more ardent the
gastronomic quest, the less the space that remains for romantic love affairs. In other words,
romancing food tends to go against, rather than favour, romantic love. I shall argue that the
homosocial nature of pre-war Japanese gourmandise and literature has brought this about.
The last couple of decades in Western publishing have seen the rise of gluterature,
eatlit, and Mills and Food Romance.2 In cinema and television, too, the combination
of food and romantic or erotic love has gained huge currency, in both literal and
figurative senses. This is true not only in the West but also in many Asian countries
including Japan, where eatlit and other cultural products to do with food are very
popular. Some of these do include romantic love stories. The most internationally
known examples may be Yoshimoto Bananas novel Kitchen and Itami Juzos comic
film masterpiece Tanpopo. The subject of this paper, however, is not such recent
popular examples but less well-known, in fact, mostly obscure, gastronomic fiction
from pre-war Japan.
In relation to the relative obscurity of the texts we are going to examine, perhaps it
should be mentioned here that in traditional Japanese culture, eatingconsidered, if at
all, as an illegitimate child, or as a concubine or a mistress, as Kaiko Takeshi has
noted3enjoyed a status far lower than that of drinking.4 Generally speaking, to talk
about food, to desire food, to be at all interested in food was regarded as vulgar,

This paper forms part of an ongoing project on food and eating in twentieth-century Japanese literature.
I should like to thank the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland for a
Faculty Fellowship in 2002, which enabled me to prepare an earlier version of this paper, presented at
the Plural Romance conference (34 April 2002) at Monash University.
2
These terms were coined by David Dale in his article Gluttons for the good life, 6.
3
Kaiko, Saigo no bansan, 139. This collection of essays (first serialised in a magazine from 1977 to 1979),
is certainly a pioneering work on the themes of food and eating in literature. Its chapter entitled Nihon
no sakka-tachi no shokuyoku (The appetite of Japanese writers) (ibid., 127153) includes discussion of
some gastronomic texts, including Tanizakis Bishoku kurabu. As the books title suggests, however, the
volume tends to focus on problematic eating in extreme situations rather than on pleasurable eating.
4
For this, see Aoyama, The cooking man in modern Japanese literature, 155156.
ISSN 1037-1397 print/ISSN 1469-9338 online/03/030251-14 2003 Japanese Studies Association of Australia
DOI: 10.1080/1037139032000156333

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Tomoko Aoyama

especially in adult men. The uninhibited eating and food writing of contemporary Japan
seems to have been given its impetus by a reaction against the repression and oppression of appetite during the war and against the understandable preoccupation with
food for survival. Even at the beginning of the gourmet boom, however, the pursuit of
delicacies occupies a very limited place in literature. Serious literaturenotoriously
interests itself in misery more than in happiness, and few examples of happiness
associated with food are to be found, whereas hunger, starvation, conflict, marginalisation, and other sorts of problems involving food are prominent themes.
The pursuit of culinary or gastronomic pleasure, however, is not absent from
Japanese literature and is not necessarily confined to the period of the gourmet boom.
It can be found, though one has to seek it out, throughout the twentieth century.
Gastronomic fiction usually takes the form of a quest for rarer ingredients, better
cooking techniques, and so on. It may be comic, serious, satirical, witty, romantic,
melodramatic, pornographic, aesthetic, lyrical, decadent, didactic, and so on, or several
of these at once. It may advocate the pleasure of eating and cooking or it may take an
ambiguous or sceptical stance towards those pursuits. Notably, these stories of gastronomic quest are not necessarily about what Brillat-Savarin called gourmandise, in
contrast to gluttony and voracity. In many cases the quest goes totally against BrillatSavarins physiology and heads towards destructionof the body, the economy, and
human relationships, romantic or otherwise. Also notable is that the Japanese gastronomic novel seldom pursues the uniqueness of Japanese taste or culture; it often shows
close affiliation to European, Chinese, American, or some other culture. The drive to
consume, adopt, and explore imported and native forms, techniques, and themes is of
course shared by both literature and gastronomy.
But where is romance in all this? As we shall see, the majority of pre-war Japanese
gastronomic fiction seems to ignore or reject heterosexual love. The passion for food
may be associated with eroticism; but the stronger that passion is, and the more ardent
the gastronomic quest, the less the space that remains for romantic love. In other
words, romancing food tends to go against, rather than favour, romantic love. Why
should this be? I shall argue that the homosocial nature of pre-war Japanese gourmandise and literature has caused this. Male homosocial desire, of course, is part of the
subtitle of Eve Sedgwicks study Between Men, in which she explains that the term is
applied to such activities as male bonding, which may, as in our society, be
characterized by intense homophobia, fear and hatred of homosexuality.5 Such homophobic implications are not an issue in this paper; instead, we shall see how gastronomy
reflects, and at the same time reinforces, male bonding. This is obvious in the second
and third texts discussed below; in the first and the last cases there seem to be some
possibilities for breaking the homosocial tradition, and yet, as we shall see, these
possibilities do not develop fully into heterosociality.
The Gastro-Enlightenment Novel
Murai Gensais (18631927) Kuidoraku (Gourmandism, 1903) is one of the earliest
examples of the modern gastronomic novel. It was initially serialised daily in the Hochi
shinbun from 2 January to 27 December 1903, and was subsequently published in four
volumes, Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, which sold some 100,000

Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, 1.

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253

copies.6 It was adapted for theatre in 1905, with the audience participating in tasting
the food cooked on stage.7 Thus at the very beginning of the century the gastronomic
novel was closely tied to the media and popular culture.
Kuidoraku welcomes Western cooking, and claims to present it in its authentic state
rather than Japanese adaptations (or imitations). Gensai includes in the course of his
story recipes ranging from sweetbreads and roast lamb to rice pudding and blancmange, all of which were completely new to his audience. He had learned these during
his stay in San Francisco (18841887) and later, while writing this novel, from
professional chefs. Evident throughout the novel is his intention to introduce his
audience to Western cuisine, which he holds to be more nutritious, hygienic, practical,
modern and democratic than traditional Japanese fare. In the novel this is done through
his mouthpieces, the young aspiring writer Nakagawa and his sister, O-Towa. They
provide cooking lessons and catering for their upper-class patrons and friends, and
discuss not only dinner party menus but various other topics related to food and
cooking.
Romance is not completely forgotten in this pioneering gastronomic novel; indeed,
the key to its commercial success may well have been the combination of the new
recipes with the familiar story of love facing obstacles. The couple involved are O-Towa
hara, who is being pressured by his family and relatives
and her brothers best friend O
to marry his cousin, O-Dai. While O-Towa is not only beautiful but also, like her
brother, highly knowledgeable and articulate in culinary matters, O-Dai is presented as
an ugly, fat, ignorant, uncouth woman with a heavy country accent and appalling taste
in food and everything else. The contrast between the two young women is graphically
and emphatically depicted both in the novel and in its illustrations. It should be noted
here, however, that O-Towas beauty has only secondary importance in the story; the
most important quality of this heroine is her cooking. If O-Towa does not quite accord
hara, on
with the image of a romantic heroine, she does not completely go against it. O
the other hand, is hardly a dashing young man: he is depicted as a short, not-so-bright
(he failed twice before graduating from university) glutton with a huge paunch, though
hara, an ordinary surname written with the
with a heart of gold. In fact, his surname O
characters for big and field, is an obvious pun on big stomach, and his personal
name Mitsuru means full. Similarly, O-Dai implies the price or the cost of the
hara received from his wealthy uncle (i.e. O-Dais father) to study
financial support O
at Tokyo Imperial University.
So despite the conventional romantic theme of complications arising from family and
financial matters, one would hesitate to call this story a romance. And this is not simply
haras physical features and his gluttony. His attraction to O-Towa is not
because of O
exactly love at first sight; it begins even before he actually meets her, when he hears

6
The texts used for this paper are the 1976 reprint of the 19031904 publication of the complete novel
in four volumes, referred to hereafter as Kuidoraku. The first volume in this reprint shows that between
12 June and 16 August 1903 it went through as many as 11 printings. To the contemporary reader,
however, Kuidoraku no reshipi is more accessible. This is an abridged, slightly modernised, and annotated
version of Vol. 3 of the novel. Recently, Shibata Shoten, the publisher of the 1976 reprint, made the
complete edition, complete with illustrations, available on the Internet. Although this Internet site gives
the later reading of the title, Shokudoraku, I cite the reading used in its original publication, i.e. Kuidoraku.
7
According to Gensais daughter Murai Yoneko (Appendix to Kuidoraku, 37), the kabuki actor Onoe
Baiko VI played the part of O-Towa and cooked chou a` la cre`me for the audience in the Kabukiza theatre.
See also Yamamoto Natsuhikos commentary Reizoko girai, in Murai, Kuidoraku no reshipi, 305.

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Tomoko Aoyama

about her extraordinary cooking skills. Love on hearsay may not surprise the reader of
The Tale of Genji, but it is by no means common in modern fiction. Furthermore, that
hearsay is not about the ladys beauty or elegance but about her cooking prowess. At
first O-Towa is uninterested in him, or for that matter, in any man, or in the idea of
romance. After her brother and his other close friend Koyama and his wife all
haras honesty and sincerity, however, she (rather sudenthusiastically commend O
denly) decides that he is the man to marry and build a happy family with, although this
is precisely when his cousin arrives from the deep North to marry him. The only person
who is unambiguously and literally uncontrollably in love seems to be O-Dai, who is
overtly and crudely shown as an embarrassing and annoying figure. The message of the
novel is that irrational and inferior conventions such as arranged marriages between
cousins should be replaced by pragmatic, rational, and democratic alternatives and that
proper education and guidance are vitally important to avoid undesirable consequences.
Nakagawa argues (echoing strongly Brillat-Savarins gastronomy) that in order to
advance the nations civilisation one should civilise ones own home and that in order
to civilise ones home one should civilise oneself. For this, he continues, one should
improve what one eats daily.8 Given that this work was written on the eve of the
Russo-Japanese War, Nakagawas patriotic internationalism seems interesting. While
admitting Japan was lagging behind in science and technology, he sees a bright future
for the nation in eclectic adaptation:
[] It would be sour grapes to say that Japanese cooking has the essence of
the nation and that there is no reason for us to learn Western cooking. It
would, of course, be imprudent to follow blindly everything Western and to
abandon even the good things about Japanese ways. Doubtless our duty is to
observe and judge things with a fair mind. We writers should never be
entrapped by sentiments; we must lead the public according to reason. []
Observed fairly, physiological studies of food are more advanced in the West
than in Japan. [] Within what we call Western cuisine there is a wide range
[]. Western food in Japan combines all the merits of various types of cooking
[]. In future, too, we must endeavour to gather the culinary essence from all
over the world and develop Japanese-style Western dishes.9
The last part of the quoted passage reminds us of another text, Shosetsu shinzui (The
Essence of the Novel, 1885), which was written by the founding father of the modern
Japanese novel, Tsubouchi Shoyo (18591935). In this seminal text Shoyo rejects tales
and stories from previous eras for their alleged lack of integrity and originality, and
advocates their replacement with the modern Japanese shosetsu, the term he adopts as
the translation for the novel in its (arguably) European sense. With his guidance and
with careful planning on the part of writers, he claims, our fiction will finally surpass
the European novel and take a glorious place on the altar of the arts along with
painting, music and poetry.10
The discourse of modernisation, Westernisation, and civilisation is supposed to be
egalitarian, and women like O-Towa do participate in it. Nevertheless it reminds us of
the common phrase otoko no roman, male romanticism, or mens dreams and yearning

Kuidoraku, Vol. 3, 115. Also found in Kuidoraku no reshipi, 40.

Kuidoraku, Vol. 3, 273274. An abridged version is found in Kuidoraku no reshipi, 96.
10
Cited and translated by Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, Vol. 1, 102.
9

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for adventurous pursuits. Women may assist with or contribute to such a dream but
only under the strict guidance of rational and fair-minded men like Nakagawa.
Indeed, on another occasion he preaches about the importance of producing the most
progressive women, taking the best of Japanese, Chinese, and Western merits.11 In this
sense women are treated just like food in his modernisation discourse, and advocates of
equal rights and love marriage are regarded as enemies of this grand scheme of
advancing womens education. As a writer, Nakagawa is particularly hostile to what he
regards as the evil, frivolous, and poisonous romantic fiction that is becoming popular
among young women.12
Between culinary discussions and lessons, Nakagawa and his friends try to extricate
hara from his unwanted engagement. Their argument against intermarriage, based on
O
hara
Western eugenics, however, has no effect on O-Dai and her parents. When O
himself has nearly given up hope, enter the deus ex machina in the form of Viscount
hara to Europe to study
Hiroumi (i.e. wide ocean), who not only is happy to send O
domestic education but is also eager to marry his own daughter (and O-Towas cooking
student) Tamae to Nakagawa. Another hint of romance? Hardly. Nakagawa accepts
this offer on one condition: that he and Lady Tamae exchange their health certificates
instead of traditional engagement gifts. Hiroumi offers to send O-Towa, too, to Europe
for a few years as it would be even more beneficial to the nation if such an able woman
acquired advanced knowledge of and the technology of feeding and nurturing a healthy
population. So the future of Japan seems promising both in culinary matters and in
domestic education, and there remains plenty of material for the sequels to the novel.
The Gastro-Comic Novel
Despite its didacticism, or perhaps because of it, Kuidoraku did not impress every
contemporary reader. Koda Rohans short story Chinsenkai (The Delicacy Competition, 1904) is a comic-satirical response to Gensais popular gastronomic enlightenment. Rohan (18671947), Gensais junior by four years, had already firmly established
his name as a talented and erudite writer. Chinsenkai is by no means Rohans
representative work but it does exemplify his use of gastronomic knowledge in fiction.
The entire story consists of dialogues, monologues, and conversation among characters
who are given comic and demonstrative names such as Chokosai (pert), Muteki
(invincible), Gaman (endurance) and so on. All this clearly goes back to the comic
tradition of the Edo scribblers (writers of playful gesaku) and performing artists, a
tradition labelled frivolous and worthless by Shoyo and others eager to develop a
culture suitable for a modern nation. At the beginning of the story Chokosai explains
how he has decided to organise a gourmet competition with five other gentlemen:
[] It all started like this. You know theres a popular novel called Kuishinbo
[a glutton, an obvious parody of Kuidoraku], dont you? Some ignorant
bumpkin of a gentleman has given me a copy of this as an end-of-year gift.
Having nothing much to do, I read it and then it dawned on me. The book
itself is rather serious and not much fun. For seasoned debaters like us its like
drinking plain boiled water. So I thought of this little rebellion: wouldnt it be
nice if five or six of us got together for a New Year entertainment, bringing all

11
12

Kuidoraku, Vol. 2, 218.

Ibid., 50.

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Tomoko Aoyama

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sorts of truly rare delicaciesthe kinds of delicacies you cant find in the
book?13
So the delicacies competition is a rebellion against the serious, pragmatic, modern, and
supposedly democratic gastronomy of Kuidoraku. Once this is mentioned, however,
Rohans story moves on to caricature the self-proclaimed gourmands, each of whom is
evidently interested mainly in surpassing the others in his display of gastronomic
connoisseurship. They are so preoccupied with their gastronomic rivalry that it never
occurs to them that their pursuit is ludicrous, which is obvious to the people around
them and to the reader. Mrs Gamando, for instance, advises her husband not to attend
the planned gourmet meeting as it is not only silly but possibly life threatening. If he
still insists on going, she says, he should cover himself with a large life insurance policy.
Mrs Gamandos fears come true: on the day of the competition the contestants
present truly rare delicacies such as python wine, monkey lips, steamed toads, and the
legendary Cantonese delicacy of live honey-fed baby mice. The participants not only
have to eat and drink what the others have brought but must also display the depth and
breadth of their knowledge. As the party continues, it becomes more and more like a
competition in fearlessness and endurance than one of gourmandise. So there is no
room for romance here. Mrs Gamando demands life insurance, and the young and sexy
mistress of the organiser Chokosai simply leaves him and his companions to their
pathetic competition.
This ludicrous story of ludicrous gourmands seems to suggest two important aspects
of the gastronomic pursuit. First, as Shibusawa Tatsuhiko has pointed out, there is a
strong connection between gourmandise and the play element of homo ludens.14 As we
have seen, Chokosai finds the popular novel Kuishinbo too serious and not much fun.
The story of Chinsenkai is to bring in and explore the play element that Gensais novel
lacks. Second, quite unlike the gourmandise of Brillat-Savarin and Murai Gensai, the
tendency is toward excess, eccentricity, and transgression.
Play, in Huizingas terms, is a free activity standing quite consciously outside
ordinary life as being not serious, but at the same time absorbing the player
intensely and utterly.15 The members of the Chinsenkai are certainly deeply absorbed
in their play, which also shows other characteristics pointed out by Huizinga, such as
its superfluous and leisurely nature, its lack of material interest, its temporal and spatial
boundaries, and its promotion of the formation of social groupings which tend to
surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world
by disguise or other means.16 The social grouping of Chinsenkai is a homosocial one,
and the competition clearly shows the basic factors of play, that is, contests, performances, exhibitions, challenges, preenings, struttings and showings-off, pretences, and
binding rules.17 Notably, many of these are commonly seen in romance, but the centre
of the competition in Chinsenkai is not love but food. The women in the story are not
so much being excluded from the play as simply too sensible to join in, although this
kind of representation of women can certainly be regarded as deriving from male
homosociality.

13

Koda Rohan, Chinsenkai, in Nanjo, Bishoku, 5354.

Shibusawa, Hanayakana shokumotsu shi, 73.
15
Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 32.
16
Ibid., 2632.
17
Ibid., 67.
14

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257

The second tendency of the gastronomic novel is closely related to some of the
characteristics of play such as its freedom and intensity, but it may breach or transgress
the boundaries and rules of play. As the gastronomic competition or quest intensifies,
the original search for delicious food may be twisted or transformed into a search for
more and more extraordinary food, and even for the unsavoury, unappetising, and
inedible. This can offer ideal material not only for a comedy, a satire, a fantasy, or a
thriller, but also for serious fiction. Modern readers might also assume its use in
romance, but such an application does not seem to have been explored in pre-war
gastronomic fiction.

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The Gourmet Mystery, or the Aesthetic of the Slime/Sublime

Like Rohans Chinsenkai, Tanizaki Junichiros short story Bishoku kurabu (The
Gourmet Club, 1919)18 shows clear signs of homosocial play elements as well as the
tendency to extremity and transgression of boundaries. Like Chinsenkai, this has long
been regarded as a minor work in the corpus of the celebrated novelist. It only relatively
recently started to attract some attention in accordance with the so-called gourmet
boom. That it deals with food, the topic traditionally regarded as unsuitable for serious
literature, may well have been one of the reasons for this neglect. That it does not fall
into the genre of realistic or autobiographical fiction or any other genre of accepted
serious fiction is another. Whereas Rohans story emphasises the comic-satirical,
however, Bishoku kurabu combines detective story-like suspense with a detailed
analysis of sense-impressions.
The Club, like the Chinsenkai, consists of five gentlemen of leisure, for whom
eating is not a matter of life-sustaining necessity but a quest for as yet unknown
delicacies. The opening sentence of the story states that their obsession with food is just
as strong as their obsession with beautiful women; they would be willing to pay a good
cook as much money as they would to monopolise a top-class geisha. Women are
compared to food again, this time clearly as commodities and the prize in mens
obsessive pursuit of pleasure. The parallel between food and women, however, is not
pursued any further; women appear in the story essentially as food or its extension only.
The single focus of the story is the gastronomic pursuit of these men who seek stronger
and stronger stimuli and compete with one another in their search for new and better
tastes. Unlike those in Rohans story, the Club members are too serious and sincere
about their quest to try to trick each other or make fun of each other.
Tanizaki, a noted gourmand (and glutton) himself,19 often names actual restaurants
in his fiction. Readers can visit these restaurants and try the various delicacies consumed by the Makioka sisters, the mad old diarist, and so on. Bishoku kurabu,
however, does not serve as a restaurant guide. The members have long been satiated
with the delicacies offered by famous restaurants. They are desperate to discover
something new:
They were of course sick to death of Japanese food, and as for Western food,

18

The English translation of this story by Paul McCarthy is included in Tanizaki, The Gourmet Club: A
Sextet. In Tanizakis text Gastronomer Club is given as the English version of the Clubs name (Tanizaki
Junichiro zenshu, Vol. 6, 167).
19
This is recorded in Tanizakis granddaughter (in fact, his third wife Matsukos granddaughter)
Watanabe Taworis collection of essays, Hana wa sakura, sakana wa tai: sofu Tanizaki Junichiro no omoide.

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they knew they could never find the real thing unless they actually went
abroad. There remained Chinese foodthat rich cuisine said to be the most
developed and most varied in the world; but to them, even that had become
as tasteless and boring as a glass of water.20
This provides the perfect framework for an adventure story or mystery. Indeed,
descriptions of dark alleys in Tokyo, an encounter with a group of mysterious Chinese
residents, and a meeting place that has secret opium dens do remind us of Victorian
detective novels.
And mystery is an essential part of the ultimate gastronomy in this story, which tells
us that in order to taste something one needs to use not just the mouth and the tongue
but the eyes, ears, nose, skin, and in fact the whole body. The appreciation of food thus
means inference and judgment based on multiple sensations. There is a paradox here,
however. The gastronomic mystery, once solved, is no longer a mystery and loses its
charm and significance. (All this, again, reminds us of a paradox in romance.)
How do the Club members and the mysterious Chinese gourmands solve this
problem? They create and maintain mystery by careful preparation and calculation as
well as by means of various unspoken rules. The diners are kept literally in darkness for
a long time before they are served with the mystery food. The reader is told that this
is not simply for its theatrical effect but because in this way they can sharpen their
appetites and senses. The food is never clearly definable even after tasting. It may taste
like one thing at first, but when belched, it may produce a completely different and
exquisite taste. Various borders such as those between food and its receptacles, the
edible and the inedible, the eater and the eaten, are made ambiguous and porous. The
following remarks by Barthes in his reading of Brillat-Savarin fit nicely into our reading
of Bishoku kurabu:
Added to the good food, the convivium produces what Fourier (whom we
always find close to B.-S.) called a composite pleasure. The vigilant hedonism
of the two brothers-in-law inspired them with this thought, that pleasure must
be overdetermined, that it must have several simultaneous causes, among which
there is no way of distinguishing which one causes delight; for the composite
pleasure does not derive from a simple bookkeeping of excitations: it figures
a complex space in which the subject no longer knows where he comes from
and what he wantsexcept to have his voluptuous pleasurejouir.21
In other words, long before writing essays on the beauty of shadow and the importance
of pregnant ambiguity (ganchiku),22 Tanizaki put such aesthetic ideas into this story.
That this is a story about aestheticism is clear from the beginning. Cooking is a kind of
art that can afford its appreciator sublime pleasure. The sublime taste can never be
gained from natural ingredients by themselves; they require art. The anti-naturalist
implications of this are clear. Tanizakis gourmands eat not for lifes sake but for arts
sake and fear no worldly consequences such as obesity or gastric and mental illnesses.
Even death, which lurks beneath their dining table, so to speak, would not change their

20

The Gourmet Club, 102. (Tanizaki Junichiro zenshu, Vol. 6, 144145.)

Barthes, The Rustle of Language, 267268. Emphasis in original.
22
For example, Inei raisan (In Praise of Shadows, 19331934, in Tanizaki Junichiro zenshu, Vol. 20) and
Bunsho dokuhon (A Guide to Writing, 1934, in Tanizaki Junichiro zenshu, Vol. 21).
21

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259

attitudeuntil it finally comes, of course. In this seemingly fearless and tireless quest
the reader can certainly discern a kind of masochism.
` Rebours,23 however,
Compared with that cult book of the fin de sie`cle aesthetes, A
Bishoku kurabu seems much less artificial and less hostile to nature. However unusual
or mysterious, and however elaborately prepared, food in Tanizakis story would still
look natural compared with what Des Esseintes considers ultimate deviation from the
norm, an absolute release from the boredom that invariably results from the necessarily limited choice of dishes, a vigorous protest against the vile sin of gluttony, and
a slap in the face for old Mother Nature,24 namely a nourishing peptone enema.
Instead of pursuing such ultimate deviation that literally goes against nature,
Tanizakis story pursues the aesthetic of the slimy, which is another of Tanizakis
specialities and is closely connected with the aesthetic of ambiguity. The obsession with
the slimy, the sticky, the thick, the murky, the ripe, and the stringy is an antithesis to
the aesthetic of the pure, fresh, clear, and serene, the aesthetic that so often appears in
Japanese nationalist discourse. The elaborately verbose style, with frequent use of
onomatopoeia, seems to provide a challenge to the premise that words cannot describe
taste and other sensations.
The verbosity notwithstanding, the mystery factor is maintained; or rather, the
elaborate descriptions of murkiness and stickiness create and deepen the mystery. One
of the dishes included in the members sumptuous feast is preceded by a thorough
massage of their face, inside and out, by female hands. This gastronomic foreplay is
followed by Chinese ham and cabbageonly, Member A wonders how the taste of the
ham seems to come from his own saliva activated by the massage, and how the cabbage
seems more like a cross between Chinese cabbage and human female fingers. The
concluding paragraph of Bishoku kurabu suggests the inexhaustible gastronomic
experiment of the Club led by Count G. Quite symbolically, this is done by citing the
names of the most unusual dishes, without their descriptions. Each name, consisting of
three or four Chinese characters, looks like that of a Chinese dish but is a product of
the imagination, inspired only partly by existing Chinese cuisine.25

Mens Art and Womens Criticism

So far we have seen three stories written by men. While the gastronomic quest is open
to women in the first of them, it is exclusively mens business in the others. To
conclude this essay, I should like to discuss a text written by a woman, namely
Shokuma (The Gourmand, circa 1937)26 by Okamoto Kanoko (18891939). Its
protagonist, Besshiro, is a young cooking specialist, who is believed to be modelled after

23

Tanizaki in his younger days was keenly interested in Western aesthetic writers, particularly Oscar Wilde,
` Rebours.
whose Dorian Gray, in turn, was famously fascinated by A
24
Huysmans, Against Nature, 208209. Shibusawa Tatsuhiko discusses this peptone enema and a few
other examples of extraordinary eating from Huysmans book as exemplifying the play element in
gourmandise (Hanayakana shokumotsu shi, 7478).
25
In McCarthys translation this list reads: Pigeon-Egg Hot Springs/Fountain of Grapes/Phlegm-andSpittle Liquid Jade/Snowy Pears, Petals and Peel/Braised Lips/Butterfly Broth/Velvet Carpet Soup/Crystal
Tofu (The Gourmet Club, 139).
26
The date of first publication is unknown. It was included in the collection of short stories Sushi (1941).
In the following I shall refer to the author as Kanoko rather than Okamoto (except in the reference list),
partly to distinguish her from her husband Ippei and her son Taro, and also to conform to the convention.

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Tomoko Aoyama

the renowned chef and gourmand Kitaoji Rosanjin (18831959).27 Like Nakagawa in
Kuidoraku, he gives cooking lessons to privileged young women and organises events
and exhibitions, but his aim seems to be to impress everyone around him, especially the
connoisseurs, rather than to enlighten the general public. Descriptions of his fierce and
meticulous pursuit of the culinary art are, however, juxtaposed with various disparaging
commentaries, mostly from female characters. Indeed, the story not only includes
womens viewpoints but also suggests their vital importance to the true understanding
of the culinary art and of the workings of human and cosmic nature. Furthermore,
unlike the other examples, this story does contain some unmistakably romantic
elements: it can be interpreted as a story of longing, seduction, refusal, and a kind of
surrender.
The story opens with a scene in which Besshiro is giving a cooking lesson to two
young women, who are his patrons daughters. The older sister Chiyo is scared of the
fierce and arrogant teacher, while her sister Kinu fears neither Besshiro nor the
unknown dishes he prepares. Kinu observes her teacher and is amused by his contradictory behaviour: while his movements in the preparation of food look deliberately rough,
uncalculated, and arrogant, in certain procedures they betray nervousness and an
almost mean cleverness. Besshiro, on the other hand, is preoccupied with his art and
his pride in it; cooking lessons to him are where he can prove his culinary brilliance.
Even Kinu admits, if reluctantly, after tasting his endive salad, that he is a genius:
O-Kinu carefully chewed a piece of endive. The moment she swallowed the
fresh vinegary juice, its delicate exquisite flavour entranced her. Furthermore,
there was a touch of bitter aftertaste which was just as faint as the crescent
moon. This faint bitterness swept away the obstinate aftertaste of the meat she
had had for lunch and transformed it into a pleasant memory. While performing this effect, the endive salad disappeared softly in the mouth without
asserting itself and without leaving any discernible sediment.28
While thus describing Besshiros culinary genius, Kanokos writing poignantly captures
the multiple sensations, refuting indirectly but firmly the myth that women cannot
understand or describe taste.29
Besshiro triumphantly accompanies his cooking with aphorisms such as salad, like
womens make-up, should not be overdone, cooking, like music, can be a supreme art
because of the momentariness of taste.30 Based on this latter belief, when Kinu asks
him to keep the salad for supper, he indignantly throws it into the bin. Kinu, however,
continues to observe and analyse him: in her view he is a deformed genius, destined to
contribute to human culture solely with his appetite, although she also recognises a
certain beauty that comes with stupidity.31
In this opening section the reader is not yet aware that Besshiro secretly admires

27
In her dialogue with Kanokos son, Okamoto Taro (entitled Haha naru Kanoko), Ariyoshi Sawako
mentions Shokuma as a story about the young Rosanjin. Okamoto Kanoko, Okamoto Kanoko zenshu,
Bekkan 2, 268.
28
Okamoto Kanoko zenshu, Vol. 5, 288. The story is also included in the readily available paperback,
Rogisho.
29
When mens cooking was popularised in the 1970s and 1980s, this kind of discourse also gained
currency. See, for example, the dialogue between the writers Yoshiyuki Junnosuke and Dan Kazuo, both
noted gourmands, in Yamamoto, Seihin no shokutaku, 252.
30
Okamoto Kanoko zenshu, Vol. 5, 286287, 289. Ironically, Kanoko is well known for her thick make-up.
31
Ibid., 290.

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Kinu; it is only after this cooking lesson and when he is on the doorstep of his home,
where his wife and little son are waiting, that he thinks of the young woman as a
mysterious being who makes him dream of a youthful poem, an exquisite, supple, sad
and sonorous poem that can never be written with words.32 He knows that his longing
is one-sided and his seduction never oversteps the boundaries of the culinary lessons.
The significance of women in the story is also evident in that Besshiros passion for
food is apparently inherited from his mother. When he was a child, they lived in a
Buddhist temple in Kyoto. Even though they were supposed to be vegetarian, his
mother could not suppress her desire for fish and animal protein. To satisfy this desire,
she would send her young son to the river to catch fish. Having tasted all sorts of
delicacies in later life, Besshiro believes that his mothers fish dish tasted the best.
Women certainly play crucial roles in his life and art. It was the aunt of his best friend
who persuaded him to move from Kyoto to Tokyo, and to marry her daughter. This
friend, in fact the only friend Besshiro has ever had, was a flamboyant restaurateur, but
died of cancer, giving his aunt to Besshiro as his legacy. In other words, Besshiro
inherits two women, the aunt and her daughter, from his male friend, which inevitably
calls to mind Gayle Rubins account of the notion of a gift of women and the traffic
in women.33 The aunt is no stranger to the culinary profession; she teaches young
women cooking. With her connections, Besshiro has managed to find a patron in
Tokyo, namely Kinus father, and to pursue his gastronomic ambition.
Compared with these other women, Besshiros wife, Itsuko, seems passive and
characterless, which is exactly what he thought of her at their first meeting. She is
completely excluded from his culinary and related artistic performances, and is left at
home with their young child. While Besshiro extravagantly uses and discards rare and
expensive ingredients in his lessons and performances, Itsuko is under strict instructions to economise on the domestic food expenditure. So she cooks cheap sweet
potatoes for her son and herself, and when Besshiro comes home, she is sent to buy
bottles of beer, which she carries in one arm, while carrying the little child in the other.
An arrogant and tyrannical artist-husband and his subservient wifea very familiar
picture indeed in modern Japanese fiction. Kanokos story suggests, however, that even
this overtly passive woman does possess culinary and critical abilities, which her
husband occasionally notices. She finds it funny, and somewhat pitiful, that her
husband, insolent though he is, becomes like an innocent child when he is dealing with
food. And the sweet potato she has cooked and that Besshiro tries while waiting for his
beer tastes surprisingly good.
One other female character plays an important role in the story. She is a poet and a
scholar of Buddhism, obviously modelled after Kanoko herself, or what she sees herself
as, with her characteristic narcissism. While still in Kyoto, Besshiro is introduced by his
restaurateur friend to this poetess and her painter husband, and shows her his calligraphic art, which is one of his aesthetic pursuits besides cooking. Madame finds his
art work pretty but nothing more than aji, which literally means taste but is used here
in the sense of witty, implying dilettantism and frivolity. Deeply wounded by this
comment, Besshiro plans his revenge with his other, and stronger, art: cooking:

32

Ibid., 294.
Rubin, The traffic in women. As Rubin notes (ibid., 173), The result of a gift of women is more
profound than the result of other gift transactions, because the relationship thus established is not just one
of reciprocity, but one of kinship.
33

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Tomoko Aoyama
This woman so casually wrote off his work as aji [frivolous]; but, he wondered,
how much connoisseurship had she actually got in matters concerning aji
[taste]? The quickest way to test her would be with food. She must have
hardly had any true delicaciesoutside the home cooking of some leisured
ladies and form-oriented restaurant food at best. If she turned out to have no
connoisseurship, he could simply disregard her remarks about his work. If she
was a real connoisseur, then she would surely bow her head before his culinary
art, which would mean that he had conquered her and made her concede to
him.34

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This totally egocentric motivation disappears, however, as he prepares the feast. In

order to impress her, he has observed and even spied intensively on her particular food
and other preferences. As he tries to find what would please her most and plans and
prepares the food, he gradually abandons his ego and ambition:
If that girl-like woman would marvel at his dishes, and innocently enjoy a
pleasure deeper than that which one could gain in this world through the five
senses, that would be to the credit of the cooking itself. His own existence did
not matter any more.35
In other words, Besshiros recognition of a childlike innocence in her brings out
selflessness in him. Here we find a stronger hint of romance than in his relationship
with Kinu. He comes to realise that the essence of cooking is itawari (consideration),
although he knows at the same time that he can show such consideration only for idiots
and children. His efforts are rewarded: Madame gratefully savours each dish and
praises his cooking as a true art with makoto (truth) and magokoro (sincerity), which she
had not found in the immaculately prepared full-course dinner she had had at a famous
restaurant in Paris. Pleased though he is, Besshiro also feels a faint disappointment in
that he is being recognised for his culinary art rather than for his calligraphy or some
other art to which he has secretly given greater importance than to cooking.
Thus the women not only know the shortcomings of the cooking genius but
contribute to the development of his art with their criticism, childlike innocence, and
motherly love and protection. Towards the end of the story Besshiro is beginning to
understand a truth deeper than that which, in his pride, he thought he knew; a truth the
gourmands in the other stories never understood:
The night wore on silently into its depth. The thick moist darkness, with its
infinite appetite, would never cease to devour the falling hail. Or seen from
another point of view, it seemed as if it was spitting the hail forever from
above. In other words the darkness tirelessly continued to devour and spit,
devour and spit. Never in his life did Besshiro know such a robust appetite.
Would this resemble the one that devours death and spits life?36
The thick moist darkness, and spitting and devouring of life all strongly suggest
maternity and female sexuality. The above passage seems to suggest the cosmic
strength of mother/woman, the strength with which the child/man can never compete
but from which he can benefit greatly.
***
34

Okamoto Kanoko zenshu, Vol. 5, 314.

Ibid., 315.
36
Ibid., 211.
35

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As we have seen, despite an occasional propinquity to romance, none of the four texts
directly explores the parallel or analogy between food and romantic love. In Kuidoraku
hara or the engagement of
the sanctioned love between O-Towa and the paunchy O
Nakagawa to the Viscounts daughter is nothing but part of the modernisation discourse. Compared with the centrality of food, love is often completely forgotten in the
heated discussions about the nations future. If the serious and simplistic discourse and
the hundreds of modern recipes were enthusiastically welcomed by the majority of
readers at the time, they can hardly have any impact on the contemporary reader,
except for their historical value. While the intentionally comic scenes and descriptions
may only reveal discrimination based on gender, physical features, regional differences,
and so on, there are some presumably unintentional comic elements. For instance,
hara being forced into the unwanted
when O-Towa is upset about the prospect of O
marriage with O-Dai, the only consolation or diversion her friends can offer seems to
be to ask her something about food.
That food replaces romance is even more obvious in the obsessive and ludicrous
quests of Chinsenkai and Bishoku kurabu. The male Club members are so completely absorbed in their search for unknown delicacies and their competitions that they
do not need anything else. While Kuidoraku attempts to present a modern, though
clearly patriarchal, ideal of marriage with an educated and yet feminine wife who can
cook and an enlightened husband who pays attention to health and domestic happiness,
these two stories show that play is a homosocial territory. Only in Shokuma are
women given significant roles not only in criticising but in inspiring, protecting, and
nurturing the male protagonists art of cooking. It is no coincidence that the writer of
this story is a woman. The romantic elements in the story do not develop into an actual
romance, however. This is largely because the man is, after all, only a child, not only
to his mother but in the eyes of the young Kinu, of his wife, of her mother, and of the
poetess.

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