To be honest, I didn’t like Itsumi Shiraishi at first.
Actually, I hated her.
I had never spoken to or even met her, an upperclassman one grade my senior, but I knew all about her because she was basically famous at school. She wasn’t just the chairman’s daughter, she was also sharp-witted and stunning to look at. I used to stare coldly at her fans as they flocked in from the high school, junior high, and elementary school buildings and swarmed around her classroom.
Itsumi’s slender body and vivacious smile attracted attention everywhere she went. She had it all: Perfect proportions. Lovely facial contours. Big, alluring eyes. Lips like flower-buds, which emanated charm and grace. A refined air from her excellent upbringing.
You couldn’t have called Itsumi a “beauty” or some other cliché, it wouldn’t have suited her. She was an idol. Gorgeous in every way. Which is exactly why I didn’t find her beautiful.
Itsumi was too perfect. In confection design, for instance, bakers typically draw asymmetrical and uneven lines into dessert decorations to make them look sophisticated. But Itsumi looked too well-put together, as if her appearance had been meticulously calculated. She had no imperfections at all. Perfection isn’t beautiful. It’s tasteless.
I despised my classmates who fawned over Itsumi’s so-called “beauty.” They obviously had no idea what real beauty was.
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When I heard that Itsumi revived the Literature Club after its years on hiatus, I shrugged it off as the whim of someone with too much free time. Besides, the club only had two members, with Itsumi as club president and Sayuri Sumikawa as club vice president, which only made my impression of it worse. Yet as soon as their tiny club was reopened, this magnificent literary salon was built and everyone in school was talking about the salon, which was supposedly “every girl’s dream castle.” However, rumor had it that you couldn’t get in unless Itsumi personally approached you, which only made the students admire her and her salon even more. Although I was only in my third year of junior high school at the time, the girls around me had already made it their goal to be invited in.
Right after I started high school, Shiyo Takaoka, a girl in my grade who won a big prize for her light novel, became the first new member of the Literature Club, and everyone was terribly jealous. What Shiyo said about teatime—the highest-quality tea leaves imported from England and France, the Meissen tea set, the Wittamer torte cake—would have made anyone swoon. The salon must have been awfully comfortable to make Shiyo want to turn down all those television appearances and magazine interviews so she could sleep in the salon after school instead. She also mentioned that she got a lot of writing done while sitting under the Baccarat crystal chandelier.
But I found it all repulsive.
The Baccarat crystal chandelier and the Meissen tea set.
Did a student literary salon really need all those things?
I grew up in my family’s traditional Japanese restaurant, where ever since I was a little girl, it was emphasized that “flashy isn’t classy.” No, elegance is unadorned, it has both wabi and sabi:*1 subdued, stately, with a quality of subtle grace and beauty that ripens with maturity. It is tasteful, unassuming, and true to itself. That is what real chic is.
Nothing in the gaudy literary salon of rumors seemed to have any of that chic. I looked down on the salon for its bad taste, and hated it for the same reasons that I didn’t like Itsumi.
My father is a stubborn, simple, old-fashioned cook who has declined television appearances and invitations from department stores for many years. Tons of people used to ask to publish a cookbook of his recipes, but he always sent them away, adamantly maintaining that the only thing a cook should do, is cook. He refuses to open a new branch. Despite the dozens of requests for take-out lunches and catering, he insists that he wants his customers to eat their food where it was made. The only time you could eat my father’s cooking outside of his restaurant is around New Year’s, when he gives his best customers a take-home lunch as a gift for the holiday season. He is the only one who can make it and it isn’t on the menu, which makes it a so-called “New Year’s fantasy.”
My mother owns a traditional Japanese confectionery shop and has supported my stubborn father all these years. Her seasonal traditional desserts, which she has spent decades creating, add color to my father’s kaiseki meals.*2 To go with the changing seasons, my parents get together and decide upon a theme with which my father carefully crafts each course, and which my mother follows for her desserts and restaurant decorations, which include ikebana flower arrangements and hanging scrolls.
I may have inherited this from my parents, but I’ve loved being in the kitchen since I was a little girl.
My father’s prized hearth rests on the traditional earthen floor. I was raised watching my mother wake up at five in the morning to fill the stockpot with dried fish and kelp to make three servings of broth for each of my four family members. The clear liquid she strained so meticulously became our miso soup at breakfast, the broth we had with eggs at lunch, and the stew with boiled meat, vegetables, and eggs at dinner. I was fascinated with how the liquid changed tastes and forms with each meal. I held my first knife when I was three years old. By the time I was four, I could handle knives quite well and even received a knife of my own that had my name engraved on it.
Although I was born immersed in the world of Japanese cuisine, as I grew up, I found cuisine from Western countries to be new and refreshing and eventually became obsessed. My parents had nothing to say about my new passion. They had already decided that my older brother would take over their restaurant and were training him in how to clean the restaurant in the early morning, stock up on food at the marketplace, precook and organize ingredients, and gave him a strict education that they never gave me. In fact, my father wouldn’t even let me into his kitchen. I always watched my brother’s training with envy. He was set to become the fourth successor of our restaurant, “Kominami,” which had been established in the Taisho Era. And no matter how well I held a knife, tried to cook, or perfected my Western sweets, to my parents, all of my efforts were nothing more than “wife training.”
My brother was a slacker who had no real interest in cooking or Kominami. He often shirked his kitchen-stocking duties to go goof off instead, and would ride around on his motorcycle at night instead of cleaning the restaurant. Even so, Kominami would automatically be his. Frustrated, I dove deeper into the world of Western cuisine. But I couldn’t bake cakes well in our old, antique kitchen.
That was when I heard rumors about the kitchen in the literary salon.
Supposedly, it was spacious, easy-to-use, and well-stocked with everything one could possibly want. Apparently, club members used to bake cakes and make mousse together in the kitchen.
I wasn’t interested in chandeliers, marble tables, fireplaces, or teatime. But when I first heard about that kitchen, I became fascinated with the club.