Any guy who has a hamburger steak in front of him and doesn’t feel hungry probably has something wrong with his sense of taste.
Big Girl, the American restaurant chain. It’s a famous steak place, but my favorite is, without a doubt, the deluxe hamburger steak. It’s a proud testament to that land where the quantity of food exceeds dietary requirements. And it’s definitely not bland either.
The burger sizzled on the hot iron plate, and the scent of its seasoning hit me right in the gut. When I cut into the burger, so much juice came gushing out. And when those juices heated up on the iron plate, they sent a rich aroma straight to my nose.
But the amazing hamburger steaks weren’t Big Girl’s only selling point. All around me I could see the waitresses taking customers’ orders with a smile, bustling around, carrying food.
Looks must’ve been part of the recruitment criteria. There were so many cute girls working there it was fascinating. And the tight-fitting uniforms made it all the more apparent. Hygienic, yet hot.
“… Oh.”
I leaned forward in my seat to get a better look at the back of the waitress who kept passing my table. The short skirt of her uniform fluttered, and I got a good view of her nice, thick thighs. The way her black over-the-knee socks cut into her thighs was irresistible. What a delicious sight.
That’s the kind of girlfriend I want, I thought, resting my chin in one hand and stuffing my mouth full of hamburger with the other. With each bite, the flavor took my thoughts that much farther away from the girl I watched in a daze. Yum. Without thinking I let out a sigh of admiration.
Could this restaurant be our promised land, our … our … what do you call it?
“Aaaaah, I can’t remember!”
My train of thought came to a stop, and I pressed my hands to my head unconsciously and leaned back. My sudden eccentricity caught the attention of the diners around me, as well as the waitress I had just been eyeing. But that was out of the question for me now. Whenever I’d come here I’d heard that name, and I liked the sound of it. Why couldn’t I remember it now?
“A-are you all right, Hide?” the young man sitting across from him called out, sounding worried. And with that, Hideyoshi Nagachika, a.k.a. Hide, returned to Earth from the personal planet he’d been on.
“Kaneki, whaddya call it? That thing?!” Hide said, his index finger flailing violently. His friend, Ken Kaneki, set his chopsticks down. A look of embarrassment and confusion spread over his face.
“Man, it’s that thing you’re always talking about. This restaurant is our promised land, our Kofi Annan, or Cunaan or something. A Sham Gorilla, where the flowers are always in full bloom.”
Kaneki, looking astonished, folded his arms exaggeratedly just like a stage actor and shot Hide a scowl.
“The Promised Land,” he said, “is Canaan, and the flowers are always in full bloom in Shangri-La.”
“That’s it!” Hide said, sticking his index finger right in front of Kaneki’s eyes. Reflexively, Kaneki pulled away and unfolded his arms. He kept his look of astonishment as he started in on Hide.
“Like I keep telling you, you should crack open a book sometimes. All right, Hide? Canaan is the land God promised to Abraham and his descendants with his blessing. And Shangri-La is the paradise where immortal hermits live. To mix that up with Kofi Annan or a ‘sham gorilla’ is just …”
“Enough, enough. You’re putting me to sleep over here. I’ve got it now—‘Canaan’ and ‘Shangri-La.’ I promise, I’m gonna remember this time.”
Looking at Hide as he repeated those words, Kaneki grumbled, “But you’ll forget again anyway,” and picked his chopsticks back up.
This man, sitting with him at the front of the restaurant, had been a friend of Kaneki’s since elementary school. And although they had different majors, they both now went to the same college, Kamii University.
Kaneki was ordinary-looking, of medium height and build. Reading was his hobby, and he was the type of guy who never had friends in his classes. He was the complete opposite of lively, sociable Hide.
“Well, does it really matter that much?”
This consideration was outside his area of expertise. Hide was busy sending looks of love at the waitress with the short hair who had just walked past.
“If I ever get a girlfriend, man, I’m bringing her to this Big Girl.”
“Wouldn’t it be weird to bring a girl here?” Kaneki said, gulping down some rice as Hide’s eyes were drawn to the waitress, deepening his delusions. The customers here were mostly male. One could say Kaneki’s remarks were reasonable.
“Like hell would I ever want to go to one of those grown-up restaurants or trendy cafes you can’t go to without a girl! Taking a girl to a place that I feel a connection to and grabbing a bite to eat would be the chillest thing I could think of.”
“You’ve got a point.” On this, Kaneki was in agreement. And then, as if he had realized something, he grabbed the menu from where it stood on the table, opened it, and showed me a page.
“What about pasta, Hide?”
“Huh?”
“She could get one of these pastas or something. Like with a salad on the side.”
You could say that our inclinations were different. Kaneki’s powers of delusion, forged through his reading, were strong. Often he was a far bigger dreamer than me.
“I like it! She’d be eating spaghetti with meat sauce and I could be like, ‘Give me some!’ And she’d get all mad but she’d be like, ‘Well, what else can I do?’ and she’d let me split it,” Hide said, tapping his finger against the picture of spaghetti on the menu. Kaneki had imagined it even more vividly than he had. “Not bad,” Hide murmured a beat later.
“Totally!”
Hide leaned forward and hit Kaneki on the shoulder. Kaneki said, “Ow, man,” with a pained smile, then put the menu back where it was before, his eyes creasing with the pleasure of continuing his delusion. I was also still imagining what this girlfriend I hadn’t seen before would look like, wondering what kind of cute girl I’d have by my side.
“Looks like Ghouls are attacking again.”
“Don’t the cops do anything these days?”
These unsettling words suddenly invaded the dreamland we were in. We turned our gazes toward the people who were speaking. They were boys not too far from our age, digging into hamburger steaks while talking about Ghouls.
“Ghouls, man …” Kaneki muttered, looking absentminded.
Hide poked at his hamburger steak, gone slightly cold on its plate.
“If I met a cute girl who was a Ghoul, I’d still go out with her,” he said with a straight face. Kaneki burst out laughing.
“Hide, how desperate are you? Don’t give up yet.”
“No, man, it’s just like … how long is it gonna be like this? I need a girlfriend!”
With that their flights of fancy began again. As they ate, they talked about their ideal girlfriend.
Ghoul.
Hide had heard of them, but never seen them in reality—creatures that eat people.
The idea of Ghouls was enough to give anyone a vague sense of unease, but with their random attacks, people felt a sense of distance from them, like they were unpredictable accidents, as though the danger did not actually reach them.
“But isn’t spaghetti with meat sauce kind of messy to eat?”
“I think it’s all right. Just the once, anyway.”
And Rize and I can recommend books to each other!
Kaneki still remembered everything that had happened on that disastrous day very well.
He’d had his head in the clouds, telling Hide all about it. That he’d asked this girl he liked, Rize Kamishiro, to go on a date to a bookstore.
They had met at a café called Anteiku. Kaneki had dragged Hide there before to check her out.
She had glossy black hair that spilled over her shoulders, with glasses that made her look like an intellectual. And yet she had these full lips that gave her a very feminine charm. She was not the kind of girl you’d think was plain but could be pretty if she got dolled up. She was a beauty.
Hide took one look at her and told Kaneki to give up. And Kaneki also seemed to see that she was way above his level. But then he wound up getting a date with her.
Hide told him to have a good time and sent him on his way. That was the dividing line.
Instead of the breakdown about the date he was supposed to get, Hide got the news that Kaneki had been in an accident involving some falling steel beams at a construction site and had suffered life-threatening injuries.
With severe damage to his internal organs, Kaneki had needed a transplant—from Rize, who had apparently died instantly.
Miraculously, Kaneki survived. But since that day he’d changed in a few ways.
And this was one of them.
Hide had brought Kaneki to Big Girl to celebrate his recovery when he was finally released from the hospital.
Now, when faced with a hamburger steak, a thing he’d always loved, Kaneki spat it out as if it were foreign substance.