Takase Junko 高瀬隼子. Oishii gohan ga taberaremasu yō ni おいしいごはんが食べられますように. Kōdansha, 2022.
This won the 167th Akutagawa Prize, for early 2022, after its initial magazine publication in January; it was published in book form in March. Notably, for the first time in the Prize’s history, all of the finalists were women; additionally, four out of the five finalists for the Naoki Prize were women. Takase was a finalist in 2021 as well, and is a relative newcomer, having published her debut fiction in 2019.
The title isn’t easy to translate literally; it’s in the form of a wish or a prayer, and sort of requires the translator to choose a pronoun. I’d go with something like That You Might Eat Well. It announces that the theme is food, although the title and the book’s cutesy design promises a feel-good celebration of gustation that the story doesn’t deliver. In fact, the book’s more about people’s differing and complicated relationships with food, and largely centers on a guy who doesn’t like food and resents the need to eat at all.
The story takes place in the branch office of a a small company somewhere in the Tokyo suburbs. It largely focuses on a love triangle of sorts between three young characters. Nitani has just recently transferred into the office; he’s the one who views everyone else’s (everyone in the world’s, that is) obsession with food with puzzlement and annoyance. The opening scene sets the tone well: the boss has invited everybody out to lunch – it’s on him – but Nitani is glad to be one of the two who has to stay behind to mind the office. He can’t understand why everyone else is happy to go, and views the boss’s invitation as just so much power harassment.
The other two main characters are women, and Nitani gets involved with both to different degrees. Ashikawa is the book’s main representative of foodie culture; over the course of the story she gets hooked on baking (something that happened to a lot of us during the pandemic, although the Covid isn’t specifically invoked in the story). Nitani slips into a relationship with her that he recognizes depends on her inassertive, frail, and homey nature: she’s that variety of cute that’s theorized as inspiring the desire to protect it, and repeatedly the men in the office look out for her because of her fragility. Nitani assumes he’ll end up marrying her, as she’s so pleasantly inoffensive that she’s obviously good marriage material. Paradoxically, however, her handiness in the kitchen alienates rather than pleases him; left to his own devices he’d eat nothing but instant ramen, and in fact often after one of her home-cooked meals, once she’s gone to sleep, he’ll heal himself by slurping down cup noodles.
Oshio is the third main character, and Nitani seems to go out with her as much as he does with Ashikawa, but only as after-work drinking buddies. Oshio has a crush on him, but he’s got her squarely in the friend zone. She’s resigned to this, but isn’t above playing on his buried resentment of Ashikawa’s cooking. Oshio also pretends to be indifferent to food in order to keep up with him, but almost all of their scenes take place at bars over dinner. 
It’s a love triangle, but hardly a passionate one. Nitani is sleeping with Ashikawa, but after a while seems to barely think about her; Oshio pays a great deal of attention to Nitani, but her undermining of Ashikawa seems less a way to win over Nitani than simply an expression of her own frustration with the woman. The love-triangle storyline seems mainly a way to explore the social dynamics of small offices, and in a larger sense the realities of employment in the 21st century. Both Ashikawa and Oshio are career women in an age where that doesn’t even have to be stated (we appear to have come a long way since Itoyama Akiko), but this still leaves space for gendered expectations. Oshio is just as dedicated as the men, willing to work nights and weekends when necessary, even through illness, while Ashikawa will blithely go home at five or take the day off if she has a headache. This frustrates Oshio, who feels that Ashikawa is exploiting the men’s perceptions of her as a fragile woman who needs to be pampered. One of the pampering bosses points out, however, that in this day an age, it’s every employee’s right to work to rule, and the company can’t insist otherwise. (An unthinkable attitude even as recently as a generation ago.)
A lot of the novel is devoted to exploring the microtensions and repressions that come with office life; in that respect it’s quite accomplished, and Takase’s skill at depicting this narrow slice of society is something the Prize committee singled out as a reason she was awarded the Prize. Takase deftly switches between Oshio’s first-person narration and a third-person perspective centered on Nitani’s thoughts. The sociological focus also makes for a somewhat grim read. Again, the title and book design suggest something comfort-foody, but in fact the story is about people slogging through life fairly joylessly.
Just as the love triangle is a device for exploring interpersonal relations in an office setting, food seems to be just a device for getting into the characters’ attitudes toward pleasure in general. Nitani’s impatience with the whole eating thing seems to mirror his attitude toward relationships – he imagines he’ll end up marrying Ashikawa because that’s what people do, and because she’s unobjectionable as a partner, but he’s not particularly enthusiastic about it. He’s also ostensibly a lover of literature – his apartment is full of books – but while he’s still a member of his college literature club’s Line group, he hasn’t responded to their messages in years.
For Ashikawa food is part of what Oshio, at least, views as her strategy of exploiting her traditional femininity to thrive in the workplace. When she starts baking, she starts bringing treats for the whole office, which of course makes her everyone’s darling. While it’s left unspoken, it seems clear we’re supposed to read it as part of her efforts to catch a man, specifically Nitani. And the thing is, it works, even though he hates eating. One of the story’s main arcs concerns him secretly refusing to eat her workplace treats. He waits until everyone else has left the office, then smashes and discards his portion. He’s clearly stifled by her domesticity – but it never occurs to him to break up with her.
Oshio’s attitude is more balanced. She appreciates good cuisine, although she pretends not to for Nitani’s sake. She also sees through Ashikawa’s use of food to manipulate others, and ultimately joins Nitani in the ritual desecration of Ashikawa’s baked offerings. For the other two food seems to be nothing more than the means to an end (survival in Nitani’s case, victory in Ashikawa’s); while Oshio is better able to appreciate food for the simple pleasure it offers, she’s painfully aware of the way it’s implicated in the power relations that she’s caught in.
It’s a subtle book. Also a bit grim, and to be honest a bit hard to get into. Nitani’s resolute hostility toward eating as a pleasurable act is developed at quite some length, and while at first it’s an interesting corrective to the seemingly endless celebration of eating endemic to Japanese media, it’s ultimately a hard position for most readers, I suspect, to identify with. And inasmuch as this is presented as a way to think about life and relationships at work, it ends up presenting a pretty drab picture overall. Kurt Vonnegut famously said that writers have to make their characters want something, even if it’s just a glass of water; but what if your character’s defining feature is resistance to eating and drinking?
(Go here for an explanation of my Akutagawa Prize project, if you’re curious.)