air, but you...why am I not surprised that you would do it?”
(Over time, Masafumi had learned enough about the intricate nature of the English language to know better than to consider her questioning tone of voice to actually be a question. A yoko meshi thing, that inherent stressfulness of mastering, and not merely learning, another tongue.)
Harumi uncovered another waiting tray of naked tofu, and switched ink bottles on her gun, this time taking up the pale reddish-brown onion-skin ink she’d distilled herself, back in the restaurant down the block from the tattoo parlor. Watching her work the vibrating needles across the slightly yielding, flesh-like foodstuff, as the tattooed woman created starbursts of sunset-ruddy pigment, Masafumi found himself actually uttering a thought which had been coming and going in his brain each time he’d watched her work, “Why do you not do this in the restaurant? You...carry the trays here, then carry them back, while the gun stays—”
Speaking over the ear-numbing drone of the gun, she replied, “My boss and the other cooks, they can’t stand the sound. And some of the early customers, they can hear it, and it ruins the whole exotic dining experience. Now the inkjet printer they use to print the designs on the starch-paper, that thing’s pretty quiet, compared to this thing. But if you ask me, aside form being useful for wrapping up rolls of sushi, a piece of starch paper covered with pictures of maki rolls and pin-wheels made of amazu shoga and heni shoga is just a piece of starch paper, y’know? It’s still something extra. Which you don’t need. But this, what I’m doing here...this is what I call true edible art. ’Cause the art is in it, a part of it, even if it is a subtle taste thing. I mean, I know these slabs are going to be chopped up, and steeped in broth, so all the customer will see is a hint of color on each piece, and maybe will detect a hint of onion or citrus if their taste buds are halfway alive, but still, what I’m doing is there. A part of it. Not some coating of cartoon sushi which someone slapped on as an afterthought, all because some guy down in Chicago came up with it a couple of decades ago in his restaurant. I dunno...does this make any sense at all to you?”
This time, she was asking a question. But how to answer her? Even as she spoke of food, novelty dishes, to be precise, Masafumi had been reminded of his former art, that of kimono-painting...that same art which had eventually brought him to such a state of despair, of utter inability to decide on something as simple as which new outfit to wear upon waking, that he had taken the route of no road, of no destination. Merely staying in his room, week after month after year, where nothing associated with his former art could be found—no aobana ink, no tiny zinc granules of makinori waiting to be sprinkled across silk, then fixed in place with rice paste, prior to being coated with wood wax and fixed on the fabric with soy juice...and no disassembled eight panels of silk, waiting to be painted, resist-dyed and then sewn back into that ancient “T” configuration which had been the staple of kimono design for centuries. Eight waiting panels of cloth, eight chances to turn the two-dimensional into the three-dimensional, once the final element of his art was included...the woman who wore the kimono. And while Harumi understood the artificial excess of something merely added, Masafumi didn’t know if she would understand the inherent obstacle of his art in itself—there was the design to be added to the kimono and then there was the woman within, who would give life to the design but in the middle was the kimono itself, those inevitable eight panels of cloth, two each for the back and front of the garment, the remaining four for the sleeves, culminating in what was literally a “thing worn”—always, no matter how one decorated the kimono, in anticipation of the woman who was to wear it, the “thing worn” itself had become his creative nemesis. When those eight pieces of cloth began to insinuate themselves between Masafumi and his artistic ideal, preventing him from instilling his creative will directly onto the being which would give it real life, he had given up, withdrawn, become a twilight ghost who only ventured out of his house for short trips to the neighborhood konbini, the Japanese answer to the convenience stores which popped up in fungal stealth seemingly by the day in his new country, his adopted city.
True, cartoon sushi and hand-painted kimono had little in common save for being something worn by something else (with both things being equally edible, if not uniformly desirable as such), but Masafumi didn’t know if Harumi could really care about his entire hikikomori episode, his lost years...even if she had asked him a direct question about her own art, and its purposefulness.
“I suppose...one is an embellishment, while the other is an...ingredient. Both are edible, but only one is essential.”
She smiled at that. For the first time, Masafumi felt bold enough to sit down on the tatami mat next to hers, his chest level with the already-tattooed sheets of momongoshi. He wasn’t certain, but he thought he could smell the faint odor of citrus and onions against the creamy bland near-nothingness of the tofu itself. Leaning over to peer at her freeform designs, he surprised himself by suggesting, “If they serve kinugoshi, do you think that branding the tofu first would survive the deep-frying process?” He hadn’t thought of kinugoshi in years, not since he had left Japan, but the mere utterance of the word itself brought back that creamy, custard-like texture of the silken tofu’s interior, after one had bitten through the deep-fried exterior, which rested unseen but curiously felt on the tip of his tongue, like a lingering aftertaste combined with the phantom sensation of silken smoothness.
“Oh man...they could call it ‘kiss of fire’ tofu, or whatever the Japanese is for that. Me, I mostly know kitchen-Japanese, just what my father’s people used to use when they cooked stuff for family gatherings. That’s what happens when races intermarry...my name is more Japanese than I am. Can you guess how many different nationalities I could check off on my census form?”
How to answer that? Not only was her hair an autumn-leaves-on-wet-cement mingling of browns, oranges and a hint of red, while her eyes were that sparkling green-brown hazel hue, but her very skin was creamy pale, even more so than that of mainland Chinese women. The shape of her eyes was closer to almond than Asian, with only the slightest corners-tilt of the eyelids to hint at an ancestry not wholly European. And her voice was purely Minnesotian, with that closed-mouth way of speaking, and rounded “o” sounds within words. But with a certain lilt that remind Masafumi of bamboo wind chimes....
“Eight.” She shut off her magic wand, and began ticking off the nationalities on her fingers and thumbs: “Japanese, on my dad’s side of course. Norwegian, English, Irish, Swedish, German, Polish, and again on my dad’s side, Chinese, from some mess during one of the wars nobody in the family would speak about. But it’s all in there. Every generation on his side, the people’s hair and eyes got lighter and lighter, and their eyes got rounder. But they still go for Japanese first names. Drives everyone else nuts. And I’m shit out of luck if I ever get sick and need a bone marrow transplant, or some new organ. No way no how they’ll ever find a matching donor for me...which is why I decided a long time ago that I’m gonna live the way I want, ’cause there’s no turning back for me. I can’t go abusing myself with the back-up plan of getting a new liver or kidney from someone else, so I can start tearing myself down all over again. I consider myself like a statue I’m carving out day by day...if something gets hacked off, it has to stay off. Even if the end result is something other than I was envisioning for myself. I mean, some art is meant to be disposable, no?”
Another question waiting for an answer. Not sure how to reply, he demurred, “So that is why you tattoo and brand yourself, because you are your own artwork. And do this with your hair—”
“Yeah...I thought I’d visually add another ethnicity into the mix. ’Dreads, on account of nobody in my family hooking up with a black person. But I like them...I don’t need to wear a hairnet or scarf while I cook.”
“So, you don’t serve at the restaurant?”
“Do I look like I fit in with the décor?”
One of those rhetorical questions, which could safely be ignored.
“That
