Even as a teenager, when I overheard the late night conversations between Dad, who’d come home after playing his heart out, and Mom, who’d kind of been waiting up for him, I felt safe, like I was a young child again.
When Dad came through the door, Mom would come out of the bedroom, and they’d talk mellowly about how the gig had gone, who’d turned up, or where she’d taken me for food afterward. Dad would address everything patiently, sounding relieved. The most important thing for him, at the end of a long day, was catching up with Mom over the little things. I know this because he told me so himself. “It’s the best thing about being married,” he used to say, so often it sounded like habit. “People you can share the little things with are few and far between.”
I wondered if Dad had felt lonely when he got killed, without Mom there to talk to. Whether his spirit was hanging around, feeling like there were things he’d left unsaid. There had to be—he wouldn’t have known he was going to die that day. Well, I guessed most people didn’t, but I was sure he didn’t expect to be killed by the person he was with. Was he scared? Or did he think, deep down, that it would somehow turn out okay?
Even though I didn’t believe in ghosts, I could hardly bear to think about this.
I wasn’t sure—being still too much of a child not to wish that things could be definitely one thing or another—but I suspected that people couldn’t always be true to themselves, or live wholly for the proper and acceptable things in their lives. But perhaps they held themselves together by acting as though they were happy with their own choices, because they’d fall apart if they didn’t at least aim to be, and it was too uncomfortable to admit that they weren’t.
For Dad, his music, having fun with me, the almost dead-end stability of his relationship with Mom, or the fact that her indistinct expectations hung like a mist and put pressure on him like he was packed in cotton wool—each of these things might have contributed a little to the way he’d died. Mom was a very strong personality, and it could sometimes feel a little stifling just to be around her.
What made me sad was that Dad was the only one who knew how he’d really felt. That I could never know the truth—and that Dad himself probably hadn’t been able to stand to look at it any longer.
MY DAYS AT THE bistro were so busy they made my head spin.
I opened up the kitchen first thing in the morning. I’d mix and knead the bread dough and leave it to rise, then put the chairs up in the dining room and start cleaning. At the same time, I put water on to boil, and prepped the vegetables for sides and salads. I checked stock levels, and topped things up if we were running low. Then I’d bake off three or four dozen loaves.
Then Michiyo-san, the chef, would turn up and I’d assist her with whatever she needed help with, until customers turned up and I’d switch to serving. From there, time passed in a whirlwind until two thirty.
Our staff meal at three thirty was always incredibly delicious, and sometimes I’d ask Michiyo-san to show me how it was made. Then I had my break, and on days when I had no other plans, I’d take a walk around the neighborhood, or go home and take a nap.
At dinner service, most customers would linger over drinks, and we’d be at closing time before I knew it.
At weekends, which tended to be hectic, I had help in the form of Moriyama-san, a friendly man who was an expert on wine. But even during the week, when it was only me, I had hardly any downtime. We usually had a full house, and didn’t turn a lot of tables, since our customers tended to take their time. That was the kind of restaurant it was. That said, we also had customers who came in for a quick beer or a glass of wine during the day, so we always had to have some simple hors d’oeuvres on the menu, in addition to the lunch dishes.
I was in charge of the hors d’oeuvres and the appetizers, so I’d take any spare moment I had to wash vegetables or do other prep. It was also my job to clean the dining room and keep the glassware polished.
The bistro wasn’t in Ginza, where the best French restaurants were, or in a upscale neighborhood like Aoyama or Azabu. It wasn’t even in the fashionable areas of Jiyugaoka or Hiro’o. But I had a personal reason for having set my heart on working at this particular bistro in Shimokitazawa.
FOR OBVIOUS REASONS, MOM completely lost her appetite after Dad died. She stayed in bed a lot, and when she was up and not talking to me, she was always talking to herself, whispering, “It’s not true, it can’t be true.”
She refused to set up the usual altar in the house, saying she just couldn’t believe he was gone. She did put up a photo in the room that contained Dad’s piano and his beloved speakers and valve amplifier, and kept fresh flowers there, so it wasn’t that she didn’t understand what was real. She just couldn’t accept it.
“I feel like he’s going to come back through the door any day now,” she’d say.
For some reason, my reality had kept up to date with everything that had happened—his body, the business of organizing the funeral and putting his ashes in the tomb, even seeing the photo of that woman who’d died at the same time. So I didn’t have the same sense of disbelief as Mom did.
Even so, I constantly wondered—Why had it come to this? Why hadn’t he talked to us? Had I been too distant from him? Had there ever been a time when he might have wanted to talk, and I’d passed him in the hallway and gone to bed oblivious? Around and around, I’d remember, wonder, regret, wonder again, forget for a moment, and then plunge back into the cycle.
ON HIS LAST MORNING, I saw Dad in the entry of the condo, about to leave.
“Hey, when you’re done with these gigs, maybe next week, will you take me out for some expensive French food in Aoyama?” I’d said.
“How expensive are we talking about, here?” Dad said, putting on his shoes.
“Umm, around the fifteen thousand yen mark. Not including drinks. Somewhere with a really good wine list,” I said.
“You’re not kidding, that’s pretty expensive!” he said, and laughed, with his tattered Boston bag at his feet like a loyal dog.
He’d told us he was going out to a friend’s venue in Ginza to fill in at a gig that evening. That much, at least, was true.
After making a brief appearance at the after-party, Dad left Tokyo in the woman’s car, took a room at an inn at a hot spring bath in Ibaraki, where he told the manager he was going out to eat, had dinner at a local izakaya, and then died.
When Dad didn’t come home that night, Mom and I hadn’t thought it was a big deal, even though he’d basically never done that before.
He forgot his phone, I’d said. Do you think he left it on purpose so we couldn’t reach him, knowing he’d be getting into trouble?
I hate him, Mom had said. I won’t let him in the door when he comes back.
I’d handed him his bag as he left the house, and he’d put it on his shoulder.
“I need to eat lots of good food so I can educate my palate,” I said.
“That’s true. Let’s make a date when I get back,” Dad said. He looked a little sad.
That when I get back hadn’t been a lie. He’d had no intention of dying that day.
“I wish I could come with you and see the gig, but I promised a friend to help out at their café in the evening. Someone got sick, and they’re shorthanded,” I said.
“You could still join us in Ginza afterward. I won’t have a lot of stage time, though; I’m only guesting,” he said.
“No, it’ll be too late by the time I’m finished. Save our date for Aoyama,” I said, and laughed.
“Sure thing. I’ll see you later,” he said, and floated out the door. I saw a flutter of his familiar blue short-sleeved shirt out of the corner of my eye. That was the last time he walked out that door alive.
Over and over, I rewind the scene, replay it. Okay, I’ll see you there, Dad. No—it’s not enough. Let me come with you right now, I don’t need to bring anything. Over and over I regret not saying that. I could have clung to his legs, wept and asked him not to go,
made it impossible for him to leave. Fallen to the floor and pretended to faint and made him stay.
I kept noticing myself trying to redo the scene in my head, even though I knew it was impossible. The more I replayed it, the clearer the fake images got, while Dad’s real memory faded.
FOR A LONG TIME after Dad died, neither Mom nor I could muster up much of an appetite.
One Sunday afternoon, Mom and I were in the apartment, feeling trapped and stifled. We should have been hungry, but eating was the last thing we wanted to do.
I thought about fixing some food. Even soup or congee seemed too heavy. I’d bought some vegetables for a salad, but their freshness and greenness felt so blinding, I didn’t think I could eat them.
“Hey, Mom? Can you think of anything you feel like eating? Let’s get something in our bellies. Or we’ll feel even more miserable,” I said. I was stroking Mom’s warmish back as she lay in bed, crying messily.
Out of nowhere, she said, “I could go for a shave ice.”
It was a sweltering summer. The kind where you felt if you took one step outside you’d be steamed alive by the heat rising from the asphalt, and the heat hung around even at night and stopped you from breathing.
No wonder they kept Dad’s body on ice, given how hot it’s been. The thought came to me suddenly, quietly.
The deep blue of the sky outside the window matched the way I felt. I can’t believe you’re not here anymore, Dad.
I forced Mom to get up, and we pulled on some clothes over our pajamas, got into a taxi, and headed to Shimokitazawa. I was thinking of a place I’d been a few times with friends that had the best shave ice I’d ever eaten: Les Liens.
When we entered the restaurant, our bodies were immediately drawn into the cozily muddled atmosphere, a combination of hot air rushing in from outside and chill wafting from the air-conditioning. We gravitated toward the small table at the back by a window, sat down, and sighed.
The high summer sun coming through the glass was steadily burning my right arm. Mom was staring out at something outside. No matter where we went, we were a sorry sight—miserable, pathetic, and abandoned.
The pretty chef with the good posture—whom I now call Michiyo-san, but whose name I didn’t know at the time—smiled and told us we had plenty of time, so we ordered two shave ices with mango, white peach, and blackcurrant.
The ice was delicate, and the fruit was truly ambrosial. The sweetness slipped into our hearts and our stomachs, like food from heaven. I could feel my mind, overheated from endless cycles of questioning and doubt and regret, relax into cool repose.
Even the occasional waves of hot air entering through the front door felt comforting.
“I feel like I might be getting hungry,” Mom said.
The restaurant was in a renovated old building, with an interior reminiscent of a bistro in a Paris backstreet, and that sensation of being outside the everyday put us at ease. After surviving on what little we could keep down—mugs of café au lait, cookies, sachets of powdered soup—we found our appetites for the first time in a long time, and ordered a big barley salad to share. It arrived topped with crispy toasted French bread, and plenty of barley and jambon cru, with baby corn and cherry tomatoes and cucumber and okra mixed into a bed of lettuce.
“Wow, I can taste this—it tastes good. I’d almost forgotten what it feels like to taste. I guess the body lives, even if your heart’s died,” said Mom, in a small, hollow voice.
We wolfed down the salad, like we had the shave ices, and drank coffee, and finally settled. It felt like the first time in months.
We stared out the window. The time passing in the bistro felt natural, like it was all our own, safe from intrusion.
We’d forgotten time could even feel that way.
We’d been carrying around a sense of someone missing—someone we might be able to find if only we knew where to go, then things might become clear.
We didn’t cry then and there in the bistro, but the feeling of the cells in our bodies welcoming the sudden influx of nutrients was as refreshing as crying in a speeding car with the windows rolled down, letting tears fly. Like finally sitting yourself down at your destination at the end of an exhausting journey.
Michiyo-san didn’t know what we were going through, nor did she console us directly. All she did was put herself into her food and offer it to us. That was obvious in everything about the restaurant—everything there was as real and as certain as anything could be.
For a while after that, Mom and I went there regularly, one or the other of us suggesting the outing whenever we started feeling discouraged or down. We shared salads, and reset with shave ices, and somehow got through the rock bottom that was that summer. We’d both lost weight and become a little unsteady, but whenever we went to the bistro, we managed to work through the menu like a happy mother and child.
For some reason, the summer afternoons, and evenings when the sky turned pink, and all the times I found myself there absorbed in looking out the windows or down at the floor, now live on in my mind like something wonderful and priceless.
Summer ended, as did shave-ice season, but we kept going to Les Liens all through that fall and winter.
By the time the cherry tree outside the Tsuyusaki Building, which housed the restaurant, was in full bloom, both Mom and I had recovered enough to be eating and drinking normally. Even so, when our appetites flagged, or staying in the apartment became unbearable, one of us would say, “I might be able to manage the barley salad,” which would be the signal for us to get on the bus or a taxi and get to Les Liens.
THUS IT WAS ALMOST inevitable that when I moved out to live on my own, I got a job at Les Liens, and built my new life around my work there by renting an apartment across the street.
The pay wasn’t great, and I knew it would be hard work given that Shimokitazawa was something of a tourist destination.
But I couldn’t have asked for a better distraction. Yes—the most important thing for me at that point was to find some relief from the thoughts in my head.
The excitement of not knowing who would come through the door; the thrill of using both my body and my mind at once; the awareness that the restaurant was something like an amoeba, a living thing that responded to my every move—it all suited me down to the ground. I was also starting to see the value that training here would have for my future career.
Les Liens never let it be an option for me to leave the water in the vases unchanged because I felt a little slow that day, or to go ahead and bake the choux pastry dough even though the texture was slightly off.
I was starting to understand that not stopping to fix little internal niggles like these always came back to you, and sooner than you might expect. This was probably even more true when it came to food, which as humans we tended to respond to on an instinctual level. Even if you kept something a secret at first, held it close to your chest, it always came out in some form or another. The only thing to do was to work steadily, humbly, and carefully, without trying to complicate things or make them other than what they were.
I sometimes thought that if Dad had been more of an epicure, he’d have had another thing to enjoy—something that might have been able to keep him anchored in this world.
Dad was never that excited by eating, but he always made an effort with anything I made. Mom even got a little jealous sometimes because he always cleared his plate. “Someday,” he’d said once, “when you’ve opened your own restaurant, I’ll come and have a full-course meal. Do my best with the wine. I’ll have to stay alive until then,” he’d said. And yet . . .
I felt a little cheated. A few years ago, I’d been nowhere near as good a cook as I was now. But my cooking then was all Dad was ever going to know of my food. For Dad, my cooking would be stuck at that stage forever.
On the other hand, it also inspired a more constructive desire to cook things that even people who didn’t eat that well, like Dad, would enjoy. To create a space that could nourish and
empower people just by their being in it, and make them think maybe eating wasn’t so bad after all.
That was something Dad had said, a few years ago, when I’d made him a small rice omelette.
“I never really understood the fuss until now—I thought food just needed to be edible. But when your own daughter makes you something like this, it’s really something special. Maybe this eating thing’s not so bad after all.”
My life in Shimokitazawa revolved entirely around the bistro.
If I woke up and Mom was still asleep, I’d get worried she was going to stay in bed all day, but thankfully that never happened. Once I got up and got going, Mom would get up too and make me coffee, even though she didn’t have to.
When I first discovered the coffee that Mom made when she didn’t have to, I was shocked at how strong, hot, fragrant, and delicious it was.
Up until now, all the things Mom had done to take care of me she’d done out of habit or obligation. Now, she made us coffee so we could enjoy it together. The difference it made was astonishing.
Mom never fixed me breakfast, either. That was good, too.
The most she did was shape rice balls from last night’s rice, or put sweet pastries out on a plate. Other days I’d pull out a chilled ratatouille I put together from vegetables leftover from the bistro. We’d pick at these and watch morning TV, and chat a little. Things that had nothing to do with us being mother and daughter, like Do you think this is a little too salty for breakfast?—I agree, it might go better with wine. Even so, living with Mom, I felt more at ease than I would have done otherwise. I could stay out late with no qualms, and surprisingly, my impatience never got the better of me. Living together worked well on the basis that I was almost never home, but the apartment was very clearly my space.