Itried peeling the kitchen wall with my fingernails, but that didn’t work, so I pressed hard with my fingers and a flake of the “stucco,” which is what I call it, fell off. I don’t know if it’s really stucco or not, or even what stucco is, precisely, but I like the snappy sound of the word, and that’s good enough for me.
I popped the stucco into my mouth. Then I chewed and chewed until, finally, I was able to swallow it.
Once you dislodge the first piece, the rest is easy. Over and over, I stripped flakes of stucco from the crumbling wall and ate them.
“You shouldn’t be eating that!” said a voice from under the refrigerator.
That had to be the kitchen god.
A kitchen god is small, has three faces, and lives in the dark corners of the kitchen. The first time I saw one, I screamed, which earned me a scolding from my mother. That was before I started first grade. My mother then was younger than I am now.
“You must never be scared of the kitchen god, or neglect him, either,” my mother said.
Were kitchen gods common, I wondered. Did they inhabit other people’s kitchens, too? My mother never instructed me to keep my mouth shut about ours; nevertheless, I didn’t breathe a word about him to Ayaka, who lived next door, or to my cousin, Shō.
I’m a grown woman now, but in all these years I haven’t told a soul about the kitchen god. After I got married, I moved into this company apartment with my husband, but it didn’t take long for a kitchen god to show up. This kitchen god, however, was unlike the one I had grown up with: the three faces were different, as was the sound of his voice, and its cadence.
“He’s here,” I told my mother.
“He’s present, you mean,” she said sternly.
“So, they’re everywhere,” I said.
“You mean, they are present everywhere.”
“It seems they’re present everywhere.”
“Yes, they are present.”
My mother lowered her voice. “It’s because you have the right attitude, Izumi,” she said.
“Attitude?”
“Yes, kitchen gods only inhabit the kitchens of women who display the proper attitude.”
My mother hung up with a satisfied click. But was my attitude really so proper? Just that morning, I had stolen a pack of plum chewing gum and an Extra-Large container of miso-flavored Cup Ramen from the convenience store in front of the train station. I was an old hand at shoplifting, a skill I had picked up in junior high. An Extra-Large Cup Ramen was a difficult target, however: the package rustled, and its size made it hard to squeeze into my bag.
Shoplifting always leaves me feeling disappointed. It’s not a “Damn, I’ve gone and done it again!” kind of thing. And it’s not that I feel let down once the excitement of the moment has passed. Or even that I wish I had ripped off something more valuable. Rather, it’s a vague, nonspecific form of disappointment.
From the convenience store, I hopped on my bicycle and pedalled back to the company apartments. There, waiting for me under the middle staircase, the one that leads up to my fifth-floor apartment, was a collapsible plastic box from the local Shoppers’ Co-op. I’m a member of the Co-op. They deliver every Thursday. My order tends to draw attention because it’s so skimpy—I might get only a bag of Co-op madeleines, or perhaps a jar of Co-op strawberry preserves. You could never act so dainty and refined, one of the housewives in the building told me, if you had children of your own. When my kids were in preschool, she went on, I loaded one child on the front of my bike, the other in the back, and then we wobbled down the street with five cartons of tissues and a jam-packed supermarket shopping bag in the front basket. That was how she explained it to me. I didn’t say anything, just nodded in response.
We all call one another okusan. An okusan has blemish-free skin and muscular arms. She puts her Co-op order in a reusable bag and lugs it up to her apartment. I stuff my order—Co-op ketchup and Co-op mini doughnuts this time around—in my tote bag and trudge up the staircase. When I show the kitchen god what I bought, he snorts in disgust.
“Sweet stuff again, huh?” he says.
I like sweets, it’s true, but I like stucco even more. I boiled water for the Extra-Large Cup Ramen I had pilfered that morning. Stucco tastes great, but it doesn’t fill me up. I then devoured the ramen, right down to the last drop of broth, polished off a whole bag of sugar-coated biscuits, stuffed six sticks of plum-flavored gum in my mouth, and clasped my hands in prayer to the kitchen god. My mother trained me to pray to him every morning, noon, and night. I heard him growl underneath the fridge. Then everything went quiet.
•
“Okusan!” called a voice from behind me.
It was an okusan from the building next to mine. The one whose eyes were set very far apart. I thought that separation made her look cute. I like cute things. If it’s sweet or cute, it’s for me.
“Did you hear tell what’s going on in the trash-disposal area?”
Did I hear tell? I hadn’t come across that phrase since I read “Little Women” when I was young. I shook my head.
“The crows are bad enough, but, to make matters worse, now it seems we have a weasel.”
I opened my mouth wide. “Oh, that’s terrible,” I said, opening my eyes wide as well.
“It looks like this,” the okusan said. Hunching her back, she began running around in small circles.
“Oh, that’s terrible,” I said again. The okusan handed me a clipboard. As I’m in charge of looking after the staircases this year, it’s my job to distribute a circular with all relevant information to the residents, starting on the first floor: in addition, the clipboard has a sheet of paper with two columns, one column for me, listing in order the units I must call on, and a second column that the residents have to stamp with their seal.
The okusan tittered when I suggested that we trap the weasel and sell it. I thought she looked even cuter when she laughed. When I added that the weasel’s pelt might be worth something, though, she stopped laughing and walked off with her nose in the air.
I decided to climb back up to my apartment to prepare the circular. The air inside was warm and humid. I watered the spider plants. They’ve been growing like crazy. I got the original cutting from the okusan who lives on the floor below me.
Living rooms that have potted spider plants, cyclamens, and philodendrons I call “aunts’ living rooms.” My mother’s elder sister Aunt Katsura had big pots of those plants scattered around her living room, as did Aunt Nana, as did Aunt Arika. All three aunts also made sure to lay down small rugs in their front entranceways. Glass jars full of potpourri were placed on their bathroom shelves. Cowrie shells and glass figurines of horses graced their kitchen counters. At Christmastime, cards from abroad were lined up on top of the shoe racks in the entranceway.
I never felt comfortable in my aunts’ homes. They were always patting me on the head and forcing chocolate-chip cookies on me. None of their kitchens seemed to have a god in it, but once, when Aunt Arika slipped into her kitchen to add hot water to a pot of apple tea, I heard a squeaky voice through the crack in the door.
“Aunt Arika, is someone in your kitchen?” I asked when she came out.
“It’s a weasel, Izumi,” she replied with a smile. “A scary, scary weasel. If you go in the kitchen, it’ll catch you and eat you up.” She arched her eyebrows, the smile still frozen on her face.
“Is it an old weasel?” I asked, but all that earned me was another chocolate-chip cookie.
My living room bore a slight resemblance to the living rooms of Aunt Arika and my other aunts, but without the sweet, cloying atmosphere that filled their homes. All my living room had was spider plants, pots and pots of them, with a little kitchen god scampering around in between. The okusan who lived below me, however, did have an aunt’s living room, with cyclamens and philodendrons, as well as a yucca and a “tree of good fortune.” A rug sat in the front entranceway.
Was the weasel visiting the trash-disposal area the same kind of weasel as the one in Aunt Arika’s kitchen? I could feel my thoughts beginning to stray as I pondered this question. Alarmed, I joined my hands in prayer to the kitchen god. My mother had often warned me not to allow empty spaces to form in my mind. When that happens, she taught me, all kinds of bad things can sneak in. If you prayed to the kitchen god, however, he could drive those bad things away for you.
•
Mr. Sanobe and I got together at a coffee shop called the Olive Tree, which was situated in the building above the train station.
I had been introduced to Mr. Sanobe by an okusan who lived in the building two down from mine. It seemed that he worked as a salesman of textbooks and other educational materials. He and I had gone to a hotel together three times. After each meeting, Mr. Sanobe had given me twenty-five thousand yen.
“Why are you giving me money?” I had asked him.
“You know, your breasts are awesome” was his response. He never answered my question.
Right after our first meeting, when I was wending my way home with the extra twenty-five thousand in my purse, I bumped into the same okusan from the building two down from mine in front of the station. She was carrying a tiny handbag. Too tiny to contain even the smallest coin purse.
“What a cool handbag,” I said, whereupon she laughed and extracted from it a single small stone. It was white and smooth to the touch.
“Here, it’s yours,” she said.
“For me?” I asked. She nodded.
“Take good care of it.”
“I will!” I answered.
“How was Mr. Sanobe?” the okusan asked.
“He gave me money,” I said. Her eyes widened.
“Don’t ever say that out loud,” she said.
“Should I give it back?”
“No, it’s just something that we have to keep to ourselves.”
“O-oh, I see,” I said, laughing. She laughed with me. We walked back to the company apartments together, our steps matching. She was still laughing as she climbed the stairs to her apartment. I rolled the small white stone she had given me between my fingers for a moment. Then I tossed it in the gutter.
Mr. Sanobe was sipping his iced coffee in the Olive Tree. It was always iced coffee for that guy.
“How do you feel about me, Izumi?” he asked.
“I like you,” I answered. “I think you’re cute.” I especially liked the way his hair was thinning in front.
“Does your husband have any idea what’s going on between us?”
“No, none at all.”
“Are you sure?”
“Let’s go to the hotel,” I said, rising from my seat. Mr. Sanobe followed right on my tail. I tried a few new things in our hotel room, stomping on him, slapping him around, and calling him some nasty names. He loved it. Before we left, he gave me twenty-eight thousand yen.
“I hope we can make this last forever, Izumi,” he said, as we headed out the door.
“I hope so, too,” I replied.
“I want us to be lovers,” he said immediately.
“What do you mean, lovers?”
“You know, going to movies together, taking trips, hanging out on the phone.”
“Sure.”
Mr. Sanobe gasped in surprise. “Well, then, next time we’ll meet as lovers. It’s a promise, right?” His forehead was glistening as he took me in his arms. I kissed the sweaty skin with a loud smack.
I stopped by the flower store in the station on my way home and used the twenty-eight thousand yen Mr. Sanobe had given me to buy the biggest philodendron they had. There was still a lot of money left over, so I picked up a fancy box lunch with salmon roe and grilled salmon as well.
When I got home, I put the plant on the small table next to the living-room window. Then I unwrapped the crinkly packaging of the box lunch and ate the contents. I picked off the grains of rice stuck to the box and the wooden cover and ate them, too. The kitchen god came out from under the fridge and ran a quick circle around the table with the new plant on it. When I showed the god how clean the box and the wooden cover were, all three of his faces nodded in approval. I took a plastic cup of Co-op custard from the fridge. The only things left inside were beer, a bag of oden that I had stolen from the convenience store the week before, and four soft-boiled onsen eggs. I gave the god a bit of my custard. He sucked it up, sprinted around the spider plants, and disappeared under the fridge. I took a bath and immediately fell asleep.
•
How nice to be childless—you stay so young, said the okusan who lived in the apartment kitty-corner to mine on the floor below.
It’s rare for a childless woman to be asked, Don’t you want children? It’s common, though, for a mother with one child to be asked if she intends to have a second.
I don’t like the idea of “making” children anyway, my neighbor says from time to time. We are blessed with them, right? I mumble my assent and nod. That very morning, I had lifted a carton of milk and a plastic bottle of green tea from the convenience store. They made my tote bag so heavy I swore never to pilfer drinks again.
The okusan living kitty-corner to me on the floor below came up beside me in the hallway. This week, it was my turn to clean the trash-disposal area, so I was walking along carrying an empty bucket, a dustpan, and a broom.
“That weasel is a serious problem,” she said.
I hadn’t seen the weasel myself. These days, though, it was a common topic of conversation for the okusan community in our company apartments. It’s a lot worse than the crows, they complained. Ripping up garbage bags is bad enough, but squeezing through the mail slot to get into someone’s apartment and then laying waste to the kitchen? That’s another thing altogether. It’s absolutely dreadful. Weasels invading our kitchens—how do you deal with something like that?
The okusan stood there leaning against the cinder-block wall next to the trash cans, chattering while I filled my bucket with water from the hose and splashed it over the concrete floor.
“Have you ever seen the weasel?” I asked her.
“No, but don’t you think it’s a terrible situation?” she replied.
Come to think of it, I hadn’t met anyone who had laid eyes on the animal.
“I wonder if it really exists,” I muttered, refilling my bucket with water.
“Weasels multiply like crazy, too,” she went on, still leaning against the cinder-block wall.
She kept watching me as I went through the process of cleaning the area.
“How does the weasel find its way out of the kitchen once it has gotten inside?” I asked. The concrete I’d splashed with water was gleaming black.
“What are you doing about the storage problem in your kitchen?” she asked, ignoring my question. “There just isn’t enough shelf space in these buildings, is there?” I described the long, narrow shelves designed for small spaces that I had purchased online. She praised the equally narrow shelves she had bought that boasted an even greater storage capacity. I murmured a few “uh-huhs” and nodded.
“Does a god live in your kitchen?” I blurted out. What on earth induced me to mention the kitchen god to a near-stranger that way? I myself have no idea. It just slipped out.
“It’s so gross, leaving footprints all over the kitchen.”
“What?”
“They eat fish right down to the bones, you know. And that’s not all.”
She was still talking about the weasel. I studied her face as I gathered up the cleaning tools. This okusan had a prominent nose. And she was as thin as a rail.
“Are weasels at all cute?” I asked her.
“Weasels can make themselves flat. There isn’t a crack that they can’t get through,” she replied. I bowed in her direction and started up the steps. She returned the bow but continued to stand there, propped against the wall.
When I got back to my apartment, I asked the kitchen god if he’d seen a weasel, but he didn’t make a sound. I clasped my hands and prayed to him—prayed and prayed, wiping all else from my mind.
•
Mr. Sanobe phoned, hoping to get together. We met at our usual place, the Olive Tree, but when I started for the hotel he tugged at my sleeve.
“Let’s go to the game arcade,” he said.
“What would we do at a game arcade?” I asked.
“You know, play games and stuff,” he answered, sweat beginning to ooze from his forehead.
We walked for a while, turned down what looked like an alleyway, and there, sure enough, was a game arcade. Maybe because it was the middle of the day, no customers were inside. Mr. Sanobe won a stuffed animal playing the UFO Catcher game.
“What a cute dog,” I said.
“It’s a raccoon,” he said. He gave it to me. I found nothing at all cute about it, however. I crammed it into my handbag. Mr. Sanobe moved on to the car-driving game. I stood behind him watching until he crashed, for my benefit, it seemed.
“Aren’t you going to give it a name?” he asked.
“Give what a name?”
“The raccoon.”
“Oh,” I muttered vaguely.
“Let’s call him Peter,” Mr. Sanobe chirped, after receiving no response from me. So, Peter it was. He kissed me, right there in the back of the arcade. Then we headed off to the hotel, where, like before, I gave him a good trampling.
“Do you ever think about divorce, Izumi?” he asked. We were in bed, and I was just drifting off to sleep.
“What?” I snapped. It was pure reflex.
“I love you, Izumi,” he said, pulling me closer to him. “I really mean it.”
I held my breath. I hate it when I’m lying down and someone slips an arm under my shoulder like that.
A few minutes later, Mr. Sanobe began to get dressed. I put on my bra and panties. We had already said goodbye and I was shopping in the station building when it hit me—he hadn’t given me money this time around.
•
I placed a pot of cyclamens in my living room. The red flowers seemed to strike a chord with the kitchen god. His sprints around the room became more frequent.
The okusan next door had just left. She’d stopped by for tea with a loaf of banana bread that she had baked herself. The banana bread wasn’t very sweet.
“My, what a lot of green!” she exclaimed when she saw my apartment.
“Not all that much,” I said.
She took a sip of tea.
“It must take a lot of looking after,” she went on.
“Not all that much,” I repeated. The kitchen god came running into the room. He scampered about among the spider plants, philodendrons, and cyclamens.
“Green plants aren’t easy, getting them to grow properly.” Had she seen the kitchen god or not? She sounded a bit distracted.
“My husband’s home late every night and my children are busy with their own lives, so I was thinking maybe I’d take a course in gardening, but the children’s expenses are going to keep mounting. I’d like to find work, but I’m afraid I’m too old,” she said as she shovelled in the banana bread.
I sat there and nodded.
“Don’t you work?” she asked me.
“I’m not really qualified for anything,” I replied. The kitchen god was racing madly around the cyclamens. I was suddenly overcome by an urge to vomit. I held it back, though, and the feeling passed.
The okusan left not long after that. I plopped down on my kitchen floor and began munching the stucco. I tossed what remained of the banana bread in the garbage. The kitchen god circled the garbage can, sniffing its contents. I picked up the god and pressed my cheek to his. All six of his cheeks, I should say. It felt as though bad things were trying to steal into my mind, so I put the god down and began praying to him with all my might.
When I walked back into the living room, the thick, musty smell of the potted plants rose to greet me. They blanketed the floor so tightly it was hard to move around. I edged my way to the table and placed the cups and dishes the okusan and I had used on a tray. I figured it was a good time to pedal over to the convenience store and shoplift something. I grabbed my tote bag and thumped down the stairs.
•
I began to get calls from Mr. Sanobe during the day. He phoned every hour, sometimes every ten minutes.
Every third call or so, he would say something along the lines of “Is a man there with you?” and I would answer, “Fat chance,” which would set him laughing. Then he would change the subject, and ask if I had seen the big home run on TV the night before, or tell me he was thinking of quitting his job.
“How is Peter?” he inquired. My memory was hazy, but I knew I had tossed the stuffed raccoon in the gutter at some point.
“I treasure the little guy,” I answered. He laughed happily. Then he went into his “I love you, Izumi, I really do” routine.
The okusan who lived in the building two down from mine, the one who’d introduced me to Mr. Sanobe, moved out. Apparently, she had purchased a custom-built home. The next time the Co-op delivery arrived, the okusan gathering around the boxes that held our orders gossiped about her. How could she have afforded such an extravagance? Weren’t we in an economic slump? Bonuses had shrunk, right? Maybe she had inherited some money. She had all the luck!
We wasted no time dividing up our purchases. The wall of our building was turning gray, I thought, as I leaned over the rim of the plastic box. I could feel my mind beginning to wander. Alarmed, I tried to focus on a package of Co-op flour. Then I shifted to a box of the Co-op chestnut-and-bean-paste sweets. If I could just keep focussing on external objects like those, I thought, then bad things couldn’t sneak into my mind.
•
Mr. Sanobe started asking if he could visit me at home.
“C’mon,” he said on the phone one day. “Tell me where you live. Then I can come and visit.”
I smothered a laugh. He fell quiet, waiting for an answer. I said nothing. The silence was driving him crazy—I could tell.
“You and I are lovers, right, Izumi?”
I hung up immediately.
After that, I stopped answering the phone altogether. Wordless messages were left on my answering machine, but those ended after a few days.
I went to the kitchen and began to peel small flakes of stucco off the walls.
“You shouldn’t eat that stuff,” the kitchen god warned me. The walls in the kitchen were turning dark. I had stripped off almost all the stucco. Underneath, the plaster surface was gray and bumpy.
I went to the convenience store. An okusan followed me in. She wanted to talk, so I couldn’t shoplift. When she finally left, another okusan took her place. The weasel was on her mind, so she gabbed on about that. Not long afterward, a third okusan showed up, also interested in the weasel situation. With all the talk about weasels, I had no chance to steal anything. I was going nuts.
Apparently, weasels were running rampant throughout our building complex. They were impossible to drive out, no matter how many times you hit them. They laid waste not just to kitchens but to everything—living rooms, bedrooms, nowhere was safe.
I was finally able to pilfer a pack of safety pins and leave the store. The sky was a cold, wintry blue. Wisps of cloud floated high overhead. My eyes were bleary, unfocussed.
I went to the kitchen to pray to the kitchen god. Recently, I had been blanking out a lot, which meant it was easy for bad things to find their way in. I prayed and prayed to the god every day.
•
Mr. Sanobe showed up.
I didn’t have a chance to ask how he had found me, for the moment he closed the front door he pushed me down on my back right there in the entranceway.
I smiled sweetly at him. He wasn’t looking at my face, though, but at the philodendrons, cyclamens, and spider plants that had overflowed my living room and spilled into the entranceway. My head almost banged into a potted philodendron when he forced himself on me.
Mr. Sanobe finished up quickly and hurried out the door. When he left, he bowed and, in a loud voice, called out, “Please think it over, okusan. You will not be disappointed in the quality of our merchandise, I guarantee it.”
I slammed the door and headed for my bedroom, skirting the living room and its wall-to-wall plants. I threw myself on the bed. The bedroom floor, too, was almost completely covered. I fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow.
When I awoke, I could see the winter sky outside my window. The sun had gone down since Mr. Sanobe’s visit, but night had not yet fallen. Something shot past the window. The weasel, perhaps? I went to the kitchen. The kitchen god was running around. All three of his faces looked angry. Taken aback, I clasped my hands and prayed. When I went to scrape some stucco off the wall, though, there was hardly any left—all I could manage were a few tiny bits. I leaned against the naked wall, my mind a blur.
“Are you happy?” the kitchen god asked.
The kitchen god was prone to ask out-of-the-blue questions of that sort. I sensed that my mind was vulnerable to bad things entering, so I prayed to him with all my might. Was I happy? I had never given that question a thought. My mind was growing more and more scattered. I knew that bad things could sneak in when I was in this condition, so I scrambled to focus on something. Since I wasn’t sure what that something should be, though, I prayed for the people in my life:
May Mr. Sanobe find happiness.
May my mother find happiness.
May Aunt Katsura find happiness.
May Aunt Nana find happiness.
May Aunt Arika find happiness.
May all the okusan find happiness.
The kitchen god scampered as I prayed. He circled the philodendrons, the spider plants, the cyclamens in their pots. Around and around he ran. ♦
(Translated, from the Japanese, by Ted Goossen.)
This is drawn from “Dragon Palace.”
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