"A Death in Tokyo"

 

Nihonbashi Bridge, Tokyo. (source)
A beautiful historic bridge, built in 1911, with a huge freeway structure awkwardly built above it.

Keigo Higashino's most recent publication in English is the mystery novel A Death in Tokyo. Like his earlier novels (of which I have read several), it's cleverly and intricately plotted, though I found the pace a little slow. The very first scene of the novel is the death by stabbing of a man named Aoyagi, who runs out onto the bridge and dies beside the elaborate light post that's in the image above. 

As the police investigation proceeds, the bridge becomes more and more important, as are the two statues of mythical winged and horned beasts called Kirin. The center of the bridge, the detective mentions at one point, was “Kilometer zero for all the roads in Japan. This was people’s jumping-off point for journeys all over the country.” (p. 233)

I enjoyed the details of Tokyo landmarks and the Tokyo neighborhoods that were important in the novel. In an attempt to find the murderer, the two main police investigators must visit a number of shops, religious shrines, secondary schools, diners, bars, workshops, and other types of businesses. They question people at woodworking shops, bookstores, specialty paper sellers, and others. They interview the owners and service people in eating places, trying to reconstruct the last hours and the associates of the victim, Aoyagi. As they do so, they also try a number of different foods, which also help to produce the fascinating atmosphere of the story. 

Food, in fact, plays a big role here, as it does in just about every one of the previous novels that I have read by this famous author. As in many well-plotted detective novels, meals help the reader to have a sense of time passing and a sense of location. In this novel, I think we also learn a lot about what fairly ordinary people eat in Tokyo, and I find these details to contribute very much to the effectiveness of the narrative and creation of a vivid picture of the victim and the suspects. A few examples (just because I like them) —

“According to the member of the staff they spoke to, Aoyagi had been there at least twice. He couldn’t recall precisely what Aoyagi had ordered, but he remembered him because he said something complimentary about the food. Since they had the opportunity, Matsumiya and Kaga decided to eat lunch there themselves. Matsumiya had cold soba noodles. They were nicely al dente while the broth was delicious with a real depth of flavor.” (p. 124)

“Kaga split his disposable wooden chopsticks and picked up some salted fish guts. ‘Ooh, that’s good,’ he murmured, and took a swig of beer. … Their food was brought to the table. ‘Looks delicious,’ said Kaga, his eyes sparkling. Matsumiya used his chopsticks to help himself to a piece of lotus root deep-fried with pollock roe. The taste and texture were in perfect balance. … As they ordered chilled soba with dipping sauce, they showed her a photograph of Takeaki Aoyagi.” (p. 128-130)

At another restaurant, the policemen are anxious to interview some potential witnesses. The owner calls and says these witnesses have just sat down to eat:

“The two of them [the detectives] hurried off to the prix fixe restaurant. They caught the owner’s eye and nodded good evening. A group of four typical businessmen were drinking at a table for six. They had sashimi, a rolled Japanese-style omelet, and deep-fried chicken in front of them.” (p. 184)

One more meal:

“Their food was brought to the table. The croquettes were fragrant and went down easily with the beer. The deep-fried shrimp was crisp and smelled delicious. The chunks of meat in the beef stew melted in the mouth.” (p. 262)

While Higashino’s reputation and popularity aren’t as significant in the English-speaking world as they are in Asia, I think a lot of people were waiting eagerly for the publication of this newly-translated work. I was very happy to read it!

I was curious about the appearance of the bridge before the freeway was built over it. (source)

Review © 2022 mae sander

It's Winter: Let's Think of Color

It's dark and grey these days, so I'm trying to think about sunshine and bright colors. In no particular order, here are some photos that I’ve taken over the years while visiting a number of different gardens in various parts of the world. Some of the older photos have faded and the colors aren’t as nice as I would like, but I enjoy thinking of those experiences.

Orchids at Hawaiian Tropical Botanical Gardens, Hilo, Hawaii.       

Water Lilies at Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania.

University of Michigan Arboretum, Ann Arbor: The Peony Garden

Morikami Gardens, Florida, 2020.

Korakuen Gardens, Tokyo, Japan, 2008.

Missouri Botanical Gardens in St. Louis, showing the Climatron, a Geodesic Greenhouse.

Ganna Walska Lotusland, Montecito, California. (2003)

Lotus in Bloom at Lake Erie Metropark, Michigan.

Brookgreen Gardens, Georgetown County, South Carolina, February, 2020.

Roseraie de L'Haÿ in L'Haÿ-les-Roses, France.
(Image from Wikipedia; I visited there long ago)

Tivoli Gardens, Rome, 1976.
Obviously this photo has faded with the years!

Keukenhof: the largest flower garden in the world. Holland, 1999.

Zen Gardens, Kyoto, 1994.

Photos © 1985-2022 mae sander 

At Ikea

 

Why is Mona Lisa always here?

I know why meatballs are always here: everyone loves them!

Blog post © 2022 mae sander

“Lessons in Chemistry”

“While all the other children gummed their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Madeline opened her lunch box to find a thick slice of leftover lasagna, a side helping of buttery zucchini, an exotic kiwi cut into quarters, five pearly round cherry tomatoes, a tiny Morton salt shaker, two still-warm chocolate chip cookies, and a red plaid thermos full of ice-cold milk.” (p. 3)

This is the lunch that Madeline’s mother, Elizabeth Zott, packed for her. It was “back in 1961, when women wore shirtwaist dresses and joined garden clubs and drove legions of children around in seatbeltless cars without giving it a second thought.” So begins Lessons in Chemistry, a novel by Bonnie Garmus. 

Wait a minute, I thought when I read about this lunch. Kiwis and cherry tomatoes weren’t readily available even at specialty food markets until some time much later than 1961. (I looked it up. Kiwis were exotic and rare, and the hybridization of marketable cherry tomatoes didn’t happen until the 70s and 80s.)

Is this another work of seemingly historic fiction where the author doesn’t think the reader cares about accurate details, especially about food? The more I read, the more I thought that this book is a kind of elaborate joke about the sixties, so it indulges in many anachronisms for effect. Maybe. Sometimes, it is conscious of changing times, including details like this: “… he always did his running outside in tennis shoes. This made him an early jogger, meaning that he jogged long before jogging was popular, long before it was even called jogging.” (p. 59)

The fundamental subject of Lessons in Chemistry is the abuse and exclusion of women, ordinary women, from the important features of modern life.  Women were not allowed generally to participate in intellectual and professional activities in the post-World-War-II era — a point made over and over in the life and experience of Elizabeth Zott. Women acquired an identity and a living only through their husbands; an unmarried woman like Elizabeth was reviled or abused, especially if like Elizabeth she had dared to give birth to a child and raise her on her own. Including Elizabeth, women in the novel as in history, resented this: what they were after was “Being taken seriously.” 

Similar analysis of women's fate has been around since the sixties at least, and you could take it back to Mary Wollstonecraft in the 1700s. The events of Lessons in Chemistry occurred just before the publication of the famous book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, which took the marginalization of women very seriously, along with other social problems of the era. Garmus, it seems to me, is serious about these same issues, but her book makes the point in a very humorous way, with a variety of exaggerations for effect. For example, the main character, Elizabeth, makes her daughter Madeline into a prodigy — a nearly unbelievable one, in order to highlight the deficits of education and the assumptions of how mothers (not fathers) would be involved.

“Elizabeth had not only taught Madeline to read but to read highly complex things: newspapers, novels, Popular Mechanics.” (p. 234) It’s mentioned that at age 5 this remarkable child was reading Zane Grey, Faulkner, Dickens, Darwin’s Origin of species, and more. Madeline constantly astounds — or annoys — the school librarian with her requests with her exceptionalism, caused by her mother’s refusal to be average.

Six-Thirty, Elizabeth’s dog, has some remarkable characteristics, which also highlight some of the novel’s points about human oddities. Six-Thirty can read the minds of humans. He has a great deal of self-awareness, and a vocabulary that keeps growing. At last count he somehow knew over 900 English words, though he did not speak and we don’t know just what his word knowledge means. There are lots of interesting things about the dog such as that he finds “fetch” to be boring but he indulges humans who want to play with him. All for humorous effect.

The core of the novel is the character Elizabeth Zott’s TV show, where she talks about her real profession, chemistry, and applies it to cooking. In giving kitchen advice to housewives, she encourages them to think, to strive, and to respect and cherish education. And above all, to take themselves seriously!

In fact, the author really plays with us. Here’s a sample when Elizabeth’s boss agrees for her show to have a canned soup manufacturer as a sponsor. What does she do?

“Hello, viewers,” Elizabeth said three hours later. “And welcome back. See this?” She held a soup can close to the camera. “It’s a real time-saver.” From his producer’s chair, Walter gasped in gratitude. She was using the soup! “That’s because it’s full of artificial ingredients,” she said, tossing it with a clunk into a nearby garbage can. “Feed enough of it to your loved ones and they’ll eventually die off, saving you tons of time since you won’t have to feed them anymore.” …

“Luckily, there are much faster ways to kill off your loved ones,” she continued, walking to her easel, where a selection of mushroom drawings was on display, “and mushrooms are an excellent place to start. If it were me, I’d opt for the Amanita phalloides,” she said, tapping one of the drawings, “also known as the death cap mushroom. Not only does its poison withstand high heat, making it a go-to ingredient for a benign-looking casserole, but it very much resembles its nontoxic cousin, the straw mushroom. So if someone dies and there’s an inquiry, you can easily play the dumb housewife and plead mistaken mushroom identity.” (p. 268)

Discrimination against women had an even uglier side in the novel as in real life. A scene that's central to the theme of the book involves a heated interchange between Elizabeth and Miss Frask, a former secretary who had been gleefully instrumental in depriving her of a research position.

Elizabeth says: 

“I’m a chemist. Not a woman chemist. A chemist. A damn good one!” 

“Well, I’m a personnel expert! An almost-psychologist,” Frask shouted. 

“Almost-psychologist?” 

“Shut up.” 

“No really,” Zott said. 

“Almost?” 

“I didn’t have a chance to finish, okay? What about you? Why aren’t you a PhD, Zott?” Frask shot back.

Elizabeth hardened, and without meaning to, revealed a fact about herself that she’d never told anyone other than a police officer. "Because I was sexually violated by my thesis advisor, then kicked out of the doctoral program, she shouted. "You?' 

Frask looked back, shocked. 

"Same," she said limply. (p. 178).

Sometimes I think the reason for the anachronisms is to bring home the point that women haven't made much progress, and that they are still staying home maybe watching cooking shows that seem to take them seriously, maybe relying on husbands for their identity, maybe being shut out of professional goals. This book made me laugh and made me think. So maybe it doesn’t matter if the details or right. Or maybe it does. I can’t decide.

Blog post © 2020 mae sander

Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor Winter Dinner

The theme of the December Culinary Historians dinner was Food from the British Isles, and the selection of foods was both interesting and delicious! People made many classics such as colcannon, the potato and kale/cabbage dish from Ireland; the timely Coronation Chicken, which was invented for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth; and the “National Loaf,” a wholemeal bread required of all British bakeries during World War II. Several more appealing breads were also on the menu. Here are some photos:

Cookbooks that people used and brought to the dinner.

Colcannon with two relishes.

Salmon cured in Scotch Whiskey.

"Selkirk Bannock" -- a delicious fruit bread.

Phil Zaret, the organizer of the dinner, explains Kentish Huffins,
which are tasty little rolls served with cherry jam.

Quite a few new members were present for this meal. During the pandemic, the Zoom meetings
attracted a number of interested people both local and from elsewhere.

My contribution: white bean dip from the Ottolenghi cookbook Flavor. 
Ottolenghi’s seven London restaurants are quite popular!

This unpalatable wartime bread was called "Hitler’s secret weapon." 

Several participants brought various English cheeses.

Dessert Table

Christmas Pudding: aged since mid-October!

The baker of these mince pies explained the history of mincemeat,
which originated shortly after the Crusaders returned with lots of exotic spices.

This shortbread once won a prize at the Ohio State Fair.

Along with the many sweets, we drank coffee, though I didn’t photograph it.

I’m sharing this beverage with Elizabeth at the blog party celebrating drinks.

Remembering Jan Longone

This year's dinner was dedicated to Jan Longone, founder of the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor, and always a leader of the local food-history community. Jan passed away last summer. You can read her New York Times obituary here: "Jan Longone, Influential Scholar of Food History, Dies at 89:The cookbook collection that began in the basement of her home became the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan." 

Jan Longone at the December dinner in 2015.

Blog post and photos © 2015, 2022 mae sander.

"Olga Dies Dreaming" by Xochitl Gonzalez

The devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico a few years ago is central to the events and character development in the novel Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez. Prieto, one of the two central characters, is a congressman representing a district in Brooklyn. He reacts to the plight of the Puerto Ricans:

“Unlike when Sandy took out power in New York, or when Houston was flooded after Harvey, or when fires burned the houses of Sonoma to the ground, these people had no one to go to. They had no real voice as far as the government was concerned. They paid taxes, served in U.S. wars, yet there was no one with actual power whose job was to fight for them. No one to represent them and demand action. On a good day, Prieto didn’t trust this administration not to fuck anyone who wasn’t a part of their ‘base.’ He could only imagine the cruel neglect they would subject upon an entire island of disenfranchised Brown and Black people. It was playing out before his very eyes. He wanted to stay to help, yes, but also so that no one could deny what he saw. No one could ‘spin’ it and say the footage was worse than the situation. He needed to bear witness.” (p. 264)

Olga Dies Dreaming (published in 2021) has many themes besides this, and I found a lot to like in the novel. I was impressed by the insights about the characters’ thoughts about material goods and especially the way that they view ultra-rich people and their values. The author has an original way to contrast wealth with poverty: contrasting those who have everything to people who want to avoid being poor and ethnically different. The author deeply understood how alienated and impoverished people wanted a place of their own:  “Stomping up and down the stairs of a house your family owned, not getting policed by a landlord who wants your money but not the smells of your food or the sounds of your language.” (p. 25)

Olga Acevedo, her brother Prieto, and others in the book really came to life as they were depicted in a plot that was appealing, if somewhat unbelievable when it came to their all-powerful mother the revolutionary!  The dialog was readable, though sprinkled with references to Puerto Rican music and use of New-York-Puerto-Rican-Spanish-in-group expressions that you were supposed to learn by reading. (It reminded me of some older New York novels that used Yiddish that way.)

Lots of home life characterizes the narrative; also lots of thoughts on the life of closeted or nearly closeted gay people afraid of the ethnic disapproval of their families. This is key. For example, here’s how the author shows Olga’s aunt, beginning as she makes arroz con habichuelas blancas—Olga’s favorite:

“Olga stared at Tía Lola intently as she seasoned beans, boiled rice, chopped onions, and sliced avocado. While she cooked, Lola hummed along to the Daddy Yankee song playing on the stereo system and from across the kitchen Olga attempted to discern something of her aunt beyond her boundless capacity to love. Her mother’s baby sister had always bucked convention. In college, she had studied accounting and, once done with school, landed a good job, chopped off all her hair, and took an apartment forty blocks north in Park Slope. Lola then proceeded to stack cheddar in a way that enabled her to care for her mother as she aged, keep Olga and Prieto in fresh back-to-school clothes, and still go on one cruise a year. On Saturdays, Lola, who had been the family chef since she herself was a girl, came and cooked for whatever family showed up. On Sundays, in good weather, she rode with her Puerto Rican motorcycle club. She never married. What she did with her days and nights outside of that, none of them knew. The block had long whispered that Lola was a lesbian, and Olga hadn’t ruled that out, but she also wasn’t completely convinced.” (p. 110)

Politics of Puerto Rican freedom and independence are a major topic in the novel, handled with a great deal of skill and tact so that they didn't overcome the reader with stuff that's not focused on character development. And character development is very much the center of this book: Olga, the central figure, learning to understand who she is, became able to relate to many people: friends, relatives, lovers, and coworkers, and to the memories of her dead father and absent mother.

The poem from which the author took the book’s title is “Puerto Rican Obituary,” and it’s worth reading at the Poetry Foundation website. The character in the book says of the poem: “That Olga was ashamed of her identity and died dreaming of money and being anything other than herself.” (p. 276) As the quote implies: this novel is about identity.

Review © 2022 mae sander

In the Van Gogh Museum

A sketch by Van Gogh made into a mural in the museum.

 

Dramatic murals on the staircase between floors of the Klimt exhibit.

Reproduction of Klimt’s murals for the Vienna Session. Klimt painted famous and very controversial
murals for several venues, but eventually gave up making murals because of so much criticism.

I very much enjoyed the experience of seeing the work of Klimt as well as the huge collection of Van Gogh paintings in this museum in Amsterdam on my trip there earlier this month.

Now I'm back home, and doing my usual thing with blogs. This post is now linked to Monday Murals at Sami's blog -- check this out if you like murals! 

https://sami-colourfulworld.blogspot.com/2022/12/monday-murals-rottnest-island-fauna-and.html

Blog post © 2022 mae sander