Eating the City

As I headed to get some lunch, the automatic door to the office building opened in response to my presence, and warm humid air immediately pressed in on me. It was still early spring, but the steaming hot air that enveloped me was more reminiscent of summer, and memories of childhood vacations suddenly rose up in the back of my mind. It was always the same when I detected the scents of summer. It would be the same for anyone, their sense of smell responding to the summer scent that linked back to memories of vacations, bringing up vivid, nostalgic scenes.

Until I left elementary school, it was our family’s custom for the three of us to get in the car, drive to my father’s childhood home in the countryside, and stay there for a week over the Obon festival. It was a typical country house, deep in the mountains of Nagano. We would drive up a narrow mountain road to reach the house, which had an entrance hall about the same size as a child’s bedroom and an atmosphere completely different from our house in Saitama. I was so fascinated by the old house that as soon as we arrived, I would immediately start running around and exploring, but with all the rooms connected by sliding paper doors, I would soon get lost and then burst in on the room where the adults were relaxing. They would scold me, but as soon as they let me go, I would be off again, running around and sliding doors open. Once I finished exploring inside, I played outside to my heart’s content until it was time for dinner. Then I was hungry, so would keep peeking in on the kitchen,

where my mother and grandmother were cooking. I was a picky eater, but to my parents’ delight, I ate twice as much as usual when we were in the mountains. The vegetables Granny brought in from her vegetable garden were much sweeter than those we ate at home. Wondering why that was, I’d open my mouth wide and bite into vegetables that I never normally ate.

Absorbed in such universal memories of summer vacation, I went into the café next to the office. When my order arrived, I immediately opened the large sandwich, picked out the slices of tomato, and flipped them onto the plate. My colleague Yuki was eating raw tuna with avocado on a bed of rice, and laughing, she tucked her dyed-brown permed hair behind her ears.

“You’re doing it again, Rina. Why don’t you just ask them to leave it out from the start?”

“I did, but it was in there anyway.”

The menu at this place was popular for its fusion of Western and Japanese rice dishes and well-stuffed sandwiches, and the café was always crowded with women office workers. And it was true—the thick, freshly BBQ-grilled hamburgers were delicious, but I couldn’t help grimacing at the unappetizing smell of the vegetables stuck to the bread.

Normally we ate our lunch at work, Yuki with her homemade bento and me with a sandwich or rice ball from the convenience store. Today was payday, though, so we had decided to treat ourselves. I was fussy about food and didn’t really like going out to eat. When I was with work superiors, even now, at the age of twenty-six, I couldn’t bring myself to say I didn’t like certain foods and usually forced myself to swallow everything, but Yuki and I were the

same age, and we got along well and often went out together, so I didn’t have any qualms about also removing the disgusting bit of lettuce and leaving it on the side of the plate.

“Not eating vegetables is bad for you, you know.”

“Yeah, I know. I used to eat them more when I was a kid.”

“That’s funny. Usually you grow out of not liking vegetables!”

The reason I grew even fussier about food when I left my parents’

home in Saitama and started living alone in Tokyo was not that I didn’t like vegetables, but because the vegetables in Tokyo were horrible. I did sometimes leave vegetables on the plate at home, too, but the tomatoes and eggplants and other vegetables we were sent from the countryside, and the food from the nearby honesty stall, where they sold cucumbers and things, was always delicious. You have got a pampered tongue, haven’t you? Mom would often say, laughing at me, but they were completely different foods to me. Our local supermarket had a lot of precooked dishes and bentos, but there was only a small selection of fresh vegetables and wilted meager leaves sold in single portions. With this thought in mind, I bit into my sandwich and immediately noticed the unpleasant taste of the green juice from the tomato slices that had soaked into the bread. I grimaced and washed it down with cold water.

“I think I can eat fresh vegetables, though.”

“So why don’t you make a small vegetable patch on your balcony?” Yuki asked.

I shook my head. “That’s not going to work—I’ve killed at least three cactuses. And I don’t have the space for it anyway.”

“Oh, there’s a place near me that delivers pesticide-free vegetables direct from the farm. That would be okay, wouldn’t it? But

they’re expensive, I guess.”

“That’s the problem. The tasty vegetables are all expensive, and the cheap ones taste awful. They have this unpleasantly weird kind of taste, don’t you think?”

“It doesn’t really bother me, to be honest.”

After the meal, I swallowed an array of supplements, knowing full well that it would be better to eat a proper meal. The bits of squashed tomatoes were piled up on the plate, discharging their sticky green innards into the scattered bread crumbs.

That evening, when I left work, the air was considerably colder than at midday. I took a shawl out of my bag and put it over my shoulders, glancing at my watch. Half past five. It was about the time we got busy in the kitchen when we were in the mountains in the summer, I thought nostalgically, for no reason at all.

Now that my grandmother was dead, nobody was living in the house, and there was even talk of demolishing it. Back then, though, the house in the mountains was especially lively during the Obon festival, and preparing meals for everyone was a lot of work. While all the women relatives, Mom and Granny included, prepared a huge amount of food, the children usually took a nap, tired out from playing. I would often watch TV, bored as my younger cousins were sleeping, and then Dad would take me out for a walk. We would go past the watermelon chilling in a narrow stream of water from a faucet and the old disused well, then out of the garden onto the mountain path. “Did you know that you can eat these, Rina?” he would ask, plucking a little food from the mountain—wild strawberries, maybe, or some small leaves. On either side of the path, pale and dark green undergrowth grew tangled together, with

black thickets farther in. I was scared of big insects jumping out at me from all directions, and I shrank back, but Dad thrust his hand into the greenery with a practiced air and then passed me a piece of the mountain. As I bit into it, warm juice oozed out.

One day Dad picked up a stick in the garden. It was Y-shaped, thick and sturdy. “Oh, this is perfect,” he said, stroking it with a nostalgic look on his face. “You put a rubber band here and use it to shoot small stones. I used to do it all the time.”

I quickly took the rubber band from my ponytail and held it out to him. “Show me! Please?”

“It won’t work with that one,” he said, laughing. “But okay, I’ll try.”

He went back inside the house to get a large, chunky rubber band and a small, thick scrap of cloth.

“What’s that bit of cloth for?”

“What? Oh, that’s where you put the stone.”

He sat on the veranda and took a gimlet out of the toolbox to make a couple of holes in the cloth; then he threaded the rubber band through them. He stretched and loosened the rubber band a few times, holding on to the cloth, then abruptly stood up and said,

“Okay, Rina, let’s go.” He seemed strangely excited as he strode off quickly, leaving me to scamper after him.

When we reached the mountain path, he said, “Don’t make any noise as you walk,” and he gazed at the sky as if searching for something. Eventually he stopped and whispered in my ear, “There’s one! Be quiet and wait here for me, Rina, okay?”

He picked up a few pebbles from the path and left me there, crouching over as he went deeper into the grass. I held my breath as I watched him approach a large tree and put a stone in the cloth,

then pull the band back like drawing a bow and arrow. Dad stretched the rubber band back as long as his arm, and I was about to warn him, terrified, that it might break at any moment, when he suddenly let go and the stone flew like a bullet into the branches. Birds flew up out of the tree all at once, and I was captivated by the sight. “How about that?” Dad said. “I haven’t lost my touch at all!” He walked calmly over to the base of the tree and picked something out of the grass, cradling it in his hands, so I couldn’t see very well what it was.

Holding the object in one hand, with his free hand he held mine and started walking. I tried to see what he was carrying, but Dad’s body blocked my view.

“Grill this for Rina, will you?” he said when we got to the kitchen.

“A sparrow? Whatever next! Where on earth did you find that?”

My grandmother’s wrinkled face creased even more as she stood up, supporting her hunched back with one hand. She had a basket at her feet that contained the vast quantity of vegetables she had just picked for dinner.

“Come on, you help too!” Dad told me, so I sat between an aunt and an older cousin and started peeling some potatoes, but the work didn’t go very quickly as I couldn’t stop glancing over at what my grandmother was doing.

After a while my grandmother put something black on a piece of newspaper and handed it to me. “Watch out, it’s hot.”

“Give it a try, Rina,” Dad said.

Nervously I stretched out a hand and took it. It looked more like a miniature mummy than a sparrow. As my grandmother watched, I bit into the charred meat. An appetizing fragrance burst out, and, being

hungry, I opened my mouth wide for another bite, only to sink my teeth into bone.

My grandmother laughed. “It’s all bones, not much to eat!”

“Yeah, that’s true. But it’s tasty, isn’t it, Rina?” Dad said.

“Yes!” I nodded enthusiastically. I thought little birds ripened on trees like fruit did. Compared with the meat sold in packs, the meat you picked in the mountains was small and had a weird shape, but somehow the meat of a freshly picked sparrow still had a hint of life in it, with lots of flavors packed into the tiny body. I said the head was especially soft and tasty, and he laughed. “That’s the brain. It’s considered a delicacy that goes well with sake, so maybe you’ll be a drinker when you grow up!”

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could take evening walks and pick my own food, the way my father did in the mountains back then, I thought as I made my way home. There weren’t many trees in the streets around my office in Nihonbashi, and this made me long even more for the scenery in my memory. There were some flower beds, but these contained well-tended flowers, with signs giving their names, and they looked more like they were on display than just growing there. Today I’d felt like taking a different entrance into the subway station and was walking along the road when I saw a large, dirty plant pot that looked as if it had been forgotten there, alone among the flower beds. Thinking that a gardener would probably dispose of it before long, I went over to it and saw a small withered tree around which thick weeds were growing, almost bursting the pot. I noticed a somewhat early flowering dandelion and reached out for it. I hadn’t seen one of those for ages, I thought as I plucked the yellow flower.

Seeing the hollow stem almost instantly brought back memories of

playing with dandelions when I was little. I used to make toy waterwheels out of a stem and bamboo skewers, but now I couldn’t quite remember how I’d done it. Looking closely at the flower, I started walking again, and an elegant elderly lady coming from the opposite direction smiled as she passed me.

Realizing that picking a dandelion must have struck her as something a little girl would do, I suddenly felt embarrassed and shoved it into my bag as I quickened my pace and headed for the station.

When I got home and opened my bag, I saw the yellow flower, looking a bit crumpled. I’d completely forgotten about it after shoving it in there, and I hurriedly took it out. I filled an empty jam jar with water and put the dandelion in it. It must have sucked up some water through its stem, for it seemed to perk up a little.

The next day, Yuki and I had lunch as usual in an empty meeting room at work. I casually mentioned what I’d done the day before, and when I came to the part about my memories of dandelions and the house in the mountains, to my surprise she leaned forward eagerly.

“How I envy you that! I’ve always lived in Tokyo, and my granny and grandpa are both from here too, so I’ve never spent time in the countryside, and I don’t think I’ve ever played at picking flowers. And I’ve certainly never made a flower crown or a dandelion waterwheel.

I just adore stories like this.”

“Really?”

“Really! It sounds so wholesome, the kind of thing people should be doing. I mean, I go to the gym once a week, but I don’t ever feel

like I’m getting healthy. Going for a walk and picking flowers to decorate your room feels more luxurious than any aroma oil.”

“In the real countryside, I never picked flowers or anything like that. Although my Dad used to pick wild strawberries.”

“Wow, I love that even more!”

“I don’t know, though. I mean, they’re so laid-back there, and totally fine about doing things that are horrifying for city folks. Like, for example, when my Dad was little, he had a chicken, and he was really fond of it. But once it stopped laying eggs, my grandpa killed it and they ate it for dinner. Even Dad didn’t feel particularly sorry for it, and he ate some too, saying how delicious it was.”

Yuki laughed. “What’s wrong with that? That’s a natural process, after all. In the countryside you learn to appreciate life, don’t you?”

This had gradually been dawning on me as we talked. “I’ve heard that mugwort grows in Tokyo too, in parks and places like that,” I murmured as I munched on a convenience store bun. “Maybe I’ll try picking some. Homemade mugwort mochi is completely different from the ones you buy, you know.”

I’d been half joking, but Yuki nodded seriously. “Try it! Getting some exercise and picking vegetables must be doubly good for your health, right?”

I looked at my lunch. A big sweet bun and a sandwich. I hadn’t had any vegetables at all this week. I was conscious of the high-calorific content of this food, too. I didn’t feel like eating the limp vegetables from the convenience store or the supermarket, but I could imagine myself eating mugwort that I’d picked myself.

“Yeah, maybe I will. Maybe it would help me get over my dislike of vegetables a bit.”

“If you make some mugwort mochi, let me try them, okay?” Yuki said, laughing.

“Of course,” I said. Now I really wanted to eat some homemade mugwort mochi and recalled the nostalgic taste as I stuffed the last of the dry sandwich into my mouth.

The next day after work, I was in the locker room getting changed when Yuki came in a little late and looked a bit surprised at my outfit.

“Hi, Rina. Oh, you’re dressed lightly today.”

“Oh, hi, Yuki.”

“I don’t suppose you’re going out looking for mugwort today?”

“Yep, and getting some exercise while I’m at it.”

“I see—if you do find some, be sure to let me have a taste!”

I waved goodbye and left the locker room, straightened my back, and started walking. I had a plastic bag from the convenience store ready in my pocket. When I was still at my parents’ home in Saitama, we sometimes went to pick fern and bracken shoots on vacant lots in early spring. There probably wouldn’t be any fern shoots, but I’d be happy with some mugwort. And even if I couldn’t find that, I was bound to find some dandelions. I knew they were edible, but hadn’t ever eaten them, and they didn’t look so appetizing, so I wasn’t thinking of actually having any for dinner that night, but I wouldn’t mind a little taste. I wasn’t exactly serious about it, I just thought I’d have a bit of fun while getting some exercise.

First I went to where I’d found the dandelion the day before, but I couldn’t find any others there. I picked the remaining leaves and peered into the flower beds, which were thick with weeds, to see whether there was anything worth picking, but I didn’t know what any of the weeds were, so I decided to leave them.

As I put the dandelion leaves into the plastic bag, I noticed an office lady around my age eyeing me curiously. I quickly walked away, thinking that if anyone from work saw me doing this, it would be a bit difficult to explain. Just then a truck belching exhaust fumes drove past. I looked at the gray smoke spreading over the sidewalk and quickly opened the bag, took out the dandelion leaves, and threw them into the trash can at a convenience store I happened to be passing. Of course you couldn’t eat plants growing by the side of a busy road. I’d been stupid for assuming unthinkingly that any dandelion would do, and I set off again in search of some clean dandelions.

I looked around in several parks. In one large park there were some shacks that looked as though they were occupied by homeless people, and when I thought of people living and relieving themselves in this park, I didn’t feel like touching the earth, let alone eating anything from it. In a small children’s playground, apparently where office workers came for a break, there were cigarette butts and empty coffee cans lying around. Naturally I couldn’t eat anything that had come into contact with garbage, so I walked a bit farther and finally came to a park where there wasn’t much trash, only to see signs saying

!” suggesting that it was

popular with dog walkers. Looking for edible wild plants in the city was ill-advised after all, I thought, but I couldn’t quite let the idea go, so I set off again, determined to find just one clean dandelion. I needed to find a park where there weren’t any homeless people and that wasn’t popular with dog walkers. I wandered around several children’s playgrounds before realizing that I had come as far as Tokyo Station, so I decided to have a look in the Fountain Park.

It had been marked in green on the street map, so it came as a surprise to find that it was actually a concrete park with a number of large fountains and no greenery in sight. Somewhat disappointed, I looked around and saw that the concrete was enclosed by some raised beds that had exposed earth in them. They looked well-tended, without many weeds, although there were a few growing up around the plants. I wandered around, crouching over to see whether I could spot any dandelions. It occurred to me that I probably looked weird looking in the flower beds without even glancing at the fountains, and I quickly took a look around, but I saw only a few foreign tourists taking pictures. Tourists might think I was weird, but they probably wouldn’t go so far as to complain, I thought, so I went back to hunting among the weeds, my face even closer than before.

This was a long way from the scenes in my head of picking mugwort on the empty lots near my family home and gathering chestnuts from the nearby prefectural park. I was more like a scavenging crow. Far from feeling enriched, I cut a pitiful figure, and worried about people seeing me, I wiped the sweat from my forehead and decided to finish up quickly and go home.

I’d gone halfway around the edge of the park when I finally spotted a group of dandelions. I looked around again and, to avoid getting dirt under my nails, took out another small plastic bag that still contained crumbs from my lunch. I thrust my hand inside it and grabbed a fistful of flowers and leaves. Still with my hand wrapped in the bag, I plucked all the dandelions within reach and put them into the convenience store bag. Feeling like a pickpocket, I quickly stuffed it into my purse and started walking to the subway station. It

was getting dark, and I could no longer see any people in the park. I had worn light clothing, thinking it was spring, but the night air was unexpectedly chilly and my shoulders felt cold.

I hurriedly threw my shawl around me and got onto a subway train, but my shoulders and hands still didn’t warm up. When I got back home, I switched on the heating and put the bag on the low dining table.

I made some tea and sat at the table sipping it, staring at the bag as I warmed up. The green leaves stuck to the inside looked transparent and a bit limp, not at all like anything edible. I thought about throwing them away, but having come this far, I thought I might as well do something with them, so I took them out of the bag.

The flowers didn’t look edible, so I chucked them into the wastebasket in the sink. The leaves were completely wilted: even a convenience store salad looked fresher than they did. Washing them carefully, I was about to put them back on the chopping board, but then had second thoughts, and I spread the plastic bag out on the chopping board and laid the leaves on it.

I’d had the image of eating dandelion leaves as tempura, but I had only an electric stove that didn’t get hot enough for frying, and I didn’t feel like going to all that trouble anyway. The leaves looked bitter, so I decided to put them in miso soup to make them more palatable. I was uneasy about not cooking them enough, so I decided to boil them first, then add the miso.

As I started cutting them up with a kitchen knife, a dark green liquid seeped out. The smell they gave off was not the sort of smell you get when cooking, more like the weeds I’d been made to pull up in the yard at school. I was overcome with the sensation of playing in

the mud, not cooking. I doubted whether I would actually be able to eat them.

Anyway, I put the leaves into the pan of boiling water. I felt a bit like a witch making a potion. The color rapidly seeped out into the hot water, turning it into something that looked like fabric dye. It was a bit scary, so I threw away the colored water and added fresh water several times, cooking the leaves carefully, and by the time I finally decided to add the miso, they were utterly frazzled. As I stuck the spoon into the miso, I hesitated, feeling like I was throwing precious miso into the trash. Telling myself it would be more wasteful to put only a little in and end up making a weak, unpalatable soup, I took out a big scoop and dissolved it in the pan.

When it was more or less done and I put some in a bowl, it could have passed for miso soup with spinach. But it also looked like sewage water with trash floating in it.

I served myself some rice from the rice cooker, which had been left on all day, and put it on the table next to the soup. I felt like a kid playing house, and I had absolutely no appetite. To start with, I ate only the rice, but then I summoned my courage and took a sip of the soup.

The moment I put a lump of green in my mouth, the sight of the gray concrete fountain park I’d been in earlier came back to me. I almost spat it out at the thought that what I was eating was part of that park.

The overboiled greens had no taste and felt like bits of wet tissue paper stuck to my tongue. I had a vision of the people who had been walking around the park, and then I had the urge to vomit and quickly spat it out into a tissue. It was trash after all, I thought, seeing

the wilted dandelion leaf in the middle of the white tissue paper. I threw the contents of the pan into the sink and took a pack of natto out of the refrigerator. I couldn’t quite bring myself to eat that either and ended up leaving half. I brushed my teeth meticulously and gargled repeatedly, but I couldn’t get rid of the sensation of that tasteless leaf on the surface of my tongue.

The next day, Friday, I started to feel unwell at work and ended up having to lie down in the tea room. Yuki brought a thermometer from the admin department and took my temperature. It was 38.5C. My normal temperature was on the low side, so just seeing those figures made me feel dizzy.

“Surely it’s not because you ate some mugwort, is it? Do you have a stomachache?”

“No. Don’t worry, I didn’t eat any . . . actually I didn’t find any after all. Seems I just caught a cold walking around in the chilly weather.”

I fudged my answer, not wanting anyone to know about the pathetic figure I’d cut yesterday.

Yuki looked contrite. “Oh, no. I feel partially responsible for having put strange ideas into your head. I wish I hadn’t said anything. Have you told the boss yet?”

“Yes. He told me not to overdo things and that I could go home.”

“Well then, leave everything to me. Take care of yourself, and have a good rest, okay?”

I thanked Yuki for being so thoughtful, went to tell my boss that I was going home early, and left the office on shaky legs. I was sitting on the train, my head bowed, feeling awful, when I noticed that an ant was clinging to the hem of my coat. I’d been wandering around in a daze, so maybe the hem had brushed against a planter or

something. I brushed the ant off with my fingertip, then closed my eyes and tried to sleep.

Somehow I managed to make it home. I took some medicine and went straight to bed, but I couldn’t shake off the chills. I felt so stupid for having gone to so much trouble in the cold to pick some junk that ended up being disgusting to eat, and then catching a cold in the process. I didn’t even have the energy to make some rice gruel, and I had no appetite anyway, so did my best to sleep in order to be better by Monday.

Lying there in the dim room, I began to have the sensation that I was floating. My apartment was on the first floor, so the sounds of the street rang out in the room, and every car that went by brought me back to my senses. Hearing the sounds of engines and people talking, I thought back to the house in the mountains from my childhood summers.

When you were in that house, you could hear the rustling of the trees and the chirring of insects, which made you feel the overwhelming power of the outside world. You were living amidst the presence of various other creatures. The sensation of living quietly in that little gap was pleasant, breathing air that that was blended with the breaths of countless other creatures. As a child, I too had exhaled the carbon dioxide warmed by my insides, quietly suffusing the air with my own presence.

After dark, in order to alleviate the heat a little, we would open all the windows, but even though the windows were screened, we had to make sure the place was pitch-dark before opening them, or little bugs would manage to get in somewhere. We would feel the outside world, with the faint sounds of living creatures moving around and

the air that had been set trembling by the movement of the trees, pressing in on us.

After my grandfather died, my grandmother came just once to visit us in Saitama. We put her in the car and set off for Tokyo to do some sightseeing. My mother and I gazed out the windows, happy to see the night views of Tokyo for the first time in ages. My grandmother was watching us, her eyes crinkling in amusement. “It’s quite different from the mountains, isn’t it?” my father said, to which she responded, “It’s no different at all. Here they just waste too much electricity, otherwise it’s much the same,” and laughed.

I thought at the time that my grandmother’s take on things was far more sensible than mine, and I’d wanted to be like her. Roads probably all looked the same to her whether they were made of gravel or concrete.

I pushed back the duvet, my arms covered in sweat, and opened my eyes a crack. In the dim light I saw an ant crawl out from under my coat, where I’d dropped it on the floor. I thought I’d flicked it off in the train, but it must have clung to the inside of the hem. Normally I’d have been repelled by it and would have either thrown it outside or squashed it, but I remembered being fine with the much bigger ants that had often been crawling around the house in the mountains, so I decided to just watch it. It must have been years since I tried living with nonhuman creatures I found in my home instead of immediately getting rid of them. In the mountains, everyone calmly carried on eating, even with grasshoppers jumping around on the dining table.

We had the sense of living together with creatures of various sizes.

When my grandmother came to Tokyo, she might have been perfectly aware of the presence of poor-looking insects crawling

around on the asphalt and the feeble rustling of the trees on the streets, which we usually didn’t notice, diluted as they were by the artificial noises.

I could hear the voices of some people outside, but they were speaking in a foreign language, so I didn’t understand what they were saying. As I listened, their voices began to resemble the calls of animals. In my mind they overlapped with the night presences I had sensed on the other side of the torn window screens during those childhood summers, and before I knew it, I had fallen asleep.

I slept pretty much constantly for more than two days, and when I finally woke up and looked at the bedside clock, it was five in the morning. I pushed away the damp duvet and got up. My fever had gone down, and it looked as though I would be able to go back to work today.

During this time I’d ingested only liquids and a small amount of jelly and hadn’t eaten any proper food. Now that my appetite had returned, I checked the refrigerator. All that was in it was some frozen rice, so I decided to go to the convenience store and changed out of my sweaty pajamas into a sweatshirt and pants. Just then I felt something tickle my little toe, and I looked down to see the little ant climbing onto it. When I realized that it had been hanging out in my apartment all this time, I didn’t feel like killing it, so I went to the front door with it still on my toe, crouched down, and gently pushed it off.

Maybe it instinctively knew where the outdoors was, since it made a beeline for the door and started running back and forth beside it. I opened the door for it, and feeling a little concerned about where it would go, I put on some sandals and went outside too.

The ant moved quickly over the concrete. As a memory came back to me of the way I followed ants like this when I was little, the ant entered the roughly half-meter gap between my apartment and the fence.

Weeds grew thickly here, mixed in with cigarette butts and empty cans perhaps thrown from an upstairs window. I tried to find the ant among the weeds, but it had already disappeared. Instead, I saw two dandelions with wide, spreading leaves squeezing their way up through the tall weeds. The nearest flower was quite big and surrounded by some twenty overlapping leaves almost twenty centimeters long. I crouched down and touched the leaves, feeling how fresh they were, plump with moisture. Suddenly I was overcome by a raging hunger.

I knelt down and grabbed the base of the closest dandelion, intending to pull it out by the root. I pulled with all my strength but was met with unexpectedly strong resistance, as if in a tug of war with the ground, but as I pulled harder, the stem tore away unsatisfyingly quickly. I saw a thick, pure white forked root peeping out of a gap in the soil and realized that the plant was growing quite deep.

I stuffed the torn leaves into the pocket of my sweatpants and crouched down even more, pushing my upper body into the gap to reach the other dandelion. It wasn’t as big as the first one, but it was still quite large and the ground had a firm grip on it. This time I carefully dug away the surrounding soil with my hands and pulled at it, taking care not to be too rough so that it wouldn’t break in half.

After a while, the surrounding earth cracked and mounded, and the root slipped out, flailing like a fish. This root was more than twenty

centimeters long. It looked like a burdock root, and the smell of fresh soil rose up from the hole it left. Even so, when I peered into the hole, it looked as though there was still some root left in the soil. A small bug crawled out of the scattered earth and wandered around.

Holding the dandelion with the root dangling down, I went back into my apartment and immediately began to wash it. Together with the other dandelion in my pocket, the leaves and flowers half filled a colander. Suddenly I noticed the leaves I’d left on the sink earlier, and since only five days had gone by, I threw them in too.

My hunger was so fierce I could hardly bear it. I cut the leaves and stem with a kitchen knife and threw them into a pan of boiling water, flowers and all. Little by little the water turned green and a smell rose up similar to cooking beans. Unable to wait any longer, I picked out a piece with cooking chopsticks and bit into it. As I broke the stem with my teeth, a faint green flavor somewhere between mustard spinach and rapeseed shoots spread in my mouth, along with a slight bitterness.

Having expected a strong flavor, I felt a little let down by the taste.

It was really plain. While slightly bitter, it was fragrant, and rather easy on the palate. I drained the leaves and put them on a plate.

Having gone to the trouble of pulling out the root, I should eat that too, I thought. It seemed similar to burdock root, so it should be good stir-fried. I quickly cut it into julienne strips and fried it in a generous amount of oil. I put it on a separate plate, then set it down next to the plate of leaves on the table.

The leaves had shrunk quite a lot from boiling and produced a rather small portion, but when I placed the dishes next to a bowl of defrosted rice, it made for a far more splendid meal than my regular

breakfast. The stir-fried root had taken on an appetizing aroma, and though it was slightly bitter, the flavor was less marked than burdock root. The flowers didn’t have much taste but were soft and easy to eat, and I hardly used any of the soy sauce I’d put out in case. I could hear the voices of some people standing on the street outside my window. They were speaking in Japanese, and I should have been able to understand them, but I was utterly absorbed in enjoying the green flavor and couldn’t catch a word. A shrill voice blended with a low one, and they no longer sounded like language as they melted down into a simple vibration in the throats of animals, setting the window quietly trembling.

By Wednesday I was completely over my cold and had just stood up to go to lunch with Yuki when she noticed me holding my bento and her eyes widened.

“Oh, that’s not from the convenience store! Did you make it?”

“Yep.”

As always, we staked our places in the empty meeting room and sat down. Yuki peered curiously at my lunch and pointed at some fried greens covered in plastic wrap.

“I don’t suppose you picked that yourself somewhere?”

“I did. I couldn’t find any mugwort, but there were loads of dandelions.”

“Dandelions? Are they edible?”

“Of course. They’re often used in tempura and things, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know, but . . . better not to risk it. They’re just weeds, right?”

I raised my head and looked at her. She seemed troubled, as though seeing a child picking something up off the floor and eating it.

I remembered that I’d felt the same way until now, and I smiled at her.

“Oh . . . maybe you’re right,” I said. “Okay, I won’t.” I wrapped the dandelion stir-fry up again, thinking I’d eat it at home later.

“What about this?” she asked, pointing at the omelet that contained obako leaves.

If I couldn’t eat that, I wouldn’t have anything but rice left for lunch, so I quickly told a white lie. “My grandmother in the countryside sent me that.”

Yuki looked relieved and laughed. “Really? Wow, does she grow it?”

“No. She probably picked it on the mountainside.”

“Oh, how wonderful! Of course, you can’t do that in the city.”

“Right.”

While giving token responses to her questions, I tasted the omelet. The obako leaves mixed in with the egg had a robust vegetable flavor. I’d been researching the topic and had discovered that dandelions were originally imported as vegetables and were sold in grocery stores abroad. Yuki obviously hadn’t known that when she reacted so strongly against them, while feeling that weeds picked in the mountains were fine. I watched her somewhat scornfully as I ate my lunch. If you had the intention to live a decent life, you could do so anywhere. I felt a bit stupid myself for not having realized this before, simply because I’d always lived in the city.

I started eating wild vegetables every day. The best time to look for weeds was in the evening, when I was feeling hungry. That day too,

after work, I changed into some lightweight clothing to go out to harvest my dinner. I had the feeling that this was more like true labor than the time I spent tapping away at the PC keyboard or calculator on my desk.

I wanted to walk around the office neighborhood while it was still light. It wasn’t so effective to go when it was dark, as I couldn’t tell plants apart and there was less of a chance to discover a new harvest location.

I looked down in satisfaction at my sneakers, which were pale blue but had already gotten dirty with soil. Until recently I had forgotten that sneakers look good when they’re dirty like this. I ran my hungry gaze over the surroundings as I walked along the street among men in stifling suits and meticulously dressed women. Now that I had learned to walk like an animal, I realized how much I had been viewing the city as a collection of symbols. I had been faithfully following these artificial symbols, thinking that this turn would take me to the station, that this was a sidewalk, those places over there were restaurants, and so forth. When I ran my gaze over the world with an empty stomach, the surroundings shed the armor of these symbols and revealed their true nature. My light blue sneakers could now walk beyond those symbolic meanings, striding over the sidewalk, deeper and deeper into this new world.

I decided to have fleabane leaves for my main dish that evening, and I set off for a certain children’s playground in the office district.

The playground was not well cared for, perhaps even abandoned, and fleabane grew there in profusion. Just thinking about it made me feel hungry, and I naturally started walking faster. I knew exactly what was growing where in this office district, and it was my daily

routine to change my route according to what I wanted to eat that day.

In addition to the fleabane in the children’s playground, there were some small dandelions in the flower beds on the side of the major road nearby. There was also a small space in the back of a parking lot on that big road where a small number of obako leaves were growing among the weeds, so I was careful not to harvest too much of it at one time. Today I would eat fleabane and tomorrow shepherd’s purse, I thought as I walked to the playground.

I had a sort of premonition and took an unusual turn off my route, scanning the side of the road as I went. Seeing some shepherd’s purse growing profusely among the flowers in an old brick planter, I crouched down happily and picked some. My senses seemed sharper than usual today, maybe because I was hungry. The hungrier I was, the sharper my sense of smell seemed. I was totally absorbed in my newly discovered wild animal existence. Maybe something similar happened to pet cats that ended up on the streets.

It was still only a small part of me, but it was certainly taking root within me.

When I got to the children’s playground, I saw a homeless person sitting on a bench there. He had with him a large number of magazines that he was apparently intending to sell. I was probably more of a feral human than he was, I thought with amusement.

Eating vegetables direct from the earth, taking only enough to eat today, this was a healthy way to live. You could even safely eat a small amount of clover if you cooked it, and fish mint leaves that had been boiled and rinsed in fresh water no longer smelled so strong, and surprisingly they lost their bitter flavor when cooked with miso or

stir-fried in oil. I particularly liked fleabane fried with bacon, and I’d started to get withdrawal symptoms if I didn’t eat it every three days or so. Dandelion root was good fried and flavored with soy sauce and sugar, and was fragrant fried with no flavorings. With such delicious fresh vegetables so close to hand, I had no desire to buy those wilted leaves in the supermarket.

As I walked to the station carrying my bag of shepherd’s purse and fleabane, I ran my eyes over my surroundings, thinking that I might just harvest one more type of plant for tomorrow’s breakfast.

Walking like this, feeling like a feral human, even machines and buildings were warm to the touch, and some even emitted sounds and vibrations. Their presence was similar to the sounds emitted by life-forms in the forest.

I heard a faint hum behind me and turned to see a vending machine standing on the side of the road. I went up to touch it and felt the body heat of a vending machine on my palm.

Satisfied that the low voice and vibrations coming from inside it were being transmitted through my skin, I started walking again.

Two-legged animals were walking around on the sidewalk, their various cries intermingling shrill howls and low growls rising up through vibrating Adam’s apples. Since the night when I’d realized that the noises humans emitted had first been animal cries and then called language, I’d been able to listen to them purely as sounds.

Several taxis were stopped on the side of the road, the heartbeats of their engines ringing out in unison. A silver lump spewing hot breath flowed past them along the river of coagulated gray liquid.

Buildings stood quietly on either side of the river, and the organs at work inside their bodies gave off waves of heat that were faintly

perceptible outside. I was floating in the middle of a gray ocean, and a big silver fish approached from afar, making a sound that rent the air as it approached, ruffled my surface, and receded again.

The city was filled with the presence of various beings. The vibrations of air really were the same as the ones I’d felt those summer nights in the mountains.

Pushing my way through the hubbub of living creatures, aware of my empty stomach, I picked just enough for tonight’s meal from the gaps in the city. The presence of living creatures seemed to spread far and beyond into vast space. I too became part of the commotion, setting the air trembling with my breath as I moved around, permeating the streets with living vibrations.

Suddenly I noticed a clump of clover growing alongside an artwork placed outside an office building. I’ll put some of that in an omelet for breakfast tomorrow morning, I thought happily, pressing my face against the artwork as I thrust my hand into the patch of weeds and plucked some leaves.

I peered into my now rather heavy bag, and a smell of green wafted up. Satisfied, I was about to get up to leave when a sudden thought occurred to me and I ran my hand over the soil I had just dug up.

I could feel the damp and warmth coming from it. With my hand still thrust into the soil there next to the artwork, I savored the sensation of the earth that had raised my food for me. Nutrition nurtured by the earth flowed into my palm. I pushed my hand even deeper into the soil, and it overflowed the gaps in my fingers, staining my sallow hand brown. My hand looked like a tree. Normally I was different from plants, separated from the earth, but I was

growing out of the earth too. Evidence of this was the fact that the plants I had picked in this city were spreading to all corners of my body. I squeezed together the fingers growing in the soil. My fingers and the soil mixed together, melded, and stared up at the plants growing out of them.

I was taking my usual route home from work, picking today’s weeds and putting them in the bag as I went. I’d come to a park to pick some fish mint, and I noticed a child squatting down. I went a bit closer and saw that he was digging what looked like a grave. Next to him, a small pale blue bird lay on its side alongside a strangely elaborate Styrofoam gravestone with the bird’s face and name drawn on it in colored pens, and origami flowers stuck all over it, even on the back. The boy looked solemn. Still holding a fistful of fish mint, I decided to say something to him.

“What are you doing?”

He looked up at me. “I’m making a grave,” he answered, and went back to being engrossed in his work.

What would my grandmother have said to such a symbolic way of mourning the death of a bird? I wondered. Remembering what I’d told Yuki about my father and his chicken, I gently whispered to the child’s back, “Why not eat it?”

“What?”

“Grilled bird is delicious, you know. I’ve eaten it before. It’s fine to return them to the earth, but I don’t think the bird will really understand having such a human-style grave. I think maybe it would make the most of the bird’s life if you ate it.”

I thought I was being helpful, but the boy’s face crumpled and he started crying. A woman, probably his mother, started coming over to

us, and I quickly stood up and ran out of the park. I glanced behind me to see the boy clinging to his mother’s skirt, bawling.

I didn’t know why I had to run away, but certainly the mother would have treated me as a weirdo.

Before I knew it, I had wandered into mysterious territory. I could say more definitively than ever that I was sane and more wholesome than anyone else. At the same time, a normal child was in tears, complaining to his mother that I was abnormal. I walked fast, clutching the fish mint leaves in my hand. It was natural for someone living in the forest to eat the forest, and likewise it was natural for someone living in the city to eat the city. But if I said anything of the sort to that boy, no doubt he would cry harder.

It was just that it hadn’t occurred to them. If they tried it, the memories of the wild rooted in their flesh would come back to them, and they would discover that eating the city like this would connect the earth between the gaps in the concrete and their own body. They would understand how natural this was, but they just wouldn’t try it.

As I walked, I took a bite of the fish mint leaves clutched in my hand.

It was the first time I’d tasted this pungent plant without cooking it.

The moment I placed it in my mouth, its particular smell and sour taste filled my senses. The strong flavor was reminiscent of celery, and in order to hold on to it, I stuffed some more leaves into my mouth. My inner organs were set trembling by its living taste, a taste that didn’t exist in the dead bodies of the vegetables lying cold in the supermarket displays. I continued walking determinedly along the gray streets, chewing on the fragments of the city, dissolving them in saliva, swallowing them, and feeling them fall into my stomach.

The next day, when Yuki and I went to have lunch in the meeting room, she peered curiously into my bento box. “What a lavish-looking lunch you have today.”

“Yes. I just got sent lots of vegetables from the mountains. I made some dishes this morning before they go bad. Would you like to try some?”

“Really? Well, just a little then.”

“Yes, go ahead! My grandmother must have picked them in the mountains.”

I knew very well how much Yuki liked hearing me talk about the mountains, so I placed sample after sample of the various dishes on top of her bento as I talked to her about the mountain landscape, the touch of the grass on your feet as you walked through it, and the huge bugs that you never saw in Tokyo.

“Delicious!”

“Really?”

My plan was to draw her into my new vision of nature here in the city while taking care not to provoke a negative response. I had to avoid prematurely shocking her, paying deliberate respect to her perception based on her current understanding of common sense. I had to gently, caressingly stimulate her empathy and slowly, slowly, pull her over to my world. I had already managed to infiltrate her mind with some feral sensations. Now I would steep her in that world more and more until she was almost drowning in it.

I now felt as though I was beginning to eat the city in a different sense than before. Once I had finished marinating Yuki, how would I get started on the next person? Utmost care had to be taken over that first caress. For example, I could start by mentioning the feeling

of homesickness aroused in me upon stepping out of the gray office on a warm spring day and suddenly noticing the smell of summer in the air, the sort of comment anyone could empathize with, and gradually start blending in my own feral sensations. The story could be chanted like a magic spell. Little by little it would penetrate the target body and slowly change that person.

Yuki was eating some boiled shepherd’s purse dressed with soy sauce and bonito flakes. She looked at me with a smile. “You know, Rina, whenever you talk about the mountains, I feel kind of nostalgic, even though I don’t have memories of a home in the countryside myself. Strange, isn’t it?”

“I guess it happens. Maybe that sort of thing is hardwired in our genes. Oh, I was going to say that Granny sometimes sends chicken meat too. Next time I’ll bring a little along to share. Talking about the house in the mountains, did I ever tell you?

UntilIleftelementaryschoolitwasmyfamily’scustomforthethreeofusto getintothecaranddrivetomyfather’schildhoodhomeinthecountrysidean dstaythereforaweekovertheObon

festival,itwasatypicalcountryhousedeepinthemountainso fNaganoandwewoulddriveupthenarrowmountainroadto reachthehousewhichhadanentrancehallaboutthesizeofachild’sbedroo mandanatmospherecompletelydifferentfromourhouseinSaitama,Iwas sofascinatedbytheoldhousethatassoon

aswearrivedIwouldimmediatelystartrunningaroundand exploringbutwithalltheroomsconnectedbyslidingpaper doorsIwouldsoongetlostandthenburstinontheroomwhere alltheadultswererelaxingandgetscoldedbutassoonastheylet megoIwouldbeoffagainrunningaroundslidingdoorsopenandonceI’dfini

shedexploringinsidenextIwouldplayoutsidetomyheart’scontentuntilitw astimefordinnerandIfelthungry”

I continued murmuring these tender words. Little by little the memories slipped into Yuki’s body and wriggled around in her innards. After a while, they would be flowing unnoticed around her whole body, and she would gradually lose her physical sense as she knew it now—just like the marvelous change that happened to me a short while ago. And then we would start to live a wholesome existence together in this world teeming with life.