In the context of Chorus of Mushrooms by Japanese-Canadian author Hiromi Goto, I am devoting this post to investigating the adage, “You are what you eat”.
The spotlight is on tonkatsu – deep fried pork cutlet drizzled with a dedicated tonkatsu sauce, served with rice, shredded cabbage salad, often with pickles and miso soup as well. Allow the following annotation if you are not already familiar with the dish in the context of Japanese youshoku, a Japanese adaption of Western cuisine. The etymology of tonkatsu consists of ton, meaning pork in Japanese, and katsu, a phonetic Romanization and simplification of the word for cutlet, derived from côtelette in French. Literal translations aside, the ingredients and the cooking method departed from the original version of butter sautéed veal. Since the consumption of meat (beyond seafood and wild game) began to gain popularity in the Meiji era, tonkatsu took hold in eastern Japan as thick sliced pork – a more readily available livestock in the region – coated with breadcrumbs and deep fried, adapted from the technique of making tempura with a Portuguese origin. You may notice that cutlet and salad are paired with rice – another telling sign of its adaption to Japanese dining tables. It is customary to enjoy the meal using chopsticks, instead of fork and knife.
Not only is tonkatsu alluded in a scene in Chorus of Mushrooms, it is in fact the centre of the novel about a Japanese-Canadian family bearing the surname of Tonkatsu. Not at all an available surname in Japan, the absurdity of the family name goes by unnoticed in the prairie town of Nanton, Alberta in the 1990s when the story takes place. Shinji, a.k.a. Sam, the father, complied with her wife Keiko, a.k.a. Kay in the deliberate effort to raise their daughter Muriel in a white upbringing in order to assimilate, from the names they go by, the language they speak, to the meals they consume at home. Grandma Naoe had been the only anchor to Japanese language and folklore for the family, although only Muriel paid attention. Here is what grandma Naoe observed about the change in the family diet:
“Keiko. My daughter who has forsaken identity. Forsaken! So biblical, but it suits her, my little convert. Converted from rice and daikon to wieners and beans. Endless evenings of tedious roast chicken and honey smoked ham and overdone rump roast. My daughter, you were raised on fish cakes and pickled plums. This Western food has changed you and you’ve grown more opaque even as your heart has brittled. Silver-edged and thin as paper.”(Goto 29)
The family was shaken up when grandma went missing one winter night. Naoe’s disappearance sent Keiko deep into depression, and teenage Muriel took over as the family’s primary caregiver. Desperate to stock up the empty pantry, teenage Muriel drove out of town to stock up – specifically on Japanese ingredients. It was from the shopkeeper whom she found out the meaning of her family name and acquired its recipe.
Back at home, Muriel gave herself the task of cooking tonkatsu for her family:
“I figured out that the tonkatsu sank when they were raw and floated when they were done. What does this mean?” (Goto 221)
Readers are invited to tease out the symbolism from this epiphany. This novel questions diaspora culture and identity by making an extreme proposition. What happens when a family erases one facet of their cultural memory (of Japanese descent) to become their idea of white Canadian, and at what cost? The family has tried so hard to blend in, and to craft an identity to remain invisible, it ends up cutting ties. This is not to rule out the complexity of diaspora families whose culture is as nuanced, authentic, and dynamic as they are unique to each one’s making; quite the contrary. Why else would Shinji, it turns out, choose the name of Tonkatsu as their family name when the family’s expressed effort to wipe out their Japanese connection left him with aphasia, and the only word he could utter when asked of his family name, was the soul food of pork cutlet? Eating is part of being.
After cooking up a storm in the kitchen, the family sat together ceremonially to partake of their namesake.
“There were three table settings. The miso soup I had made was overboiled and the seaweed was almost melted, but I served them up in bowls. Filled three more bowls with rice and a small plate with the pickled yellow takuwan that was a little strong in smell. I proudly placed my golden pork cutlets on the plates with sliced cabbage. One fifty-three in the morning. Funny, I thought, we’re going to eat our name.” (Goto 221)
In a household that does not have chopsticks, the father intuitively whittled three pairs fashioned out of garden twigs.
"I turned to my plate, my hashi in my fist, and stabbed a piece of meat with the points. I raised it to my nervous mouth and took a tentative bite. The bread crumbs crunchy and the pork tender firm, the sauce tang and salty. It was good! I shoved the whole piece in my mouth and chewed with joy. Eating Tonkatsu in the heavy silence between night and dawn, a strange configuration. There were no hugs or kisses or mea culpas. There wasn't a sudden wellspring of words, as if everything we never said burst forth and we forgave each other for all our shortcomings. We sat and ate. No one saying a word, just the smack of lips and tongues. We passed around the tonkatsu sauce whenever it looked like someone was running out.” (Goto 225)
Of course there is no magic portal or easy solution to anything. It would be too simplistic to claim that you are what you eat, but what you eat certainly changes who you become in many ways. Food gives you a sensual experience to replenish what is deprived, to discover what is unknown, and to awaken what is buried. It precedes language, as a language on its own.