![]() ![]() Eventually, he begins an obsessive romantic and sexual relationship with her, despite the warnings of an ominous elderly woman he encounters in the street-“She’s a ghost, you know.” Eventually, the house and even the neighborhood take on the characteristics of the ghostly. In a bizarre house cobbled together from Eastern and Western designs, he encounters a mysterious and beautiful woman. As a youth, W took a part-time job collecting surveys door-to-door. In “The Harajuku House”, a first-person narrator relates a story told to them by W, a “rather taciturn older man”. “The Harajuku House,” for example, has strong ties to one of Japan’s most famous ghost stories, “The Peony Lantern”, about a young man who accidentally falls in love with a ghost. These stories take place in a kind of limbo where the line between life and death has been blurred. Taihei finds in these cookbooks “the wife he wished he’d known when she was still alive, but who he would never now come to know the side of her that she herself had wanted to keep secret.”Įlsewhere in the collection, this realism gives way. In the margins, she reflects on the little sacrifices she makes for her family, the things Taihei has taken for granted about her. The most poignant moments in the story, though, are when he explores his late wife’s cookbooks, which she has used almost as a journal. So is his masculine overconfidence: “Once the shiitake had been boiled to soften it up, slicing it should be a simple task for a grown man.” Taihei is assigned to prepare “salty-sweet shiitake ready simmered in sugar and soy sauce” for homework, and his bumbling attempts to prepare the dish are comic. Like many of the stories in Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, “When My Wife Was a Shiitake” has a light feminist touch. The names of Japanese foods and cooking techniques are integrated seamlessly into Ginny Tapley Takamori’s masterful translation. Two or three weeks later, his daughter calls to urge him to take his late wife’s place at a private cooking class. “When My Wife Was a Shiitake” opens with the death of Taihei Ishida’s wife. One of the collection’s stand-out stories is also one of its quietest. ![]() Gathered from author Kyoko Nakajima’s published work, the stories assembled here speak about loss-of a loved one, of a place, of a culture-and what comes next. Things Remembered and Things Forgotten is a collection about memory, but it is also a collection about grief. When grieving is over, when no one pauses to remember, things will be forgotten forever. ![]()
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