May You Have Delicious Meals by Junko Takase Review

“May you live in interesting times” - apocryphal “Chinese curse”

A woman begins making rich home-made treats for her office - much to the quiet indignation of her secret co-worker boyfriend, whose culinary tastes run to the more basic side.

I wish I liked Junko Takase’s May You Have Delicious Meals more than I did because I think the insane Japanese work culture and superficially perfect society the country presents to the world is ripe for satire. Which Takase achieves to a certain degree - but, man, there’s barely any story here!

The story deals in metaphor. Ashikawa, the woman making the treats, represents a traditional Japanese female: subservient, relentlessly upbeat, whose only purpose for existing is to cook and one day marry. Nitani, her secret boyfriend, is a man who doesn’t want what society is pushing onto him: the desire for a traditional wife, home-made food, etc.

This is played out with Ashikawa’s cooking (society’s values) being forced onto Nitani, who rejects them, choosing instead junk food like pot noodles (asserting his individuality/preferences). His other occasional hook-up, Oshio, is in a similar boat. Ashikawa wants to give Nitani delicious meals daily, that is, if he were to relent, to trap him within a cage he can’t escape where he’s always denying his true self - that’s why “may you have delicious meals”, like “may you live in interesting times”, sounds like a positive thing, but is actually the opposite.

Except that’s all the story is - that repeated metaphor. Ashikawa makes treats, Nitani and Oshio scowl behind their masks of smiling politeness, they find ways of disposing of the treats instead of eating them, and this goes on and on. That’s not even mildly interesting to read. The story really needed another level to make this better because just making it about that metaphor isn’t enough.

The characters are well-written and there wasn’t anything especially bad with Takase’s prose. I liked that, without drawing too much attention to it, criticism of the absurd hours at their workplace came through strongly. Especially in the west, I imagine most people will find the characters’ regular 11+ hour work days, where overtime is a normal expectation, and giving up weekends to come into the office isn’t even blinked at, appalling.

(I do wonder how much work a company that makes packaging could realistically have to do - is it so much? Is it that the workers are less than capable or maybe the processes are inefficient? Or are the Japanese just toxically obsessed with work for works’ sake? Either way, I agree, patterns like this have to change for the betterment of ordinary Japanese people)

May You Have Delicious Meals by Junko Takase was missing that most nutritious ingredient of great novels: a substantial and satisfying story. Another weak Akutagawa Prize winner.