Outside, the countryside surrounding the huge manor house was beginning to quicken. Soon the cherry blossom would burst from its protective bud, and everyone would celebrate the return of life and fertility to the land. But inside of him, it was always winter. His spirit would not explode from its shell into beauty; his heart would never prove a nurturing field for any seed of love.
By day, he manipulated his investments - more from force of habit than from any real need or enthusiasm for the financial game - or he would walk aimlessly and soundlessly through his halls and grand rooms, each one empty and oppressively silent. By night, he went to his cold, solitary bed and a dreamless sleep from which he would arise as weary as he had lain down.
He was never seen to walk his extensive grounds - in fact, there was only rare evidence of his presence in the manor ever visible from outside of it - and his tenants went from wondering what had made him into such a man, to wondering if he were still alive, to wondering if he had ever existed at all or was simply a character that the true owners of the estate (presuming there were any) had invented for some inscrutable reason. Their second guess was closer to truth than they could ever know; he often wondered himself if he were still alive.
Some months past, he had dressed himself in formal white kimono and knelt before the ornate suit of his ancestor's armor, wakizashi blade laid bare and glinting on the mat in front of him. The cold invitation of the steel warred with the equally cold and disapproving grimace of his ancestor's facemask, and in the end he knew he was too cold to do it. To be fierce enough, proud enough, required warmth; even in the calm resignation of the chushingura there had been the satisfying heat of vengeance fulfilled, honor satisfied, of having done right. But he was too cold to feel pride, too cold to feel despair, too cold even to feel afraid of dying. He was too cold to feel at all.
One cannot kill what is already dead; he wore his funeral clothes day and night for many days after that, and it was only after his majordomo found him passed out in one of the interior courtyards that he permitted that faithful man to spoon a little warm broth past his lips. The dead, after all, do not eat.
Hattori slid the knife over the stone again. He had actually reached a razor-sharp edge many strokes ago, but he continued, rather like the master, automatically, in a task as basic to him as breathing. There was an important difference, though, between him and the master: he was not cold, and his inattention was not from apathy. Rather, freed as they were from minding his body, his thoughts were occupied with the master's health -- mental as much as physical.
He remembered that day, seeing the master crumpled on the stones, the kimono's silk puddled around him. Hattori's heart clenched with the memory, as it had then with the seeing, for although age had given him restraint along with his white hairs, it had not taken away one particle of the passion that had spurred him as much toward trouble as toward knowledge.
It could have been either his knowledge or his knack for getting into and out of trouble that had gotten him his position here. His younger sister had made a great show of exasperation when first Hattori told her his intent, but even she had to admit she was not surprised.
"Nii-chan," she had said, "when have I ever been able to talk you out of any of your mad positions?" The years had done their work on Tsukiko, too, polishing away her abrasiveness; now she was smooth but hard, like a grain of rice. "It's for the best, I suppose. You'd never be a proper grandmaster here. You are a boat with no sail or anchor, going where the winds of your whimsy blow you, not the kind of vessel this school needs to carry it forward. This is no different than catching snails in the park and putting them all on different diets to see which ones would make better escargots, or buying all those grapefruits, or haring off to the Sorbonne after Father forbade it."
When he was a young man, an opening feint like that from her would have turned into an hour-long shouting match, stony silences over the dinner table, days of clenched teeth and fists whenever they passed each other. But he was no longer a young man. "As I recall," he remarked thoughtfully, "you liked the ones I raised on beer and sweet potatoes best."
She had softened then, with a sigh. "They were good, weren't they." She had smiled a little, remembering, then embraced him quickly. "Go on then, big brother. Go conquer the world." She turned away then, already feeling, perhaps, the grandmaster's mantle settling on her and not wanting him to see her weep.
Perhaps one day he would conquer the world. For now, though, Hattori thought ruefully to himself, testing the edge for the umpteenth time, I must first conquer one man's madness. He set the knife down and rose, feeling his knees creak slightly as he did so. "Am I too old for this?" he asked himself as he bent down to retrieve knife and stone. Surely not, though Hattori often wondered himself what had turned the master, a man in his prime who should have been out conquering the world himself, into a cold and spiritless shadow. It must have been something terrible. Or maybe it was that the master had already gone into the world to conquer it, had glutted himself on all that that world had to offer him, and having so done discovered that he could not conquer it - that rather, it had mastered him, found him wanting, and turned away like a girl wanting a new lover.
No matter; Hattori had warmth enough for two or three men, and the past three years in the master's house had focussed all the heat of his multiple passions into a single, white-hot flame of fidelity. For even as a shadow, the master had the charisma that had made him so powerful in the first place. That he could not only induce Hattori to stay in one place for three solid years, but could succeed where his father and sister had failed... It was not that Hattori had no sense of duty, rather that no single thing or person had ever so challenged and captivated him.
Once he had discovered -- to his immense relief -- that the master lived, Hattori had nursed him, from that first spoonful of clear bouillon, through miso soup, or rice and tea, and finally his family's own all-heal, the soup on which his grandfather had sustained an army. And in this he discovered at last the only thing that could kindle even a tiny flame of life and pleasure in that cold wind that was the master.
Even now, as he slid open the kitchen door, he shielded that flame with his hands. Because even discounting the culinary skills and concepts he had gathered in every corner of the world, one thing was certain: Hattori Yukio could cook.
The very same inquisitiveness and innovation that made him perhaps a less than ideal grandmaster for his grandfather's school made him the perfect director of the master's kitchens, and since that day he had delegated many of his household management duties so that he could personally oversee the master's cuisine. Today, however, he merely left directions for the staff along with the knife, and passed on, his eyes glittering behind his glasses. "Stay out of his way," a senior chef said to one of the younger staff. "When he spends a morning honing every knife in the place, you don't want his attention."
Hattori went out into that same courtyard and sat under the cherry tree with a token sheaf of papers he had no intention of working on. Instead, he leaned back against that ancient trunk and looked up at the plump buds on its branches, just beginning to show slashes of pinky-white, and extemporized,
- Sakura, the spring
- clothes your limbs in youth again.
- When will his spring come?
He closed his eyes against the bright sun filtering through the branches. He felt old as the tree and not nearly as revived. How long, he wondered, before my menus can no longer hold him up? Something must be done. He gathered the papers up and headed for the garage and the ride into town that awaited him there. The urgency of the earth's vernal activity seized him, and he quickened his pace. Something must be done soon.
Emotional exhaustion and malnourishment had exacted their price, and while his majordomo went about the tasks that kept the household running, he himself was only just now able to get up out of his bed. He left the bedding where it lay, and concentrated on putting one foot down, then the other. He faltered his way to his desk, and collapsed at it, utterly spent. It had been two, maybe three weeks since his collapse; time, like consciousness, had become a fugitive state for him. He forced his eyes open, made himself look at the Asahi Shimbun -- he could guess who had left it carefully, if optimistically, unfolded on his desk, and found himself wondering how many days a fresh paper had been left so.
He owed Hattori his life, but still he could hardly feel grateful -- no, he supposed he was grateful, if only because what he had done to himself was the act of a fool, one which would only serve to dishonor his family name. He picked up a pen and turned it over and over in his fingers, staring at it as though it were an alien thing. He knew he should be working, should be trying to do anything at all, so that Hattori's efforts on his behalf should not be wasted; he had no idea how to begin, much less where.
He felt consciousness sliding away from him again, and this time he let it go.
"And I tell you, Yamada, that only a starving man could eat your cooking and appreciate it."
"Is that so? Then why are you eating it? Why should I not throw you out into the street where you belong?"
"If I belong in the street, then you belong in the gutter, you upstart! You call this kaiseki? I could do better than this even if I had a headcold and couldn't smell or taste a thing."
"Oh, so that explains your hamfisted seasoning! I always wondered about that. They make medicines for such ailments nowadays, haven't you heard?"
"Dammit! I ought to --"
"Ah! Welcome!" Yamada interrupted the other man on seeing a customer enter the otherwise empty restaurant.
Hattori surveyed the room. "I take it I can sit anywhere?"
"Hattori-san! So good to see you!" Yamada was all smiles, but Hattori thought he saw a touch of anxiety in his manner. "Please, sit here, if it's not too much trouble." Yamada indicated a table near the kitchen door.
Hattori took both it, and another look around. "A quiet day for you must be a pleasant change," he offered, as diplomatically as he could manage.
He was rewarded by a complete change in Yamada's manner as the man sank dejectedly into the seat across from Hattori. "I never could fool you, old friend," Yamada sighed. "No, actually, business is awful. I just don't know what to do."
"I keep trying to tell you, Yamada," the other fellow called out from inside the kitchen, "if you'd just take instruction from me, you wouldn't have even one minute's rest in a day."
"Great gods!" Hattori exclaimed. "I know that voice. Aji-no-moto, is that you?"
"What? Nobody has called me that since --!" A big man erupted from the kitchen, and on seeing him, hauled Hattori bodily out of his chair to pound on him. "Hayabusa, you so-and-so, what on earth brings you in here? I would sooner expect to see Escoffier rise from his grave and walk across the ocean and through that door than to see you in this forsaken place."
"Inomoto, this is just too much!" Yamada shouted, knocking his chair over as he leaped up. "It's bad enough your coming in here to give me a hard time about my cooking, I'm not going to let you stand there and insult me in front of my guest and my friend!" He clenched his fists, his eyes flashing. Inomoto's lips skinned back from his teeth in a snarl, and as he set Hattori down with one arm, with the other he picked up a chair, hefting it with dangerous ease.
"Easy, gentlemen," Hattori interposed, and though his voice was soft, both men subsided into chairs, still glaring at each other. "Yamada, Inomoto-san and I met each other in France; he was in my class at the Sorbonne. Inomoto, Yamada-san and I were friends when we were children, before his family moved away. So both of you have equal claim on my acquaintance. Now, what is all this about?"
"I say that I am a fine chef," Yamada said, jutting his chin forward defiantly, "and that there is no good reason for my restaurant not to be successful."
"And I say," Inomoto retorted, "that there's nothing so special about his cooking that would make anyone want to come out of their way to eat it. I say that I could do better, and that what Yamada needs is cooking lessons."
Yamada sat quietly for a moment, a glint kindling in his eyes. "All right then," he said, "if you think you're the better chef, prove it. Hattori-san comes from a family of chefs and cuisine experts, he'll be the judge. Do you agree?"
"Certainly I do!" Inomoto roared. "I have knives in my car, let me get them, and I'll show you a thing or two about cuisine. I just hope you stock your kitchen better than you cook, or I'll have to show you how to shop as well!"
"Just a minute," Hattori interrupted. "I hate to throw cold water on you two cats, but I don't have all day to spend at this. I just came in for a bite to eat at an old friend's restaurant, not for a battle! I have an hour, maybe an hour and a half at the outside. Can you do it in an hour?"
"We can do it," they replied simultaneously.
He could see nothing but light.
There was a sense of space, as though he stood in one of the huge rooms of his house, but all of those were dark, and this one was so bright that even when he covered his closed eyes with his hands, light seeped in. It was warm, and from somewhere came an amazing, delicious smell.
Slowly, as his eyes grew accustomed to the light, he felt a sensation growing inside him, and he found himself trembling in every limb. What was this feeling? Where was he?
He felt hot and cold by turns; he felt as though his heart might burst the bars of his ribcage and fly singing into the light as a hibari; he felt alive. His mouth watered and he was ravenously hungry. Something, somewhere nearby, smelled like the richest, most delectable food in the world, and he wanted it. He wanted it with a longing he hadn't felt in years. He turned around and around, scenting the air like an eager hound, trying to find the source of the smell, and set off in quest of it in the direction he thought most pleasantly fragrant.
Hattori let Yamada fill his cup one last time; he eased himself back a bit from the table, and found himself wishing for such a digestif as was customarily served everywhere, no matter how humble, when he had dined in France. Well, this last cup of tea would just have to do.
He wiped his mouth while he considered the right things to say and the right ways in which to say them. It had been a fascinating hour, watching his friends create a banquet for one, out of whatever Yamada had lying around his kitchen -- not that it was meanly stocked, by any means. It had been a somewhat difficult time, the two men each trying to work around the other. There had been muttered (and not-so muttered) curses, and many near-accidents.
But at the end of the hour, Yamada had presented Hattori with four dishes, each one a microcosm of Japanese cuisine: a scant bite or two of luxury sushi -- o-toro, amaebi, and a futomaki topped with big, gunpowder grey Beluga caviar instead of the more usual tobiko; a filet of Bonito, grilled to perfection, served with a condiment of grated ginger and daikon and garnished with gobo slices cut into the shape of cherry blossom; skewers of lightly broiled tofu, spread, some with miso ground with roasted sesame seeds and some with miso and the spring's last tender kinome leaves, then lightly broiled again; and, finally, little Mochi cakes filled with azuki bean paste.
And Inomoto? He had outdone himself. As Hattori remembered him, Inomoto had always been the one who urged their little cadre of polyglot gourmands away from Paris to ever more remote reaches of Dijon and Provence, where it was anybody's guess whether or not there'd be even one person in the area who could understand high school-level French spoken in the accent of Paris by way of Kyoto, or Calcutta, or Canberra. His epicurean drive was obvious; Hattori had never had any idea that Inomoto had been absorbing an education along with his Pate Maison aux Fines Herbes and his Truite au Bleu.
Certainly the young man whose slapdash methods and careless seasoning had, in their own little excuse for a kitchen, earned him his nickname was nowhere in evidence this afternoon. All his dishes had the same sort of coarse, hearty sense as the dishes that had been Inomoto's favorites in France, but with a Japanese twist, so that his Tapénade -- ground in Yamada's suribachi -- contained fresh maguro, parboiled, and a pinch of wasabi powder instead of its usual dry mustard, sesame oil rather than olive, and gin-nan in place of the olives; his egg custard was sweetened with mirin but darkened with shavings of black truffle he'd just brought back from France (Hattori recalled Inomoto always as something of a shiftless bohemian; what on earth was he working at nowadays, that he could afford flights to France and Perigord truffles?).
He laid before Hattori a classical French omelet, made (he pointed out) according to Brillat-Savarin's recipe for a tuna omelet, only with bonito rather than tuna and salmon roe rather than carp roe. He capped the meal with a truly astonishing presentation of vigorously grated ice -- grousing the whole time about Yamada's deplorable lack of an ice shaver -- drizzled over with roasted pine nuts in a plum wine reduction with slivers of pickled ginger, decorated with a spray of cherry blossom.
Both sets of dishes had been delightful; but both had been so different. And now both men were looking to him, Inomoto eagerly, Yamada anxiously. Hattori picked up the cherry twig which was still on the table, and twirled it in his fingers to give them something to do while he thought.
Suddenly, his fingers stopped dead. His heart leaped in him, and he stared at the budding sprig in wild surmise. A breeze ruffled the curtains over Yamada's door. He realized he was holding his breath.
Hattori looked up into the expectant faces of his two friends, a great joy mixed with hope welling up in him. "I cannot judge between you," he began, and then waited for their indignation to subside before he continued.
His eyes opened. He levered himself back upright. It was dark, his neck was stiff, and his face felt a little sore from resting on a crease in the newspaper. But on his mind's tongue, the flavors of his dream lingered, and his actual mouth watered for them.
He struggled up from his chair and mode his laborious way to the door. No doubt it was late -- he had no idea what time it actually was -- but surely there'd be something in the kitchen which he could eat just to take the edge off his hunger, whether or not it tasted like the food in his dream.
copyright ©1999, Leigh Ann Hussey
to be continued...
I began this 2 years ago, and it really hasn't progressed since then, mostly due to lack of time on my part; but I was aiming at the time not only to pay tribute to Iron Chef (my favorite cooking show), but also to the many episodes of Anime I've watched over the years -- if you can imagine "K'sooou" instead of "Dammit!", see the floating cherry blossoms looking all meaningful; stuff like that... well, you get the idea.
I was inspired by what I perceived as the "back story" to Iron Chef, the now no longer ever seen "Temple of Cuisine" CG opening credits for the show (wherein we pan down past a stained-glass window with the messiah-like Kaga presiding over a sort of Last Supper, along with portraits of the Chefs, and then this HUGE computer-generated statue of a seated Kaga looking like heroic statuary of ancient Rome, then to Kaga himself standing next to the statue with the ever-present yellow bell pepper... an astounding thing which you can see if you have an unholy butt-ton of bandwidth, as an 18Mb Quicktime Movie), and also by the episode (probably not yet, nor maybe ever, seen on FoodTV) of Iron Japanese Koumei Nakamura's retirement battle, wherein his challenger was my personal Iron Chef hero, Yukio Hattori, showing a side of himself we never get to see in the Americanized version.
If you want to howl at someone taking apart my (really rather turgid) prose, check out Allez Cuisine! -- which treats my little fic as a Mystery Science Theatre 2000 film, complete with running commentary by Crow, Tom, and Mike...
