“But as for my teacher, well he was on familiar terms with butter, beef fat, lard, you name it. Seal fat, duck fat, sheep’s fat, camel fat… The Provence region of France prides itself on a dish called cassoulet. You cook fatty duck in an earthenware casserole dish with white beans and sausage, so the beans absorb the duck fat, and the soup’s heavy with it. Apparently even the French have heartburn the day after they eat this dish. My teacher ate it three days running. He didn’t just eat it, he soaked up every last bit of fat at the bottom of the casserole dish with bread. I’d guess he shortened his life by about a week at each meal.
“Whenever he ate fat, he knew one thing for sure. Whether it was salted pork sirloin or chunks of beef fat in sukiyaki or stewed camel’s hump, or goose fat foie gras, he knew it was going to put pressure on his circulatory system, increase the adipose tissue around his liver, add wear and tear to his heart, diminish his vigour, and as a result take him one step closer to death.
“He would go into raptures over spicy and salty things. Now fat, of course, disguises much of the taste of hot or salty food. If you put salt on your tongue, you register the salty taste, and if you bite a chilli your tongue burns, but fat not only lessens the heat and the saltiness, it tames it right down. So of course his fat-soaked tongue craved food that was hotter and hotter, saltier and saltier.
“He kept the refrigerator permanently stocked with a number of salted and fermented foods. Sweet miso with fermentation starter, high-grade stuff with lime added, fermented cuttlefish blackened with its ink, he had the lot. He’d put salted fish innards and roe or salted sea-cucumber entrails in sake and drink it, he’d soak octopus or blowfish stomach or salt pickled sea squirt in green tea, or put salt-pickled baby rabbitfish on tofu, and he’d eat anchovies neat. He was a great fan of salt itself in all its guises. He’d of course use rock salt on meat dishes, and natural sea salt with fish, but he’d also blend different regional salts to create compounds for his personal delectation. This became a passion in his final years, the reason being that his body couldn’t cope with anything more than salt and water by this stage.
“Well if you’re a connoisseur of salt, you’ll also be a connoisseur of miso, soy sauce, and fish sauce. This man would serve himself dollops of finest Hatcho and Nishikyo miso washed down with sake, and slake the resultant thirst with drafts of Calpis. His pursuit of saltiness led him to start gulping down pure mineral spring water. His daily consumption of salts and sugars leapt, while his taste buds dulled. He craved ever stronger taste sensations. He took to having chilli, Tabasco sauce, or Chinese chilli paste with everything, which of course ate its way through not only his tongue and stomach but also his intestines.”
“You and your teacher make a fine perverted pair, I must say.” Just listening to him was giving Kita heartburn and a dreadful thirst. He ordered water.
“I’m just saying this is one more way of committing suicide. It takes a while, mind. Obviously, I’m not suggesting you try it yourself. I mean, you’re a man who’ll eat curry for almost his last meal, after all.”
“Just drop it, OK? You’re saying I should’ve eaten noodles? I don’t want to eat another thing.”
“Curry! Noodles! You’re a man with a sorry stomach, you are.”
“Don’t judge a man by his stomach.”
“Oh but I do. I hate Americans, for instance. This world isn’t such a simple place that you can conquer it with goddamn hamburgers.”
“Just what’re you trying to tell me?”
“I’m speaking of the sorrows of the flesh. That explosive appetite of this teacher of mine did its work and sure enough his organs fell apart. Food eccentricity is a kind of terrorism, when it comes down to it. But it was also the only way my teacher could slake his desires.
“We’re all starved of love, and tormented by the fear of losing love. From time to time we have to ease our fears and cravings by a bout of overeating. We search out food to replace the love we can’t chew and swallow – or in some cases we do the opposite, despair of finding love and thus cease to desire food. At any rate, love and food are fatally interconnected.
“I cannot live without love. Yet love evades me. This is our dilemma, and we’ve constructed two ways to ease the pain. One is fervent eating. The other is refusing to eat anything at all. Being starved of love both stimulates the appetite and removes it. Both these responses are destructive impulses that derive from a sense of love’s absence. The one leads to overeating, the other to anorexia. Either way, too much or too little, we die. We humans survive by maintaining a balance between the two, but overeating and anorexia don’t hurt others, so no one interferes. Of course your lover or your family might try to save you, but this involves love of some sort, and the result may well be that your destructive impulses subside. Anyone threatened with death through over- or undereating is actually in a crisis of love. Yet this is where someone who has no dealings with love steps in – the doctor. Where destructive impulses are directed at others the police and the legal profession step in, but they’re not in a position to interfere with self-harm. All that can be done is for a doctor to treat the problem as best he can. You may find a good one, and with luck you’ll survive.
“My teacher was lucky in that he himself was a doctor, but in some ways it was his downfall as well. At any rate, just before his sixtieth birthday he collapsed and died from overeating. It was a hideous death, but not a tragic one. His close family no doubt felt sorry for him, but those around him had no sympathy. In their astonishment they laughed rather than grieved, and at length the ironic smiles gave way to real reverence.
“What a lucky guy to die from overeating, one of his colleagues said. Meanwhile his students gossiped that he must have been aiming to get his name in the Guinness Book of Records with the readings on his cholesterol, gamma GTP, blood sugars and so on, all measures of his various ailments.
“The poor man could barely eat anything in his last years. He’d sit there lost in thought before a dish of plain broiled fatty eel and foie gras sauté, finally manage to carry a morsel to his mouth, then reach a trembling hand to a glass of water to wash it down. His flesh sagged and spilled out between his shirt and the top of his trousers. He’d developed a thick layer of fat everywhere beneath the skin, and a marbling of adipose tissue covered his muscles and organs. His breath stank and sweat constantly poured from him in all temperatures.
“At this point, he made up his mind and prepared for his last supper. The table was laid with an array of dishes devised over long years of eccentric eating. A beef brain and pork saddle fat salad, a jellied broth of pigs’ ears and fig, foie gras and Chinese chilli sauce ice cream, ravioli of fermented bonito intestine and washed cheese, green chilli stuffed with caviar, tuna eyeballs in champagne. He assembled a row of his favourite wines – Romanée-Conti, Château Latour, Tokay and so forth. It took him five hours to polish it all off, sieving off the fatty juices and injecting them into his system. He collapsed on the spot, was rushed to hospital in an ambulance, and died of a heart attack en route.”
“Why on earth would he go to that extreme? He must’ve been pretty desperate,” muttered Kita.
The doctor drew a deep breath through his nose, and gazed steadily at him. “That’s exactly how my teacher would breathe sometimes, flaring his nostrils. Like he found the world despicable.”