Life Ceremony

Food is an excellent means for cultural exchange. The things you can learn from each meal! And not just nutrition. When you eat, you ingest culture, too. I realized that’s where the future of our alimentary lifestyle lies.

We don’t have to eat out of the same pot to understand each other

When you eat the food someone makes for you, it means you believe in the world they live in, right? Even if people have fun hearing about your world, putting it into their mouth is another matter. I think food is all weird anyway, so there’s no way I can eat it unless I believe in it.

Feeling this life was a precious momentary illusion, I squeezed his slim fingers even tighter.

A hundred years later, what would our bodies be used for? Would we be chair legs or sweaters or clock hands? Would we be used for a longer time after our deaths than the time we’d been alive?

I would always feel that I too was a material, that I would continue to be put to practical use after I died. The thought that this was a marvelous and noble process was deeply rooted within me.

the only madness society allows is called normal.”

His hand was giving shape to my outline as he stroked me.

It was the first time I’d tasted this pungent plant without cooking it. The moment I placed it in my mouth, its particular smell and sour taste filled my senses. The strong flavor was reminiscent of celery, and in order to hold on to it, I stuffed some more leaves into my mouth. My inner organs were set trembling by its living taste, a taste that didn’t exist in the dead bodies of the vegetables lying cold in the supermarket displays. I continued walking determinedly along the gray streets, chewing on the fragments of the city, dissolving them in saliva, swallowing them, and feeling them fall into my stomach.

I looked down in satisfaction at my sneakers, which were pale blue but had already gotten dirty with soil. Until recently I had forgotten that sneakers look good when they’re dirty like this. I ran my hungry gaze over the surroundings as I walked along the street among men in ­stifling suits and meticulously dressed women. Now that I had learned to walk like an animal, I realized how much I had been viewing the city as a collection of symbols. I had been faithfully following these artificial symbols, thinking that this turn would take me to the station, that this was a sidewalk, those places over there were restaurants, and so forth. When I ran my gaze over the world with an empty stomach, the surroundings shed the armor of these symbols and revealed their true nature. My light blue sneakers could now walk beyond those symbolic meanings, striding over the sidewalk, deeper and deeper into this new world.