Hiromi Kawakami on Communalism in Japan

In your story “The Kitchen God,” a housewife named Izumi sees small, three-faced creatures that she calls “kitchen gods” dwelling in her apartment. What was your inspiration in creating the figure of the kitchen god?

My grandmother often told me that there was a god in our kitchen, and that I should pray to him. Kitchen gods preside over the preparation and cooking of food—the basis of our daily lives—which is why they deserve our thanks. The kitchen god my grandmother spoke of comes from the Shinto tradition, but the three-faced god in my story also derives from the god who protects the “three jewels” of Buddhism: namely, the Buddha, his teachings, and the Buddhist clergy. So the kitchen god, in both Japanese culture and in my story, is a combination of one of the countless gods in Shinto folk belief and the mystical side of Buddhism, represented by the mountain ascetics of the Yamabushi tradition.

Izumi, who narrates the story, seems to be at the mercy of strange appetites: peeling and eating stucco off the walls, shoplifting foods from the convenience store, subsisting off sweets like preserves and madeleines from the Shoppers’ Co-op. Is there a source for these appetites?

We may be led to think that Izumi suffers from what doctors call parorexia, and that her munching on stucco, as well as her shoplifting and binge eating, are symptoms of psychological stress. As an author, however, my purpose was most definitely not to make that kind of causal connection, which is why I am choosing a vague phrase like “may be led to think” here. Since I hope readers will use their imaginations to form their own understanding, I will refrain from saying anything further.

The story mostly takes place in a “company apartment” building, where Izumi has responsibilities such as looking after the staircases and circulating information, and where the female residents all call one another okusan (a word for “housewife”). Will you describe this living arrangement for readers who might not be familiar with it? How did you decide to set the story in one of these buildings?

A common pattern marks those locations where communalism is still practiced in Japan, such as apartment buildings for families whose breadwinners all work for the same company, places where members of a similar age group cluster, localities with a long tradition of collective living, etc. People customarily share chores in these places without outside help, including cutting the grass and cleaning the buildings, caring for the elderly and the very young, and managing the local festival; in other words, they jointly shoulder the labor and the financial responsibilities of their community.

The plus side of this custom is that it helps foster closer personal ties among members, but the downside is that those who fail to follow the unwritten rules of the collective become outcasts. In this story, which I wrote twenty years ago, the housewives are all subsumed by the group; they call each other okusan or so-and-so’s mother and avoid the use of individual names. This pattern remains basically unchanged, though more and more young women and men reject such communalism as outmoded today, and refuse to participate.

“The Kitchen God” is part of your forthcoming collection, “Dragon Palace,” which will be released in the U.S. in September. Many of the stories in the collection include animals (such as foxes, moles, and octopuses), some of which may or may not be gods, spirits, and other shapeshifters, but all of which have their own air of mystery; in “The Kitchen God,” for example, there appears to be a weasel infestation in the building, though we never catch sight of the animals and only hear reports about them rifling through the trash disposal or squeezing into residents’ apartments. Is there something specific about animals that attracts you to including them in your stories?

What the stories of “Dragon Palace” have in common is a focus on the enigmatic nature of humans and human relationships. All the relationships in the stories are warped and twisted, outlandish even, yet they were intensely real to me as I wrote them. Talking foxes, moles, and octopuses may not be a part of modern Japanese urban life, but I found it easier and more natural to write about those mysterious spirits than about regular people.

Why was that? In retrospect, I think choosing a human vehicle would have locked me within the conventional boundaries of the “human,” whereas creating characters who were not human on the surface but had underlying humanlike aspects freed me to think outside the box, separate from those conventions. Which also made the stories fun to write.

By the way, the spirits that we encounter in “Dragon Palace” and early collections like “To Tread on a Snake” (“Hebi wo Fumu,” translated by Lucy North as “Record of a Night Too Brief”) seldom appear in my later writing. Once I had broken through some of those “human” conventions in “Dragon Palace,” my characters in later works became people in both body and spirit; though deep down they may well still be octopuses, moles, and foxes. How mysterious people are!

What is the connection, if any, between the weasels and Izumi’s “kitchen god”?

Is there a connection between the weasel that is rumored to be living in the building and the kitchen god? I would prefer to leave this question to my readers. Why deprive them of the fun of coming up with their own answers, one of literature’s great pleasures? Still, the author of a work is also one of its readers, and I can conjecture that the “connection” between the weasel and the kitchen god may lie in the fact that both are “threatening” to the narrator. She herself doesn’t know why she is so stressed, but we can see that she is somehow trapped within the cage of her own unconscious mind. Therefore, anything that arises outside that cage is disquieting.

You describe the various potted plants—philodendrons, cyclamens, spider plants—that commonly decorate what you call an “aunt’s living room,” and that Izumi also has throughout her apartment. Why do you think that Izumi and these “aunts” are so attracted to these potted plants? Do you collect these plants yourself?