Odd Meat Sukiyaki Tale -- At the Tsutsui Family's Postwar Home (1930s-1940s)

Odd Meat Sukiyaki Tale -- At the Tsutsui Family's Postwar Home (1930s-1940s)

Yasutaka Tsutsui is a rare writer who lived through the two extremes of confusion and prosperity in postwar Showa Japan. He spent his childhood in Osaka with his father, Yoshitaka Tsutsui, a zoologist and director of the Tennoji Zoo. A kind of legend passed down in the family is that giraffe and zebra meat was served at the Tsutsui family's sukiyaki. Although the truth of this story is ambiguous, the odd-shaped table symbolizes the postwar era and the spiritual starting point of the writer, Yasutaka Tsutsui.

As reconstruction from the war began in earnest and the country steered toward rapid economic growth, Japan's dining table was becoming a place of "white rice and meat," an affluence unimaginable before the war. In Tsutsui's family, however, there was an experience that shook the very foundation of what "food" means. As a result of his father's work at the zoo, there was a possibility that the meat brought home from the zoo came from experimental animals, and the sense of taking such "unidentified meat" for granted eventually formed the basis of his literature.

Yasutaka Tsutsui's major works are filled with a point of view that laughs at and sometimes dislocates the common sense of the times. In "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time," a "time leap" suddenly intrudes into an ordinary life, and the girl's emotions and the future intersect. In "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time," a girl's emotions and her future intersect, and there is a look that questions even the order of time. The Bomb in Africa" is full of satire that exposes the shallowness of civilization while at the same time making fun of political tensions. In "The Imaginary People," the distrust of language itself is vividly depicted, and even identity is presented as plastic.

What these works have in common is a will to explore "what it means to be human" without relying on language, institutions, society, or the body. At the root of this question is the uncertainty of the act of eating, and the gap in our sense of what reality is.

Tsutsui Yasutaka's literature, while seemingly outlandish, is extremely realistic. This is because it starts from the very concrete experience of eating meat that we do not know the name of. His sharpness and humor, born in the kitchens of the postwar era, continue to be a unique feature of the literary table.