What Our Eating Habits Say About Us
I went to Shimabara because of a newspaper article. It said a young man by the name of Keigo Kirino had died at a local speed eating contest. It was a riceball that did it; a chunk which became lodged in the young man’s throat and refused to leave. He died on route to the hospital.
He was 29.
Apparently, nobody had died at a speed eating contest before. Kirino was the first, which made him famous, or at least, famous enough to make the newspaper. His only other claim to fame (also mentioned in the article) was competing in the Hakone Ekiden marathon during university.
According to the article, after graduation Keigo joined an IT company but quit after three years and returned home. For the following year, leading up to the contest, Kirino lived with his parents. He did not work, and had no history of competitive eating.
I thought about Kirino a lot. Too much. He would not leave my mind. I wondered what inspired him to enter a speed eating contest. How much he trained. Whether he had considered death a possible outcome. What his family thought about it. His friends. I wondered whether the event was one worth dying for.
At the time, I had recently broken up with my girlfriend. My job was melting out of shape along with my future. I didn’t have friends. I was trapped in an existential spiral, and my life was a void.
So, a couple of months after I read the newspaper article, I took a week off work, booked a plane ticket, and made my way to Shimabara.
——
I told the officers at the Shimabara Police Department that Kirino and I attended the same university. That after graduation we sometimes met for drinks on Wednesdays at a small bar in Akasaka, and that on a few occasions we went jogging around the imperial palace.
“I lost contact with him when he left for home, and when I saw the article in the paper, I wanted to pay my respects. He was my friend,” I said.
The officers nodded. They made some calls and got me an address. They called a taxi and insisted on paying for it.
The chief of police put a hand on my shoulder. He said, “Kirino must have been a real friend for you to make the trip all the way down here.”
I nodded.
“I feel like a part of myself is gone,” I said.
And at least now I have told them something true, I thought.
——
Kirino’s house was old. It was located down a few narrow, winding streets near Ariake Junior High School. His parents were an elderly couple nearing their seventies, who farmed carrots and grew rice.
I sat at a small table in the living room across from Kirino’s father, who was watching a variety show on the television. He took a cigarette from a small packet, and looked around for a lighter. Across the hall, Kirino’s mother read an old book at the kitchen table.
“Who are you again?” he said.
“I’m a friend of Keigo’s,” I said.
“A friend?”
“From university. We used to go for drinks on Wednesdays.”
“Wednesdays?”
I nodded.
“Yes.”
“Seems like an odd day to go drinking.”
“It was one of the few days we both had free,” I said.
The old man turned his head to the television. Outside, cicadas chirped. I realized the silence was mine to fill.
“I was wondering if you could tell me about him?”
“Hm? About who?”
“About Keigo.”
“What do you want to know?”
I paused. I did not immediately know how to answer the question. What didI want to know?
“Keigo and I were friends for a time,” I said, “but in many ways he kept to himself. I… I wish I’d known him better.”
Kirino’s father looked at the calendar on the wall. There was something in his gaze that made me think of a book hidden at the bottom of a rose bush, where reaching for it meant getting scratched. Keigo’s father struck me as a man who did not want to read very much anyway.
“Chiaki,” he shouted towards a staircase. “Keigo’s friend is here. Show him around, will you?”
——
The little truck stuttered along countryside roads, with Kirino’s younger sister Chiaki behind the wheel. I stared out at green fields and sunflowers, and the sea off in the distance. I could live in a place like this, I thought.
“So you knew my brother?”
“Yes,” I said. “We went to the same university.”
“Dad said you went drinking sometimes.”
“Yes,” I said. “On Wednesdays.”
“I didn’t know Keigo had friends.”
“Oh?”
Chiaki turned on the radio.
“He never mentioned you,” she said.
“I never heard from him after he left, either.”
Chiaki nodded.
“He never mentioned anyone, really. He didn’t have friends here, and it was a surprise to all of us when he said he wanted to move to Tokyo. Mom and dad wanted him to work the farm, but he left anyway. When he came back, he didn’t say why, and he didn’t talk about it. He just moved back into his old room, and spent most of his time there.”
“He shut himself in?”
“Not quite. He helped out on the farm sometimes. He ran errands, too. it’s just… something about him was different. He was distant before, but even more so when he came back.”
“What do you think it was?”
Chiaki changed the radio station.
“He went to an agricultural high school because my parents pushed him into it, but I don’t think he ever wanted to be a farmer. He wanted something different, and he went to Tokyo to find it, but maybe it wasn’t what he thought it would be. Does that sound about right?“
Except for the agricultural high school, I thought, it did. It sounded like a story I was intimately familiar with.
“We were both at points in our careers where the paths we walked would take us up,” I said, “but not necessarily where we wanted to go.”
“I think he was always embarrassed to admit what he wanted,” Chiaki said. “Because of his upbringing, I mean. When you’re from the countryside, people laugh at you for wanting big things. For having big dreams.”
“I can see that.”
“It made me think that reaching for dreams is a bit like delivering vegetables.”
“Oh?”
“There’s a time limit on it, you know? And It’s like, you grow these vegetables and then you have to take them with you wherever you go. You can dump them if you feel like it, and you can grow new ones if the ones you have get old, and I think most people do one of those two things. But people like Keigo are different.”
“Different how?”
“Keigo grew his vegetables and they were special, but he couldn’t let them go. And so they went rotten. They went bad. And he held them so long the smell just stayed with him, even when he finally dumped them and came back home. By that time though, he couldn’t get away from the smell, even if he’d wanted to.”
Chiaki leaned against the steering wheel as the truck idled at a traffic light. She looked at the mountain in the distance, and for a little while hummed along with the song on the radio.
“Can you imagine that?” she said. “Can you imagine carrying around a bag of rotten vegetables your whole life? Holding on to them as they rot and knowing what they could have been, even as they stain everything you have left?”
I thought of a life I knew in Tokyo: a job, a broken heart, an unfinished novel, a ticking clock, and a swirling void.
“Yes,” I said.
——
Chiaki parked the truck in a small gravel parking lot, and we walked through the local arcade, past aging, empty storefronts. The sound of flowing water from open gutters drifted with a gentle echo.
“Was it surprising,” Chiaki said, “when Keigo left? When he quit?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I was more surprised by the article in the paper.”
“Yeah, that would surprise anyone.”
I sensed something in Chiaki similar to her father; another book at the bottom of a rose bush. And though Chiaki seemed more willing to get her arms scratched to reach for it, there was also something like a mist around her; a confusion and uncertainty. She’d lived with Keigo and grown up with him, and yet he’d ended up so different, and so distant.
“One time before he disappeared, Keigo and I went out drinking,” I said. “I got to talking about my family. I told him about my mother, who lived in Hiroshima. We never got along, and part of why I moved to Tokyo was to get away from her. When I was young she would shoplift and put the stolen items in my backpack when we went out. It was smooth sailing if we got away with it, but if we got caught it was always my fault. I was a scapegoat, basically. She would act just as surprised as everyone else, and then she would shout at me and shake me, and sometimes hit me, and drown the people around us in apologies until we somehow made it home.”
“That sounds horrible.”
“It was,” I said. “But before she died, Keigo told me to call her.”
“He what?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He said that even with everything she’d done, she was still my mother. A link to my past. And however frayed that link had become, there was still no other link like it, he said.”
Funny, I thought, how in a few simple sentences, Keigo Kirino had become the voice of my guilty conscience.
“Did you call her?” Chiaki asked.
“I didn’t.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. When she got sick she started calling me. Always the same time, always the same days. But I let the phone ring. Sometimes I put it where I wouldn’t have to hear it, and sometimes I stared at it vibrating on the desk while I worked. And then one day the phone calls stopped, and I knew she would not call again.”
Chiaki stopped at a vending machine and put a couple of coins in it.
“I never saw that side of Keigo,” she said. “He was always like one of those doors you see in movies; the ones that open up into brick walls.”
I shrugged.
“People are funny,” I said. “They do weird things.”
Chiaki handed me a can of coffee, and we walked on towards the graveyard. It was the first time I had ever told anyone that story about my mother.
——
Later, Chiaki took me on a drive to Unzen, on the way back to her parent’s house. She said it was a nice drive and a nice view. As the little truck groaned along the climb up the mountain, she spoke.
“We would sometimes go to the hot springs here,” she said. “Keigo and me.”
I stared out the window.
“Keigo always drove, and we never talked much, but it was a ritual,” she said. “We did it once a month, every month. It was our way of forgetting the world. We drove up into the mountains, soaked away our problems, and lazed around on tatami mats sipping from bottles of coffee milk and staring at the ceiling.”
“That sounds nice.”
Chiaki nodded, and shifted the truck into a lower gear as it struggled up the curving mountain roads.
“When Keigo left, I stopped going. For some reason, it didn’t feel right to go without him. When he came back from Tokyo we started going again, but it wasn’t the same. Something was missing. Whatever feeling had existed between us before, it was gone. It had changed.”
I thought of the lingering scent of rotten vegetables.
“You didn’t say anything?”
“I thought about it, but I never really knew how. And when Keigo started training for the speed-eating contest, I felt like that part of him had come back. We still didn’t talk much, and he still spent most of his time in his room, but there was something… lighter about him. I’m not sure what it was. I had always meant to ask him and find out, but I never got the chance.”
“Maybe he just found it,” I said. “Maybe he just found what he was looking for. New vegetables, or something.”
Chiaki shrugged.
“Who knows,” she said.
The truck wove between aging hotels as the smell of sulfur seeped in from the hot springs outside. I felt something hanging in the air between us: a question neither of us wanted to ask aloud, and perhaps only one of us wanted answered.
Did Keigo find a way forward, or did he find a way out?
We drove the rest of the way home in silence.
——
I thanked Kirino’s parents for their hospitality, and walked to the bus stop. I took a seat at a rusty bench by the roadside and soaked in the quiet boredom of a small piece of the Ariake neighborhood; a few passing cars, a sleepy convenience store, and the quiet murmur of the sea in the distance.
I felt lost. Lost in thoughts of rotten vegetables and speed eating contests. Of disconnected families and out of touch siblings. Of quiet lives and unspoken dreams, and the rice balls that brought the curtains down on both of them. I had come here to learn more about a man I thought of as a kindred spirit, but was leaving with little more than what I had arrived with.
And somewhere in this ocean of confused, grey thoughts, I became aware of the lazy rumble of an idling truck, hovering before my vision until it slowly came into focus, together with the driver inside of it. Chiaki.
“Where are you headed?”
“Nagasaki City,” I said. “I’ve never been.”
She leaned over and opened the passenger side door.
“Jump in,” she said. “I’ll take you.”
——
The truck rolled along winding roads overlooking smatterings of houses and their surrounding rice fields. We passed by convenience stores and family restaurants, and roads that looked out at the sea, quiet and lonely, vast and unfathomable.
“You didn’t really know him, did you?” Chiaki said.
“I’m sorry? I what?”
Chiaki laughed.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “It’s just, the way you talk about him, and the way the news talked about him, and the way my parents talk about him; it’s like nobody really knew who Keigo was, you know?”
“Oh,” I said.
“And today, when I heard about moments in his life that I never knew about, and that I’d never heard about or even imagined, I just wondered what life was like for him. At school, at home, in Tokyo. Did he have someone he could open up to? Someone he could be honest with?”
I thought about the fictional scenes I had crafted in Keigo’s life; how the ink that wrote those words was drying upon the pages that were Keigo’s life, as understood by his younger sister.
“Perhaps he didn’t,” I said.
“Can you imagine that?”
I thought of brief connections flittering between strangers, like true love on different frequencies, and the lonely, despondent thoughts that came to replace them in the sea of droning static and the ongoing disconnect that was life in the city of Tokyo.
“I can,” I said. “I can imagine that very clearly.”
——
Later, we watched as rain tapped gently against the windows of the truck, parked in front of a convenience store with snacks, drinks, and an inconsistent radio.
“Why do you think he did it?” Chiaki asked.
“Did what?”
“The speed eating. I’ve always wondered, but I never asked. Well, not Keigo, anyway. Sometimes it feels like I’ve asked everyone else.”
“And what do they say?”
“Most people don’t have an answer,” she said. “They either shrug it off or they give the verbal equivalent.”
“Sounds about right.”
“So now I’m asking you. Why do you think he did it?”
I listened to the arhythmical percussive beat of rain against the windows.
“I think when some people lose the ability to connect with the world around them and share what weighs on their soul, and when that feeling gets so heavy they sink to a place so deep and dark that they lose their sense of up and down, a strange thing happens: they start grasping at things that might help them float. It’s different for everyone. Some people drink. Some people stop going outside. Some people hurt the ones they love. And some people take up strange hobbies.”
“Like speed eating?”
I nodded.
“Like speed eating.”
Chiaki looked at the bottle of tea in her hand, her thoughts lost somewhere in its half-finished contents.
“These people,” she said, “do some of them travel to small country towns on the other side of the country to pay their respects to people they went to university with?”
I chuckled.
“Maybe,” I said.
——
After a time, the winding roads we drove began to fill with cars, buildings, and people. Idling taxis with sleeping drivers lined the roadside, trams passed slowly back and forth, and behind it all buildings and homes clustered together in the surrounding hillsides. We had arrived in Nagasaki city.
“Where’s your hotel?” Chiaki asked.
“Not far from the station.”
“Let’s stop by Dejima Wharf, then.”
The shape and feel of the city felt foreign to me. The rhythm of its traffic and the flow of it through the streets made me wonder: to what extent does the shape and feel of a hometown weigh on a person’s passions, goals, and dreams? And how heavy does the city feel when you have to carry its weight on your own? How long can you bear it? As I began to sink into this swamp of muddy thoughts, Chiaki spoke.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Yes?”
“Why did you come here?” she asked. “Really, I mean.”
The truth, of course, was I had come here on a whim. I had felt something like a thin length of string binding me to a young man who had died at a speed eating competition, and it left me with a question I wanted an answer for. But also, as I stood upon the tightrope between existing and not wanting to, I felt a need to see the slow crawl back to ordinary life in the aftermath of a loss.
“I think I needed to see it for myself,” I said. “The place Keigo went back to. The life. I needed to know what he left behind, and to see it for myself. I think I wanted to know who he was.”
“Do you think you got any closer?”
I shook my head.
“Honestly?” I said. “I don’t.”
Chiaki stopped the truck at a set of lights.
“In some strange way,” Chiaki said, “in losing my brother, I feel like I’ve come to know him better than I ever did while he was alive. It’s like I needed his death to connect with who he really was. Is that weird?”
I imagined the hazy figure of Keigo Kirino — still as far away from me now as he’d been when I’d discovered him in the paper.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I think it’s fine.”
——
We walked from the parked truck along Dejima Wharf as the sun began to set. Chiaki had said the place was pretty at this time, and she had been right.
“Did Keigo ever come here?” I asked. “To the city?”
“Not really. I know he came a few times for school, but outside of that he just didn’t travel. Not really. He had all he needed at home: games, books, television, music. I don’t think the city did anything for him.”
“Now that you mention it, I wish I’d seen his room before I left.”
Chiaki laughed.
“There wasn’t much there anyway. You wouldn’t have found much more than you already did.”
I nodded.
“Figures.”
We stopped at a small bridge near a shopping mall, and watched the people mulling about near the entrance.
“You said you came here to find out who my brother was,” Chiaki said, “and the place he went back to. His life.”
“I did.”
“But how does it feel now, to see for yourself how little he left behind?”
I looked at Chiaki and tilted my head. It was as though she was a little girl with a book in her hands and scratches along her arms from the rose bush where she had found it. It was as though she wanted me to read it to her.
“You like to ask me a lot of weird questions, don’t you?” I said.
Chiaki looked down at her feet.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just, I’ve never met anyone who knew my brother as well as you did.”
I felt a pang of guilt somewhere near the pit of my stomach, and searched for words to convey my jumbled thoughts. What would an old friend say? I wondered.
“Actually,” I said, “if I’m being honest, I feel a little jealous. Keigo had people around him he could go home to, even when his dreams went rotten. He had a place to look for new ones, even if in the end it didn’t work out for him.”
“What do you mean?”
I looked out at the water flowing into the bay, and at the lights in the windows of the buildings on the other side of it.
“I couldn’t put my finger on it at first,” I said. “It was a feeling I couldn’t place, like pieces of a puzzle I didn’t know how to put together. But for everything people say about Keigo being alone, and distant, and aloof, the guy still had a home waiting for him. He had parents to take him back, and a sister to go to the onsen with, and even a community to invite him to a speed eating contest. Do you know how it feels to not have these things?”
Chiaki shook her head.
“I don’t,” she said.
“Where I live, it feels like being lost in a forest where the people are trees. And sometimes the wind whispers through them, but the whispers are never for you. And the longer you stay there the more you realize you’re just another tree among millions of others, all rooted to the same place and all of you sharing the same basic components, but none of you ever connecting.Not really. You all just grow, endlessly, reaching up for the sun and eventually dying somewhere along the way to it.”
“That sounds awful.”
I shrugged.
“For some of us, it’s just life,” I said. “For me, it’s Tokyo.”
“Why do you stay, then?”
“Because in a strange way, it feels like home. Or at least, the closest I’ll ever get to one.”
We stayed there at the bridge watching the bay, wrapped in the wind and the ambience of the city. It was nice to have company, I thought, and I wondered if this was how Kirino had felt upon arriving home after three fruitless years reaching for dreams in the same city that might have stolen them.
——
“Do you mind if I ask you one last question, before I go?”
We stood by Chiaki’s truck in a little parking lot between the Nagasaki Art Museum and the restaurants that lined Dejima Wharf. I nodded.
“Sure,” I said.
“Can I give you my phone number?”
“Your phone number?”
Chiaki looked down at her hands, and the phone that rested within them.
“I know we only just met today, but… if you want to, you can call me. Or message me. Whatever. I’m not busy most days, you know? I can make time. To talk, and stuff. We can talk.”
I wondered then if a moment like this one was the reason I had come. I wanted to tell Chiaki that I never knew her brother. That I never knew what he was like, and that I was a fraud, and that I was sorry. But I did not.
“Sure,” I said instead. “That sounds nice.”
——
I watched Chiaki climb into her truck, start the engine, and slowly drive back into the gentle sea of Nagasaki traffic.
As I made the slow walk towards my hotel, I thought about the days ahead; of exploring Nagasaki, flying back to Tokyo, taking the train to my apartment, and sitting at my desk to work at a story I would never finish. I thought of dialing Chiaki’s number as I stared out the window, and of the ambient sounds of the countryside that might accompany her voice when she answered.
In those visions of the future I saw what might be the beginnings of a friendship; built upon the death of a young man who had died at a speed eating contest in a country town. I saw how the words we shared might slowly massage the soul, and build a pathway towards something like connection; gentle, warm, and comforting.
I could see it all forming right before my eyes, like a page opening to a new chapter, and that chapter starting with a simple phone call.
But I never spoke to Chiaki again.
— -
Music
(The Charm Park — Timeless)
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— Hengtee