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## Illustrations

## Preface

Taiwan edition. Transcribed from Light Novel Kingdom. Proofreading: Castaway Scans: Castaway Image restoration: Castaway

A stockpot sending up clouds of steam in a corner of the kitchen is a sight from a bygone day.

In truth, soup vanished from restaurant menus a long time ago. The reason is simple: selling an everyday soup never pays back the labor that goes into it, and a bowl of soup with bread fills a guest so thoroughly that they cannot go on to the courses that follow.

In any case, soup is now tucked into some inconspicuous corner of the menu. Some restaurants even hang out, with a certain tact, the name "Today's Recommended Soup." What "Today's Recommended Soup" actually means is a soup made from whatever was left over that day.

There are chefs who treat soup as nothing more than a way to buy time. Make it in advance, keep it warm, and it can be sent out at once—just the right buffer before the next dish arrives.

Soup, then, is a dish of remarkably low standing.

Even so—though I am not sure that is the right way to put it—whenever I catch sight of a soup on a menu, I cannot help ordering a bowl.

And then the thought rises: This isn't it.

It is not the taste from back then—

## Prologue

I still remember, with uncommon clarity, the day I first came to the house.

The house stands in the Shonan region, in a corner that still holds the old shadow of a villa district.

The coastal slope that leads to it is deep and dim even in daylight. Houses line both sides, each with a stately garden, and the trees planted there throw their leaves across the sky.

Among a cluster of aging Western-style residences, the house before me stood out all the more. I could not help wondering what sort of woman lived alone in a place like this. I had heard she was once the daughter of some financial group, though I had no way of knowing whether that was true. Even I could tell how wealthy the household was.

Her husband had been an entrepreneur with deep ties to the political world. He had once run an investment firm, and then, in the middle of his work, died suddenly of a heart attack. She inherited the running of that company. Sweeping aside the misgivings and worries of everyone around her, she expanded the business, amassed a great fortune, and, after withdrawing from it all about ten years ago, had lived in seclusion in this house, once used as a villa.

And it was in one of the rooms of that house that I sat for the simple interview conducted by Takasaki.

Long before I came to work here, Takasaki had been in charge of every matter in the lady's daily life, great and small. He always wore a Nehru-collared suit, with leather shoes polished to a careful shine, and he walked without a sound.

From his bearing alone one could see that he was a man of long experience...

## Chapter One: French Household Potage

1

The shore was empty of people. A few white birds stood on the breakwater. I could not tell exactly which way the sound came from, but I could hear the gulls. It was a view that stirred a quiet sorrow whether one wished it or not.

A pine wood ran along the road, and I had grown used to leaving the car in front of those pines. Today, as always, I parked and walked the rest of the way to the house. A sea wind threaded lightly through the pines and lifted little gusts of sand. I walked that stretch with the wind at my back. When the wind dropped and I opened my eyes, the sea leapt into view.

When I gaze at the sea, a small wave of feeling sometimes strikes me. Whenever it does, I pretend I have not noticed, and quicken my step a little. Once I give myself over to walking, the unrest settles, and I return to the calm I had before.

The town pressed between mountain and sea once flourished as a coastal summer retreat. Now it is desolate in the extreme. Even the little shopping street in front of the station building, with its triangular roof, has fallen into decline. There is one old hotel in the outskirts, and beyond that no large buildings at all. Until a few decades ago the residential quarter was packed with the villas of politicians and entrepreneurs; now empty houses stand everywhere, and the view is bleak.

After climbing the gentle slope whose sides are walled, without a break, by the concrete of one mansion after another, the house comes into sight.

The moment I slipped in through the back gate, I caught a faint glimpse of the lady tending the flowers in the garden. She seemed to be about...

## Chapter Two: Beer Soup

1

Three days had passed since the affair of the French household potage came to an end.

Before work I walked along the coast. Yellow flowers were in bloom at the roadside. The tracks of seabirds lay scattered on the shore like dead twigs fallen from a tree.

Around one bend, the sea leapt at once into my eyes. Bathed in the morning sun, glittering, it was beautiful beyond words, but that beautiful instant could not last. The light would fade by degrees. When night came, it would be wrapped in unbroken black. The heat had been hard to bear since early morning, and by the time I reached the house my back was soaked with sweat.

An ordinary kitchen is stifling. This one is not entirely so. The house is old, yet the air-conditioning is, unexpectedly, thorough.

When the cleaning was done I rested a moment and caught my breath. Looking out the window, I happened to see Chiwa coming back from outside, and Vincent, the dog, going to meet her. In the sunlight she looked almost dazzling. Morino once said, "She lives in a different world from us." Perhaps he was not wrong.

Morino had come with a delivery. I checked the goods as usual and signed the slip. His clothes were soaked with sweat as well, so I brought out a cold drink. He thanked me and drained it in one go.

"The tomatoes today are excellent. A rare variety, you know. Come to think of it, anyone who cooks ought to understand ingredients down to the cultivar. An order form may say nothing but 'tomato,' but the flavor changes with the kind."

I picked up a tomato. There was a first...

## Chapter Three: Lautrec's Soup

1

I once worked in a restaurant whose kitchen was in the basement. Working where no sunlight fell, I felt fatigue eating through my body, and my spirits sinking day by day.

After that, I would only take work in a kitchen where the sun came in. In some fine restaurants the kitchen is better placed than the dining room itself. The kitchen of this house is beyond reproach on that score. The windows are large, and they fill the room with light. Chiwa stays at the window where that soft light falls, quietly reading a bunko paperback.

She rolls up a chef's jacket that is a little too big on her, and wears a look of thorough boredom. And yet her mere presence lays a thread of the surreal across the kitchen.

Since she asked me to teach her to cook, the hours we spend in the kitchen together have grown. Even so, a great deal still puzzles me. What, after all, is her reason for learning?

There are times when I cannot help suspecting that, while she looks at the pot on the stove, her thoughts have already gone somewhere far away. I feel I could ask her outright, and still the question will not leave my mouth.

I turn my eyes to the garden beyond the window, fix them on a tree not far off, and sigh with care, so she will not notice.

"Please be Miss Chiwa's friend."

That is what Takasaki said to me.

We cannot be friends. I thought it to myself.

The gap in age between Chiwa and me is too wide. I cannot even begin to imagine what is in her mind. The worlds the two of us inhabit...

## Chapter Four: Mock Turtle Soup

1

August was already drawing to its close.

Outdoors the heat was still fierce, but inside the gallery in Yokohama it was perfectly cool. A small retrospective was on, showing the work of a painter who had died not long before. Chiwa, unusually, wore a black dress, and a silver watch made her wrist look all the more slender.

She moved through the gallery and stopped, looking at the pictures on the white walls. A taut quiet lay over the space. Inside the gallery, time passed more slowly than it did outside.

"Can you feel the maker's presence in the work?"

Chiwa asked me in a low voice.

I shook my head. Painting is unfamiliar ground to me, but I knew this painter who had died.

"You wouldn't think these were made decades ago." She said it softly, almost a whisper.

"No."

The two of us spoke in murmurs. That alone made the air between us feel intimate.

When Chiwa suddenly asked me to go with her to the gallery, I was genuinely startled. Of course I could not refuse her, and I did not seem to mind indulging a passing whim of hers.

It was the first time in my life I had seen the work of an old friend. What hung in the gallery were minimal sketches the painter had made while traveling in Japan. Their atmosphere suited the small, elegant room.

The pencil sketches still held many traces of drawing and redrawing. Until a piece was settled, the painter must have spent a great deal of time and strength on it...

## Chapter Five: The Finest M-Flavored Soup in the World

1

I do not regret becoming a cook. What I do regret is that I can no longer simply enjoy the act of eating.

Of course I still feel a lift when I meet something delicious, and a meal with other people is still a pleasure, but while I eat there is always another self standing in the cook's place. I cannot help admiring the way someone else has handled an ingredient, and I find myself thinking how I would have made it.

For the child I was, eating what my mother cooked was a joy of the purest kind.

I still remember the sunroom that day. Spring had come early that year. The plants in the garden gave off a clean, pleasant scent, and the soil released a sweet freshness. The days I could visit my mother's place were few, but I loved that place because I could see her there.

The kitchen was my playground. Every utensil was a toy. What my child's labor produced was salad; what the game produced was soup. My mother was a fine cook, and I set out on the path of cooking because I wanted to be closer to her—or so, most likely, some part of me meant to do.

She carried a warm soup out of the kitchen in both hands. She spoke to me and smiled, though something hesitant remained in her face. She ladled the soup into a bowl and set that bowl before me. I took a spoonful with a silver spoon and put it in my mouth. The hot soup held a warmth like a windowsill laid in the sun, and it tasted sweet, with a feeling of happiness in it.

"It's so good..."

## Final Chapter

And so I found myself out of work. Thanks to the high pay at the house, my life did not fall into trouble at once. Now and then I cannot help suspecting that the time I spent in that house was nothing but a dream. As the sun keeps rising in the east and setting in the west, the past draws farther away. My new life is busy, and because of that I have no time to sink.

I passed near the house once, but I did not turn in. The view from the car window was beautiful. From a car running along the coastal road one could see the mountain woods taking on color, and the sea shining. A breeze passed lightly over the sand.

It is always when I meet a landscape that moves me this way that I remember Chiwa. In a certain sense I am no longer lonely. Since that day I have not seen her once. And yet there is a bond between us that cannot be given any name, and it still joins us. Whenever I recall the past, that feeling rises in me. At the same time it gives a great courage to the self that hesitates before the hard winter about to come.

She is in some corner of this world. Knowing that is enough. I do not mean to go and see her. Only, somewhere inside me, there remains the guilt of wondering whether I meddled where I should not have.

Autumn passed in a blink, and winter has come. I still have not found a proper full-time job, but now and then I help in a friend's restaurant. The kitchen, after all, is where I belong.

Just as what had been drawn tight...