![]() His poetry and fiction were not celebrated or even much published in his lifetime, but word spread posthumously, and he is now one of Japan’s foremost writers, widely taught in schools. His parents were pious Buddhists and wealthy people by local standards their son became a teacher of agricultural science and a social activist who attempted to improve the lot of farmers in his region. Miyazawa was born in 1896, the son of two pawnbrokers in the town of Hanamaki in the rural Iwate Prefecture. ![]() And this only scratches the surface of his work’s appeal. When I think about politics, I consider Miyazawa’s story “The Fire Stone.” For my artistic practice, there’s “Gorsch the Cellist” for my place in nature, “The Bears of Nametoko.” I can’t say there’s a Miyazawa story for everything-the writer died young and lived nearly a century ago in rural northern Japan-but he had stories for many of our basic human vices, and for our basic forms of goodness, too. Lately, when I think about jealousy or, shall I admit it, when I feel jealous, I remind myself of the story “The Earthgod and the Fox,” by the Japanese writer Kenji Miyazawa (1896–1933). In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. MaEat Your Words Cooking with Kenji Miyazawa By Valerie Stivers.In this system, eating chowder is on the side of our better nature, and eating whale is on the side of our worst, so I felt a little better about my dinner plans. So when I looked at the book’s two main food passages-one on chowder, the other on eating whale-I found a central theme: the question of what man (specifically gendered man) is doing here in America, what he’s cooking up, and how it nourishes him. I understand it now as a “lifelong meditation on America,” as the Melville biographer Andrew Delbanco writes in his introduction to the edition I own. I had some contact with it in my all-girls middle school-to my recollection, just enough to ask why this book had dick in the title and so many mentions of “sperm” in its pages-but it’s only as an adult that I’ve fallen madly in love. Moby-Dick, however, is a book in which pulling on a single thread can reveal a universe. (Many thanks to the novelist Caleb Crain for loaning me Miller’s book and writing two excellent essays on Melville, sexuality, and cannibalism, published in A Journal of Melville Studies and American Literature.) (Potatoes or no potatoes? Avast.) In fact, as Perry Miller reports in The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville, and the New York Literary Scene, Melville meant for Moby-Dick’s chapter on chowder to be a sardonic response to just such an ongoing foodie feud. Chowder is an easy dish, and while there’s raging conflict over the primacy of New York style (tomato-based) versus New England style (white), and the finer variations of each, the topic seems to inspire passion in inverse proportion to its importance. ![]() In our Chowhound-fueled, extreme-eating kind of world, I felt a little silly. Whenever I would tell someone I was cooking from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for my next column, they would gleefully shriek, “Whale steaks!” And I would dither a bit and explain that no, those are illegal in America, and that I was instead planning to make two forms of chowder, clam and cod, that weren’t going to be very different from each other.
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