seek - 凡人水族園 [Chapter 35]
Chapter 35 / Fried lobster, potato salad, gameni*
It seems as if it were raining. [Here’s a sentence I don’t really get, but I suppose it’s about how hard it's raining.] Rain. Rain. Rain. I don’t even try to wash my clothes, because they won’t get dry anyway. That way, the pants I wanna wear tomorrow won’t be clean as well. Maybe it will stop raining if I beg for it. And if I sent my anger (to heaven) everyday.
Well, ne, rain from the beginning. Rain. Everybody talks about it boisterously and gets worked up, but what we should be bothered about are vegetables. Vegetables. They’re expensive and hit every family’s expenses directly. I often visit the housewife’s battlefield that goes by the name “three-dimensional market”, but it only has articles that cost more than 200 Yen. My policy is to not touch articles that cost more than 130 Yen, so, inevitably, there are only bean sprouts in my basket. The cabbage that cost 100 Yen until recently only costs one forth of that now. That’s peculiar. Because of whatever Monday is the day of eggs, on Wednesday you get a discount if you buy four packs of frozen food, on Saturday and Sunday you get twice the amount of points than usually.
So, when you complain enough, things start to change. A few days ago, I went back home to my parents. Because they had waited for me to visit them for a long time, they made fried lobster, potato salad and gameni. And we drank on that day. From beer to Japanese rice wine, from white wine to red wine. While we mixed all this alcohol, I already got a bad feeling. Also the glass of my father, who is supposed to be a non-drinker, got empty. That’s how it went. Our tongues became loose. We started to talk about things that had been sleeping deep inside our hearts. "Because you told us you would give a concert at Budoukan, I** came to see you. I made it to the entrance, but there I turned around and went home". At once, my drunkenness was gone. Perhaps that was at the event of September 2. The figure of my father walk in a line of young girls comes to my mind. What made my father walk all the way along Namiki road to Budoukan? It must have meant some trouble for him to come, why did he stop halfway? I wanted to know how many things would come forth that had vanished, but I decided to drink until passing out that night.
The next morning, tainted with the stench of alcohol, my father and I boarded the train. My dad on the train, gently shaken by its movement, that’s something I happened to see every morning and that thought suddenly crossed my mind. And I think my dad thought the same about me at the same time. That day, in Budoukan, I was dressed as a little demon. What would my dad have thought if he had known that? But the chance that he would talk about that was gone. Due to the shaking of the train, I felt a little nauseated, and told myself that I definitely play a oneman at Budoukan one day. And mostly, I swore in my heart, I would take care that my parents would have great seats then.
Notes:
*As far as I found out, gameni (がめ煮) is a speciality from the Fukuoka-region. Its main ingredients are chicken, carrots (or ginseng - the Kanji for both is the same, so I cannot tell), shiitake mushroom and lotus root cooked in soy sauce, a bit of sugar and different kinds of alcohol. Seems to be kind of a chicken soup to me, but I’m not sure.
**It says "father" instead of "I", but I’m sure it’s his father who says that to him.