fiendfull 's review for:

May You Have Delicious Meals by Junko Takase

4.0

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May You Have Delicious Meals is a short Japanese novel about food culture and particularly office food culture, centred around the triangle of Ashikawa, Nitani, and Oshio. Nitani lives off instant noodles and he takes no pleasure from food, even though outside of work he is seeing co-worker Ashikawa who cooks for him. But she leaves work early and makes up for it by bringing in baking for everyone to eat, which Oshio hates. Oshio goes out drinking with Nitani and always ready to complain about Ashikawa, who she thinks doesn't work hard enough. 

 

This book takes the lens of food to explore office culture in Japan, but also to explore office food culture more generally, in a way that is likely recognisable to people in many countries: people who make their own lunch, people who buy easy options, people who eat out at lunchtime. And through various meals, snacks, and drinks, we explore the three main characters and their relationships and petty resentments. The plot is mostly a sequence of scenes, building up a picture of these characters, and the use of food makes for a vivid picture of how these little things impact power dynamics and how people feel about each other. The book doesn't say that much explicitly, but there's lots to read into. 

 

One detail about the translation that I didn't like was the fact that Nitani's instant noodles were almost always called 'pot noodles', which being the name of a specifically British brand of instant noodles threw me out of the novel where food was otherwise given Japanese names. Calling them instant noodles or cup noodles (with capitals for the brand name or not) would've made more sense in my opinion. 

 

Being interested in food culture, I enjoyed this short novel about the petty office politics that surrounds food, and the way different people have very different relationships to food that can impact their relationships with each other. Some people might not like the lack of action or the petty characters, but it feels very much in keeping with other books poking fun at modern workplace culture.