The final chapter deals specifically with contemporary novels by women, some of which celebrate the inclusiveness of eating (and writing), while others grapple with the fear of eating. The quest for gastronomic gratification is a dominant theme in 'gourmet novels.' Like cannibalism, the gastronomic journey as a literary theme is deeply implicated with cultural identity.

Key issues include ethical questions about survival, colonization, and cultural identity. The author then turns to the theme of cannibalism in serious and popular novels. Examples are drawn from Meiji literary diaries, children's stories, peasant and proletarian literature, and women's writing before and after World War II. Food is everywhere in Japanese literature, and early chapters illustrate historical changes and variations in the treatment of food and eating.

The examples she offers are taken from novels (shosetsu) and other literary texts and include well known writers (such as Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Hayashi Fumiko, Okamoto Kanoko, Kaiko Takeshi, and Yoshimoto Banana) as well as those who are less widely known (Murai Gensai, Nagatsuka Takashi, Sumii Sue, and Numa Shozo). Tomoko Aoyama analyzes a wide range of diverse writings that focus on food, eating, and cooking and considers how factors such as industrialization, urbanization, nationalism, and gender construction have affected people's relationships to food, nature, and culture, and to each other. Literature, like food, is, in Terry Eagleton's words, 'endlessly interpretable,' and food, like literature, 'looks like an object but is actually a relationship.' So how much do we, and should we, read into the way food is represented in literature? Reading Food explores this and other questions in an unusual and fascinating tour of twentieth-century Japanese literature.

Mikage kitchen