Less Itself

The umeboshi onigiri from Tuesday’s delivery weighed 0.3 grams less than the same product from the previous week. I noticed this because I notice everything about the onigiri. I have been rotating the onigiri display at FamilyMart #3712, Koenji Kitamachi, for eleven years. The triangular packages, the slight give of the rice through the cellophane, the way the nori wrapper crinkles differently depending on humidity. I lifted Tuesday’s shipment and something in my hands knew before I checked the manifest.

The manifest did not reflect a change. Supplier weight: 110g per unit, same as always. I placed the umeboshi in the front row, the tuna mayo behind it, the konbu in the back where it always is because konbu sells slowest in this neighborhood for reasons I have never investigated and probably never will. The salmon onigiri I arranged in the second row. The mentaiko I put beside the salmon because they sell at similar rates and it helps with restocking to group them by velocity.

I have memorized the velocity of every product in this store. Not deliberately — the way you memorize the layout of your apartment, by living in it long enough that your body knows the distance from the bed to the bathroom in the dark. The 500ml Suntory Boss canned coffee outsells the 250ml by a ratio of roughly 3:1 except on Mondays, when commuters are more hurried and the smaller can spikes. The melon pan in the bread section sells fastest between 3 and 5 PM, purchased mostly by high school students from Koenji Gakuen. These are not facts I decided to learn. They accumulated.

The FamilyMart chime sounded — two ascending notes that I no longer hear as sound, the same way I no longer hear the refrigerator hum until it stops. A woman in a beige coat bought a konbu onigiri and a bottle of Oi Ocha, and I processed the transaction, and the chime sounded again as she left, and I went back to the display.

At lunch I sat in the stockroom on an upturned milk crate and ate a makunouchi bento from the hot case. Employee discount, thirty percent. I put my earbuds in and listened to Bill Evans playing “My Foolish Heart” — the Vanguard recording, the one where you can hear glasses touching and someone coughing during the quiet parts. Evans played that night like he was running out of time, which he was, though he didn’t die for another year. The bento rice was fine. The pickled ginger was fine. The tiny square of tamagoyaki tasted like egg and sugar and soy, which is what tamagoyaki should taste like, though I sat there for a moment with the egg on my tongue trying to remember if the soy note had always arrived this late, this faintly, like someone calling your name from the far end of a hallway.

I put the lid back on the bento and turned the volume up.

The following week, I opened a soy sauce packet from the condiment station — the small plastic fish-shaped ones we keep next to the bento display — and squeezed it onto my index finger and tasted it. The salt arrived first, alone and sharp and clean, and then there was nothing. Not nothing exactly. A pause where the darker, rounder note should have been — the fermented depth that makes soy sauce soy sauce and not just brown salt water. The pause lasted a fraction of a second and then something arrived that was approximately correct. An understudy stepping in after the lead has called out. I could not have described the difference to someone who wasn’t looking for it. I could barely describe it to myself.

I opened a second packet. Same result. I opened a third from a different case, thinking maybe a bad batch, but the third was identical to the second which was identical to the first, and all three tasted almost exactly like soy sauce, and the word “almost” sat in my mouth like a fishbone I couldn’t dislodge or swallow.

I threw the packets away and wiped my fingers on my apron and went back to the register.

Hiro came in at two for the afternoon shift. He is twenty, a student at Meiji, and has worked here for seven months, which means he still hears the chime and still finds the stockroom depressing and still eats his lunch outside when it’s warm enough. I held out a soy sauce packet.

“Taste this.”

He tore it open and squeezed it into his mouth and made a face because it was a strange thing to do, and then shrugged. “Tastes like soy sauce.”

“Does it taste like it’s supposed to?”

“What’s it supposed to taste like?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. I thanked him and clocked out and walked to the station and took the Chuo Line home and sat at my kitchen table with a soy sauce packet I’d brought from the store and one from the bottle in my refrigerator, a Kikkoman that I’d bought two months ago. The store packet: flat, reduced, the understudy. The Kikkoman: the same. I opened the bottle and held it under my nose and the smell was soy sauce and also the memory of soy sauce, and I could not determine which.

I wrote in my notebook: Kikkoman soy sauce — fermentation depth reduced? Or palate fatigue? Check again Thursday.

I have kept this notebook for three weeks now. It is a standard B5 Campus Note, college-ruled, purchased from the stationery section of the very FamilyMart where I work. The entries are dated and specific. I am not a person who uses exclamation points or underlines.

The changes continued. The green tea’s bitterness had softened to something merely warm, like bathwater that someone had breathed over. The yakisoba sauce, which should arrive in the mouth like a brass section — salty and sweet and fermented all at once, demanding attention — now entered quietly, single file, its components arriving separately and never quite assembling into the chord they were supposed to form. The wasabi in the sushi packs still produced heat, but the heat was only heat. The volatile sharpness that should climb through the sinuses and make the eyes water and then vanish — that architectural quality, the rise and collapse — had been replaced by a flat, sustained burn, like holding a match to the same spot.

I tasted everything. I opened packages in the stockroom during my breaks and tasted them and wrote in my notebook and replaced them on the shelf, adjusting the position of the opened ones so they’d be purchased first. No one asked me what I was doing. The security camera in the stockroom has been broken for two years. I put in a work order when it failed, and the work order was acknowledged, and nothing happened, and I filed the acknowledgment in the maintenance binder and moved on.

In the notebook I kept a list. Not a dramatic list. Just dates and products and a one-line observation:

Feb 3 — Umeboshi onigiri: tartness reduced, filling tastes of salt and texture only Feb 5 — Miso soup (hot case): fermentation absent, tastes of warm water and dissolved soybean Feb 8 — Matcha latte (bottled): bitterness gone, only sweetness and green color remain Feb 11 — Wasabi (sushi pack): heat present but architecture absent, no rise-and-vanish

The list grew. I did not show it to anyone. There is no form for this kind of observation. No incident report for something becoming less itself.

On Sunday my mother called from Sendai. We talked about the weather and a leaking faucet in her bathroom and a cousin’s wedding I would not be attending. Near the end of the call she mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that she was finishing the work of clearing out grandmother’s apartment.

“There’s a crock in the kitchen cabinet. Ceramic. Heavy. Do you want it, or should I throw it away?”

“What is it?”

“Your grandmother used to make pickles in it. Nukazuke. Do you remember?”

I didn’t. My grandmother died eight months ago. I attended the funeral and took the train back to Tokyo that evening and opened the store the next morning at six as usual. I grieved in the way I grieve, which is to say I continued. The grief was there, underneath the chime and the inventory and the rotation schedule, like a low hum beneath the refrigerator hum, and after a while the two hums merged and I could no longer distinguish one from the other.

“I don’t remember the pickles,” I said.

“She made them every day. Stirred the nuka bed every morning before breakfast. You ate them when you visited as a child.”

“I don’t remember.”

“I’ll throw it away then.”

“Wait.” The word came out before the thought did. “Don’t throw it away yet. I’ll come this weekend.”

The apartment in Sendai smelled like a closed room, which is what it was. Stale air, mothballs, the ghost of incense from the butsudan. My mother had packed most of the belongings into cardboard boxes labeled in her careful handwriting. The kitchen was almost empty. On the counter, next to a box of dishware wrapped in newspaper, sat the crock.

It was heavier than I expected. Dark brown ceramic, wide-mouthed, the glaze worn smooth around the rim from decades of hands gripping the edge. I lifted the lid.

Inside: a cracked, desiccated surface, gray-brown and fissured like drought-stricken earth. The nuka bed had died eight months ago when the stirring stopped. What had been alive — a culture of lactobacillus and yeasts and molds, sustained by daily contact with human hands, evolving with the specific bacteria of this kitchen, this air, this altitude — was now a fossil. I touched the surface with my finger and it crumbled. Dry as ash. I brought my finger to my nose. A ghost of salt. Something that might have been the memory of fermentation, or might have been my imagination constructing what it expected to find.

My mother stood in the doorway. “She talked to it,” she said. “Every morning. She’d plunge her hands into the bran and turn it over, and she’d talk to it the way you’d talk to a garden. On hot days she’d add a little beer to keep it cool. On cold days she’d tuck in dried shiitake stems for warmth. She said the mushrooms helped the culture through the winter.”

“Did you ever make nukazuke?”

“Once. When I was first married. I kept it for three months and then forgot to stir it for a week while your father and I were in Hokkaido and it went sour. I threw it out.” She paused. “The pickles she made from this bed — your grandmother’s pickles — they didn’t taste like store pickles. They tasted like her hands.” She caught herself, or amended herself: “No. They tasted like the house. Like the specific air and bacteria that lived in this kitchen, fed by her hands for forty years.”

I held a flake of the dead nuka between my thumb and forefinger. It weighed nothing. It told me nothing. I had no memory of what it once produced. I had eaten my grandmother’s nukazuke as a child and the taste had fallen out of me entirely, like a word you use so often it stops meaning anything.

That night I slept in the guest room of my mother’s apartment, on a futon that smelled faintly of the closet where it spends most of its life. I opened my notebook and read the list of diminished flavors. The handwriting was mine — small, neat, the handwriting of a person who fills out delivery manifests and inventory sheets and maintenance requests — and the observations were precise and useless. I had been documenting a process I could not affect, in a format designed for problems that can be resolved. The list read like a maintenance log for a building that was sinking into the earth: accurate, filed, unaddressed.

I closed the notebook. Through the wall I could hear my mother washing dishes, the careful sound of someone who lives alone and has arranged her kitchen so that every action produces the minimum disturbance. I understood that sound. I make the same sound in my own kitchen.

I wrapped the crock in newspaper and carried it to the train. It was heavy enough that my arms ached by the time I reached Sendai Station, and on the Shinkansen back to Tokyo I held it on my lap, the ceramic warm against my thighs through the newspaper, and a woman across the aisle glanced at it and looked away and I did not explain what it was because there was nothing to explain.

The crock sat on my kitchen counter in Koenji, between the microwave and the electric kettle. It looked like an artifact from an excavation. The apartment is a 1K — one room, kitchen alcove, bath — with sealed windows and climate-controlled air that cycles through the building’s filtration system. The air in here has no bacteria that I know of. No culture. No history. It is the air equivalent of the convenience store: maintained, regulated, exchanged for fresh units at predetermined intervals.

At the store, the erasure continued. The onigiri rice had lost its stickiness — it held together but did not cling, the way a handshake can be firm without being warm. The miso from the hot case tasted of hot water with a rumor of fermented soybean. I opened a pack of umeboshi — the actual pickled plum, not the onigiri filling — and placed it on my tongue, and the sourness that should have made my mouth flood and my jaw ache arrived at about half the volume I expected, like a street musician playing through a broken amplifier.

I wrote in the notebook. I closed the notebook. I went back to the register.

One evening, after my shift, I bought a bag of rice bran from a specialty shop in Shimokitazawa. I had looked up the proportions on my phone: one kilogram of bran, 130 grams of salt, a strip of kombu, water until the mixture reaches the consistency of wet sand. I had also read that the first weeks would produce nothing edible — the culture needed time to establish, the lactobacilli needed generations to reach the density required for proper fermentation. The instructions said to bury vegetable scraps in the bed and discard them every other day, feeding the culture, building its population. The instructions said to stir daily. The instructions said that in a climate-controlled apartment with sealed windows, results were not guaranteed.

I poured the bran into the old crock. The bran settled against the dead residue of my grandmother’s culture, the new grain resting on the ghost of the old. I added salt and mixed with my hands and the bran was cool and granular and smelled like nothing yet — like a field before planting, like potential that had not been activated. I added water slowly, working it through the mixture, and the bran darkened and clumped and began to feel like something between soil and dough. I pressed a strip of kombu into the center. I peeled a cucumber and buried it in the bran, pushing it down until the surface closed over it.

I washed my hands. The bran had worked into the lines of my palms and under my fingernails, and I stood at the sink for a long time, scrubbing, watching the water run tan and then clear.

I put on Bill Evans. Waltz for Debby, the live recording, June 25, 1961, at the Village Vanguard. You can hear the audience — murmuring, the clink of glasses, a woman laughing during “Milestones.” Evans’s left hand carries the harmony in clusters that shift underneath the melody, and Scott LaFaro’s bass answers from somewhere beneath, and together they build a structure so delicate that the audience noises don’t interrupt it but live inside it. LaFaro would be dead in eleven days.

I sat at the table with my hands in my lap. The crock sat on the counter. The bran inside it was not alive. It was ingredients. The alchemy had not started. I did not eat dinner.

The next morning I stirred the bran before my shift. I plunged my hands in and turned it over, the way the instructions said, the way my mother described my grandmother doing. The bran was cold. It smelled of wet grain. I buried a new piece of cucumber and discarded the old one, which had absorbed some moisture and softened but tasted of nothing — raw vegetable submerged in salted bran, no fermentation, no transformation. I rinsed my hands and went to work.

I did this the next day, and the next. Each morning at 4:50, before the alarm, I stood at the counter and put my hands into the crock. On the fourth day I thought I detected a faint sourness in the bran, something beneath the salt. On the fifth day I was not sure. On the sixth day the sourness was back, and it smelled less like salt-and-grain and more like something metabolic, something working. I buried a piece of daikon. I went to work.

Three weeks later. The alarm at 5:15. The walk to the station in the dark, Koenji quiet except for the crows and the delivery trucks and one drunk salary man sleeping on a bench outside the Lawson across the street. The train. The store.

I unlocked the FamilyMart at 5:55 and turned on the lights and the coffee machine and the hot case and waited for the delivery truck, which arrived at 6:12, three minutes early. I signed for the shipment. I unpacked the onigiri and rotated the display, new stock behind old, labels facing forward, umeboshi in the front row. I checked the sell-by dates on the bento and pulled two that expired at noon. I wiped down the counter and refilled the condiment station and checked the register tape and opened the doors at six.

The chime sounded. The fluorescent lights hummed. The refrigerators hummed beneath them, the two hums harmonizing in a minor second that no one hears.

At my break I sat on the milk crate in the stockroom and took out a small plastic container from my bag. Inside: a piece of cucumber, pale green, lightly wrinkled, damp with bran. I had pulled it from the crock that morning before dawn, brushed off the loose nuka, and cut it into pieces. The bran smell clung to it — sour, yeasty, a little funky, alive.

I bit into the cucumber. It was sour, and the sourness was imprecise and ragged, sharper at the skin than the center, with a fermented undercurrent that tasted like — I don’t know what it tasted like. Not like any tsukemono I have bought in cellophane from the refrigerated section. Not like anything with an ingredient list and a sell-by date. It tasted like my apartment. Like the specific air and temperature and bacteria that live in my kitchen, that I have been mixing into the bran with my bare hands every morning for three weeks, my palms pushing the culture down and folding it over and pushing it down again, the same motion my grandmother performed twelve thousand times over forty years in a kitchen in Sendai that no longer exists.

I did not know if this was what her pickles tasted like. I suspected not. Her culture was forty years old and mine was three weeks old, and the difference between those two ages is not a difference of degree but of kind. Hers had survived summers and winters and the particular molds of a wooden house and the oils from her hands, which were different hands than mine, attached to a different body, in a different city, in a different time. Mine was an infant.

I also did not know if the flavors in the konbini had continued to diminish. I had stopped keeping the notebook. Not deliberately — the way you stop keeping a notebook, by not opening it one morning, and then another morning, and then the mornings accumulate and the notebook stays in the drawer and the drawer stays closed. I could have opened a soy sauce packet and tasted it and compared it to my notes and determined whether the trajectory continued. I chose not to. Or I failed to. The distinction between choosing and failing is not always as clear as the language suggests.

The cucumber was half eaten. I put the rest back in the container and the container back in my bag. I washed my hands at the utility sink and dried them on my apron and went back to the register. The chime sounded. A man in a gray suit bought a canned coffee and a pack of Seven Stars and said nothing and left. I said the standard greeting as he entered and the standard farewell as he left, and the words came out of my mouth the way they always do, worn smooth by repetition, and I could not tell if they meant what they were supposed to mean or if they had ever meant anything.

The nuka-doko at home is waiting to be stirred. I will stir it tonight, my hands plunging into the bran, turning the culture over, feeding it the warmth and the oils and the bacteria of my skin. I will stir it tomorrow. I will stir it the day after that. I do not know how long I will continue. The bran does not know either. It has no schedule, no manifest, no sell-by date. It has only the requirement of daily hands.

The afternoon delivery is in forty minutes. The umeboshi onigiri needs to be rotated. There is a smudge on the glass door that I will wipe with the blue cloth.