Chapter One

I daresay the members of the Gourmet Club loved the pleasures of the table not a whit less than they loved those of the bedroom. They were a collection of idlers with no occupations apart from gambling, buying women, and eating fine food. Whenever they discovered some novel flavor, they took as much pride and pleasure in it as if they'd found a beautiful woman for themselves. If they found a cook able to produce such flavors, a genius of a cook, they might employ him in their homes at wages equal to what they would spend to monopolize the favors of a first-class geisha. It was their conviction that "if there were genius in the arts, then of course there must be genius in cookery as well." For in their view, cooking was an art, capable of yielding artistic effects that--at least so far as they were concerned--put poetry, music, and painting in the shade. Not only after a splendid meal, but even at the moment they all gathered around a table piled high with delicious things, they felt the same kind of excitement, the same rapture one does on hearing the finest orchestral music. It took them to such giddy heights that it seemed only natural they should think that these epicurean pleasures were as much of the spirit as of the flesh. But the devil, it seems, is as powerful as God, for when any of the sensual pleasures (and not only those of the table) are taken to their furthest point, there is a danger of losing oneself entirely in them....

Thus, as a result of their gormandizing, each and every one of them was afflicted year-round with a large pot-belly. And it was not only their bellies, of course: their bodies brimmed with excess fat; their cheeks and thighs were as plump and oily as the pig's flesh used in making pork belly cooked in soy sauce. Three of them were diabetics, and almost all the club members suffered from gastric dilatation. Some had come close to dying from appendicitis. Still, in part from petty vanity and partly out of strict fidelity to the epicureanism to which they were so devoted, none of them was worried about illness. Or, if perhaps one of them did feel some inward fear, nobody was so craven as to quit the club on that account.

"We'll all be dead of stomach cancer one of these days," they used to tell each other, laughing. They were rather like ducks that are kept in darkness and stuffed with rich food so that their flesh will become tender and succulent. The point at which their bellies became absolutely crammed with food would presumably be when their lives came to an end. Until then, they would live on, never knowing when to stop eating, with belches continually erupting from their heavy-laden stomachs.

There were only five members of this society of eccentrics. Whenever they were free--and since they were unemployed, this meant virtually every day--they would gather at someone's house or on the second floor of some club and spend their afternoons mostly in gambling. From traditional Japanese card games like boar-deer-butterfly to bridge, napoleon, poker, twenty-one, and five hundred, they played an endless variety of betting games, at which they were all equally adept, good players to a man. Then when night came, the money they'd won would be pooled and used to finance that evening's feast. Sometimes it would be held at a member's house and sometimes at a restaurant in town. But they soon grew tired of the famous restaurants in central Tokyo: the Mikawaya in Akasaka, the Kinsui in Hamacho, the Okitsu in Azabu, the Jishoken in Tabata, the Shimamura, Otokiwa, Kotokiwa, Hasshin and Naniwaya in Nihombashi--they'd eaten their way through all of these fine Japanese-style restaurants any number of times and no longer had any interest in them. "What'll we eat tonight?" was their sole matter of concern from the moment they opened their eyes in the morning. And even as they gambled away the afternoon, they were all thinking about the evening's menu.

"I want my fill of some good soft-shelled turtle soup tonight," someone would moan during a lull in the card game, and immediately fierce gluttony would run like electricity through the little group, none of whom had yet been able to come up with a good idea for that night. All would agree to this at once, with the greatest enthusiasm, and their eyes and faces took on a curious shine which hadn't been there when they were merely playing cards--a wild, degraded look, like that of the hungry ghosts of Buddhist lore.

"Turtle? Eat our fill of turtle soup? But I wonder if we can get really good turtle at a Tokyo restaurant ...," another man would mutter anxiously to himself. This was mumbled so low as to be barely audible, yet it served to diminish the ardor of the company, which had flared up just a moment before. Even the way they played their cards lost something of its energy.

Then someone else might suddenly suggest: "You know, we'll never find it in Tokyo. I say we leave for Kyoto by the night train and go to the Maruya in Kamishichiken-machi. That way we can have turtle for lunch tomorrow!"

"Good idea! We'll go to Kyoto--or anywhere, for that matter! Once you've set your heart on eating something, you've just got to have it!"

Their relief was patently visible, and redoubled appetites were felt rumbling up from the pits of their stomachs. So, impelled by their desire for turtle, they endured being shaken about on the night train for Kyoto; and the next evening they headed back to Tokyo with ample bellies abrim with turtle soup, comfortably swaying to the motion of the return journey.

They grew more and more capricious, going off to Osaka to have sea bream and hot tea-over-rice, or to Shimonoseki for blowfish. Longing for the taste of Akita sandfish, they made expeditions to the snow-blown towns of the north country. And eventually their tongues lost all taste for the usual "fine cuisine"; lick and slurp as they might, they could no longer discover the excitement and joy in eating that they demanded. They were of course sick to death of Japanese food, and as for Western food, they knew they could never find the real thing unless they actually went abroad. There remained Chinese food--that rich cuisine said to be the most developed and varied in the world; but to them, even that had become as tasteless and boring as a glass of water.

Now, since they were the sort who'd worry more about satisfying their stomachs than about a gravely ill parent, it goes without saying that their anxiety and ill-humor had reached quite a pitch. They scoured all the eateries of Tokyo, hoping to impress their fellow members by discovering some wondrous new flavor. They were like curio collectors rummaging about in dubious secondhand shops on the off chance of making an unusual find. One of them tried some bean-jam cakes at a night stall somewhere on the Ginza and, proclaiming them the most delicious item to be found in present-day Tokyo, displayed his discovery to the other members with the greatest pride. Another bragged that a vendor who came every night around midnight to the geisha-house area in Karasumori sold the best Chinese dumplings in the world. But when the rest of the group, led on by such reports, actually tried these plebeian delights, they found that the discoverer's taste buds had usually been the victim of his overheated imagination. To tell the truth, they all seemed to be getting a bit funny in the head lately, driven by their gluttony. Someone who laughed at another's discovery would himself get terrifically excited about some slightly unusual flavor he'd come across, regardless of whether it was good or bad.

"No matter what we eat, it's all the same--no improvement. It looks like we'll have to find ourselves a really first-class chef and create some completely new dishes."

"Find a chef of genius, or else offer prize money to anyone who can think up a really amazing dish."

"But we're not going to give prizes for bean-jam cakes or Chinese dumplings, no matter how good they might be. We need something rich and striking, suited to a big banquet."

"In other words, we need a kind of orchestral cuisine!"

This is the sort of conversation they held. I trust by now the reader will have formed a good idea of just what kind of group this Gourmet Club was, and what kind of situation the members found themselves in. I felt a preface of sorts was necessary before telling the story that follows.

Count G. was the most moneyed and idlest member of the club; he was also the youngest, possessed of a sharp wit, a wild imagination, and the sturdiest stomach of all. Since there were only five members in all, there was no need for a formal president, but the club's usual meeting place was on the upper floor of Count G.'s mansion, and since this served as their headquarters, the Count naturally became a kind of manager, occupying a position very like that of president. It goes without saying, then, that when it came to hunting down some rare delicacy and feasting on it, he took twice as many pains, devoted twice as much nervous energy to the task as any of the other members. And they, of course, all placed their highest hopes of such discoveries on the Count, always the most creative of the group. If anyone was to win the prize money, surely it would be he. And if it meant his introducing them to some splendid new culinary achievement, and awakening their jaded taste buds to some blissful new experience, something subtle and profound, they would be only too happy to pay it. This, in their heart of hearts, was what they all ultimately wanted.

"A symphony of foods! An orchestral cuisine!"

These words kept coming to the Count's mind. Food whose flavors would make the flesh melt and raise the soul to heaven. Food like music that, once heard, would make men dance madly, dance themselves to death. Food one just had to eat, and the more one ate, the more the unbearably delicious flavors would entwine themselves around the tongue until at last one's stomach burst open. If only he could create such food, thought the Count, he would become a great artist. And even if he couldn't, all sorts of wild fantasies of food floated up and disappeared endlessly within the mind of this highly imaginative individual. Asleep or awake, he saw only dreams of food....

Out of the darkness, he saw puffs of white steam rise temptingly. Something smelled awfully good. A smell like lightly scorched mochi . A smell like roasting duck. The smell of pork fat. The smell of leeks and garlic and onions. A smell like beef hotpot. Smells strong and fragrant and sweet, all mixed together, rising from the midst of the steam. Looking steadily into the darkness, he could see five or six objects hovering in the steam-filled air. One was a soft white block of something--pork fat? devil's-tongue?--that trembled in the air. With every movement a thick, honey-like liquid dripped, dripped, dripped onto the ground. Where it fell, it formed a brown-colored little mound with a syrupy sheen....

To the left was the finest, largest shellfish--perhaps a kind of clam--that the Count had ever seen. The upper half shell kept opening and closing. Then, as it opened fully, he could see a strange mollusc, neither clam nor oyster, alive and wriggling inside. It was black and hard-looking toward the top, while the bottom was slimy white, phlegm-like. As he watched, odd-looking wrinkles began to appear on the surface of that viscous white substance. At first they were like the wrinkles on a dried plum; then gradually they got deeper, until finally the entire mollusc became hard, like a piece of paper that has been chewed on and spat out. Then from both sides of the thing small bubbles, like the ones that crabs emit, began to boil up; and soon the whole shellfish was covered with bubbles, welling up like cotton-balls erupting from their pods, and the mollusc itself vanished from sight.... Ah yes, it's being boiled , thought Count G. to himself. Just then there came to his nostrils a whiff of clam hotpot, or rather, something many times more delicious. One by one the bubbles began to burst and form a liquid that looked like melted soap. The liquid ran along the shell's edges and dripped onto the ground, giving off warm steam. In the shell itself, alongside the by now solidified mollusc, to left and right there suddenly appeared two round objects, like mochi cakes offered on an altar. They looked much softer than mochi , though, and quivered slightly, like fine-grained tofu submerged in water.... Those must be the adductors , the Count reflected. Then the objects gradually turned a brownish color and small cracks began to appear here and there on their surfaces.

Finally the various foods that were collected there began all at once to roll about. The ground on which they rested suddenly thrust itself up from below--it had gone unnoticed up to now because of its size, but what had seemed to be the ground was in fact a giant tongue, and all those foods were jumbled together in an immense mouth. Soon upper and lower rows of teeth began slowly to converge, like mountain ranges pushing up from the depths of the earth and downward from the sky. They started to crush the foods that rested on the tongue, and the mashed foods turned into a fluid like puss from an abscess, a kind of sludge upon the tongue's surface. The tongue licked the four walls of the oral cavity with relish, undulating like a stingray. From time to time, with a great spasm it would thrust the liquid mass down toward the throat. Still, there were small shreds of food that had been crushed into the spaces between the teeth or to the bottom of deep cracks that had eaten into their surfaces. These shreds were layered one on top of another, tangled and stuck together. Then a giant toothpick appeared and, having dug out the shreds of food one by one, deposited them on the tongue. The food that had just been swallowed came rushing back into the mouth in the form of a great belch. The tongue once again became slimy with fluid. Again and again the food was swallowed down, only to be brought back up with the inevitable belch....

The Count awoke to the sound of burps erupting deep in his gullet: clearly, he'd had too much of that abalone soup at the Chinese restaurant this evening.

It happened one evening after some ten nights of dreams like the one just described. After yet another dull club dinner, the members were having a smoke, looks of boredom on their faces. Leaving them behind, the Count slipped out for a stroll. His aim, however, was not to help his digestion. No--he regarded the dreams he'd been having lately as a sort of oracle and was sure he was on the verge of making a breakthrough of some kind. He felt a premonition that it might happen this very night, in fact.

Excerpted from The Gourmet Club by JUN'ICHIRO TANIZAKI. Copyright © 1955 by Emiko Kanze.
Translation copyright © 2001 Kodansha International. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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The Gourmet Club

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