Born and raised in Tokyo, Katherine Tamiko Arguile is a Japanese-British-Australian arts journalist and author of debut novel, The Things She Owned. She migrated from London to Adelaide in 2008, where she now lives beside the sea. A graduate of Cambridge University, she has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide.
Besides working as an author, she writes performance and visual arts reviews and co-owns and runs a coffee shop with her partner. She enjoys printmaking and other meditative pursuits whenever she can. Her award-winning short stories have been published in anthologies in the UK and in Australia.
1. Why do you write/tell stories?
My compulsion to write began so long ago it’s hard to work out where the urge comes from. Maybe it’s a need to connect with people in ways I’ve rarely felt able to do in person. Maybe it’s an obsession with sharing what I notice about how it feels to be alive in this world, whether through fiction or nonfiction, to see if anyone else feels the same way. I devoured books as a child. I liked the way reading made me feel; it opened doors in my imagination to new worlds I could experience through others’ eyes, and it made me want to create portals of my own. My mother was a great storyteller, a committed reader, and could have been a writer. Maybe I inherited the writing gene from her.
2. Describe Meshi in one (or two) sentence(s).
Hybrid, like me, Meshi is a memoir/biography/collection of essays about Japanese culture and food/recipe-collection/linocut-artbook. It’s drawn from my experience as a Japanese-British child born and raised in Shōwa era Tokyo to a traditional, food-obsessed Japanese family that’s been selling a savoury artisanal delicacy called tsukudani for six generations.
3. Your childhood is evoked in this book in lush, fragrant, saturated detail. What was it like travelling into those memories in order to reconnect with a time and place you no longer live in?
I was eleven when I was sent to a boarding school in northern England and my parents simultaneously moved to Hong Kong. The rupture from my language, Japanese family, friends, home, native city, culture and food was cataclysmic. At that age it was too overwhelming to deal with; to survive thirteen-week terms as a mixed-race kid in an all-white 1970s boarding school I had to shut off my feelings about what I’d lost and deny the Japanese half of myself. I didn’t realise just how much I’d kept buried until I started writing Meshi. Digging it all up and returning home in my mind to the lost city of my childhood, to be with people I love who are long gone from this world, was in turns painful and rapturous. I was sometimes so immersed in the sights, smells and sounds of the old places in my memories that when I stopped writing and looked up from my keyboard, I’d feel momentarily disoriented to find myself back in 21st century Australia.
4. The seventy-two micro-seasons of Japan are complexly woven into the food, poetry, and culture/festivals of Japan. Do you have a favourite season? And why?
Oh, this is hard! If forced to choose, I’d go for the eighteen micro-seasons of summer. They bring the evocative cries of semi (cicadas), the tinkling of fūrin wind chimes, the songs, dances, feasting and family gatherings of O-bon, when the spirits of the ancestors return to the living realms to visit loved ones. Summer means hanabi (‘fire-flowers’) firework displays that go on for so long they come with intervals. I loved watching them light up the night with family and friends from a Tokyo roof terrace, lounging in a cool yukata cotton robe, talking, laughing, drinking and eating. There’s kakigōri shaved ice (a world away from a slushie) piled impossibly high in a glass bowl, drizzled with emerald-green matcha syrup and topped with a scoop each of sweet azuki bean paste and vanilla ice cream; there’s the smoky aroma of tender yakitori chicken skewers, or freshly-harvested corn-on-the cob slathered in a sweet-salty shoyu glaze sizzling over charcoal at a street stall at night, aglow with lanterns; there’s delicate, iced sōmen noodles slurped from cups of savoury dipping sauce made perky with chopped spring onion and freshly grated ginger. Of course, there’s that childhood memory of belly-fluttering joy at the prospect of never-ending school summer holidays, too.
5. What is the recipe in the book that most conjures memories of your mother?
Yosenabe, a Japanese-style hot pot eaten during the cold seasons, is cooked at the table on a portable gas cooker in a donabe earthenware pot full of hot dashi stock. Each family and region has its own version of ingredients and dipping sauces. My mother’s version included paper-thin slices of pork loin, fresh shītake and enoki mushrooms, chrysanthemum leaves, cubes of firm tofu, shirataki konjac noodles, thick slices of leek and Chinese cabbage which she’d arrange uncooked on large dishes on the table. We’d dunk whatever we wanted as our next mouthful into the simmering dashi stock, and when it was cooked to our liking we’d dip it in a choice of a earthy sesame-shoyu, or zingy yuzu-shoyu sauce with finely grated daikon (mooli) and devour it with freshly steamed rice and pickles.
In one of the last dreams I had of my mother after she died, the two of us sat in a room above a Tokyo railway station on a rainy night, eating yosenabe in happy silence from her donabe, which I inherited and still own in waking life. The dream of sharing yosenabe with her was such comfort at a time of terrible grief.
6. I loved the way you incorporated all of your lineages (Japanese/English/Australian) into the weaving of this personal history. Did you learn anything new about your family, or yourself, in putting this story to the page?
I experienced deep gratitude for the millions of ancestors that came before me who survived war, famine, disease, earthquakes and other natural disasters so I’d be able to experience being alive in this world. It seems miraculous that I should exist when my father was born in England and my mother on the other side of the world, at a time when their respective nations were at war with one another. Putting Meshi to the page gave me a more objective perspective that made me see how lucky I am to have had such remarkable people in my life, like my English and Japanese grandmothers, my mother and my Japanese uncles, even if they’re all gone from this world.
7. Tell us about the beautiful linocuts in the book.
I made a set of linocut prints to introduce each of the 24 sekki seasons that form the chapters of this book; a roundel illustrating something I wrote about in each chapter and the kanji for the sekki title that sits above it. After the emotional rollercoaster of writing Meshi, the act of carving out the lino panels and printing them felt meditative and therapeutic. I’m planning a limited print run of each, in case anyone would like them framed for their walls.
8. When and where do you write?
I occasionally enjoy writing in coffee shops, but I’m a homebody and I love to write in my study with a cup of coffee at my spiffy new sit stand desk and comfy chair, with Millie the cat curled up beside me. I write almost every day, although at the moment it’s mostly art reviews and other arts-related writing commissions. I can’t wait to get stuck into my next manuscript, a novel this time, and I’m enjoying carving out a new short story for Liminal Magazine, though it’s taking me longer than I’d hoped, given I now work at the university, my coffee shop Booknook & Bean, and for InReview. I’ll often find myself still writing at three in the morning.
9. What are three things that sustain you as an author, or while you’re writing?
Meditative activities, a regular writing routine, and what I call replenishing the creative well – any activity that snaps me out of the day-to-day, making space for new ideas to flourish, or for solutions to a tricky spot in a manuscript. It could be a solitary beach walk, a few hours in an art gallery, tending to my garden, printmaking, baking, or even taking a long bath. And reading, always. I know that’s four things, but since reading is a given for any author I hope you’ll let me off.
10. Name three books that you couldn’t live without.
I’m going to cheat and count all seventeen volumes of Chibi Marukochan, a ground-breaking manga series by the late Sakura Momoko, as one. The stories are autobiographical, and Sakura’s alter ego, a nine-year-old girl called Chibi Marukochan, grew up in Showa era Japan at the same time as me. In turn laugh-out loud funny, tender, nostalgic and sometimes heartbreaking, Sakura Momoko was the first to intersperse her manga strips with wry, observational essays. My mother wrote out hiragana phonetics beside the more complex kanji characters in every single volume so I could read them easily, and I remember her snorting with laughter from time to time as she worked her way through them. Reading them again always reconnects me with her.
David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens. I first read this for my English O-level and many times more since. Each reading as the years went by gave me new perspectives on Dickens’ sometimes sentimental, but nevertheless addictive epic and social commentary on life in Victorian England. As in Chibi Marukochan, there are moments that make me laugh out loud, others that make me cry, and I return to the book and its larger-than-life characters for comfort whenever life feels uncertain and strange because (plot spoiler) it all comes good in the end. I love Aunt Betsy with all my heart.
George Saunders’ brilliant A Swim In the Pond In the Rain, a gift to writers. It inspires me, keeps me on my toes, and reminds me why I love to write. I think I love George Saunders with all my heart, too.
bonus question:
what books are currently on your to be read pile?
The latest issue of Granta, What Do You See?
Rattled, by Ellis Gunn
If You’re Happy, a short story collection by Fiona Robertson
The Web of Meaning, by Jeremy Lent
The Science of Storytelling, by Will Storr