Office lunches—those momentary escapes from work that can vary from 15 minutes to an hour—sound like a welcome break from the relentless rhythm of corporate life. But in almost every enduring pop culture moment, this instance of professional bonding has been used to convey bad planning, forced/organised celebrations, incompetence, routine, the little carrots and sticks. You may recall the melon parties, egg bars, and Irving-shaped watermelons of Severance or Michael Scott in The Office coughing over the cocoa powder of his tiramisu, running for the office pretzels or downing his trauma in mayonnaise and olives.
Food, a glue for community in most contexts, somehow becomes a source of friction or frustration when taken to the context of a workplace. Are you really interested in singing ‘Happy Birthday’ at the cake-cutting for a kind-of-colleague with whom your deepest interaction has been a forced smile over the soap dispenser in the office restroom? Is judging the bringer of leftovers a new form of trauma bonding? Does the prospect of forced socialising and small talk in the office canteen bring on existential dread? The office lunch break is not easy. After all, where else do our differences manifest more clearly than in what we pack in our dabbas?
And Nitani, Junko Takase’s protagonist from May You Have Delicious Meals, gets you.
The rules of politeness for eating homemade treats: you must talk loudly while eating. You must continually perform gratitude. You must say, ‘This is so good,’ when you take your first bite; when you’ve eaten half, ask about something you have no interest in, for example, ‘Wow, how do you make a sauce like this?’; once you’ve finished you must declare in a particularly satisfied-sounding voice, ‘Gosh, that was good! Thank you!’ All that effort just because you were given a slice of cake.
In this excerpt, Nitani is reacting to the cake that his colleague Ashikawa has brought to work. His complicated reaction to eating cake stems partly from his somewhat romantic/physical relationship with Ashikawa, his lack of professional respect for her, as well as his own take on the function food is supposed to serve.
May You Have Delicious Meals, which won the Akutagawa Prize in 2022 (previous winners include Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata and The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada), is set largely in a company making labels for food and beverage products. While the company is headquartered in Tokyo, the book deals with the lives of the employees in its Saitama branch. Oshio, who’s been here five years, is frustrated at the concessions that her colleagues keep making for Ashikawa, whom she sees as weak-willed, inefficient, and annoying. She wants to enlist Nitani’s help in bullying Ashikawa. Nitani, while understanding of Oshio’s reasoning, is reluctant to act on it. The fact that he embarks on a relationship with Ashikawa also plays a role in his ambivalence.
Through it all, “delicious meals” become the chorus against which everything plays out. Cucumber and whitebait marinated in vinegar, soy sauce and mirin, okonomiyaki, chicken naban and miso soup, sometimes just a pot of instant noodles in the middle of the night…
Books with food as the plot-driver have a tool that can be wielded in so many ways. For comfort, camaraderie, warmth, healing. For murder, jealousy, manipulation, coaxing, exploiting. (You may recall 2024’s Butter by Asako Yuzuki.)
In Takase’s workplace novel that’s also a novel of manners, everything from ambition, jealousy, competition, seduction, appeasement, power to disgust is expressed though the characters’ relationship with food. How does one react to a colleague who doesn’t recognise boundaries? What do you do when you’re not into the team dinner that your boss is arranging? Is there a right thing to order when you’re going out with a colleague? How do you express gratitude when a colleague keeps bringing in homemade treats for the whole office?
The motives of each person are understood through their own relationship with food. For Ashikawa, a meal is supposed to nourish and nurture—and, maybe, bribe. She takes a nappe class in order to perfect the cream on the cake she gets to work. Nitani says things like “I hate the idea of arranging my life around eating food.” He’s the sort of person who won’t cook his own noodles for an extra two minutes out of plain spite. When Oshio meets Nitani to conspire against Ashikawa, she tempers her own interest in food, deliberately choosing to not mention the recent tour of Shinshu-style soba restaurants she had recently gone on.
In May You Have Delicious Meals, through the cookies, lemon-flavoured madeleines, truffles, apple muffins, yogurt cheesecakes, raspberry jellies, and doughnuts that Ashikawa keeps bringing to work, Nitani’s cynicism is a dark undercurrent. You won’t agree with his logic every time, but quite often you get it. And you’ll never look at a peach tart the same way again.
May You Have Delicious Meals, translated from Japanese by Morgan Giles, is published by Hutchinson Heinemann; ₹607
