Hideo Furukawa - Slow Boat

It was a hit.

Idiots. Tokyo thought my Trojan Horse was avant-garde?

Die, Tokyo, die.

So—did my escape plan work?

Well, Kate hit a bit of a speed bump in June. A slipped disc sidelined my chef (the beef-bowl ex-con). “Ca–can’t move…” his pained voice hissed through my cell phone. “I’m in the hospital.”

“What? Are you OK?”

“Shit no—that’s why I’m in the hospital.”

“Seriously? What do we do?”

“Man up.”

“Huh? You mean like ritual suicide?”

“Yeah, right. Look—Kate has to stay open, with or without me. The doctor has no idea what’s wrong. All he does is giggle like a fucking idiot. I can’t make any promises about coming back to work. Hate to wuss out like this, but I think I have to hang up my apron.”

“CHEF!”

My brain was a total blank.

“Man up, man!”

“Suicide isn’t the answer…”

“Knock it off.”

Chef was hors de combat, but he was going to make sure Kate stayed open for business. He told me he’d already lined up a replacement, someone he trusted. Nothing for me to do but wait for said help to arrive.

Then help arrived.

It was a few hours later. No introductions, no questions. No “Hello”, no “Nice to meet you”. She just made a beeline for the kitchen—like she was ready to clock in.

I mean, she didn’t look anything like the help I had in mind. My first thought was: Strange. Kate doesn’t get that many high-school girls in uniforms—and they almost never come alone. My second thought was: Isn’t it a little hot for a blazer?

That was all I was thinking.

I mean, I thought she was a misguided customer.

“That’s the kitchen! You can’t—” I start to say.

But the schoolgirl just stares me down. Doesn’t say anything.

“You… you can’t be back here.”

I tried to sound like I was in charge, but—on the inside—all I was thinking was: Hey, she’s pretty cute. Piercing eyes. Nice full body.

I guess I was checking her out.

She looks right at me and says sharply:

“Of course I can.”

She whips her cell phone out of her skirt pocket and puts it down on the counter like she means business. There’s a Snoopy figure dangling from the strap. Then, right in front of me, she starts unbuttoning her blazer. Pop, pop, pop . Wh–what is she doing!? She’s not gonna show me her boobs or anything!? No. This was no striptease. Not even close.

She opens her blazer to reveal four streaks of metal in the lining—two on each side. Knives.

“My brother says I’m running this kitchen—starting tonight.”

“Say what?”

“Don’t worry,” she says with a smile.

Holy shit, she’s cute.

“Just leave everything to me.”

Then she heads over to the vegetable stash, grabs a long white daikon and gets to work—reducing it to ultra-thin slices at superhuman speed. Sssh-sssh-sssh . Then, ch-ch-ch-ch-chop . She fills a bowl with water to soak the diaphanous strands.

I’m speechless.

What skill. No movement is wasted.

A sight to behold.

Then, with a cool look that says this is nothing , she turns to me and says:

“You look like you’ve never seen a teenage knife girl before…”

Another smile.

I was in love.

With my chef’s little sister. She moved into her brother’s apartment in Koenji that day. Her folks lived in Hatchobori—a neighbourhood for low-level officials… in, like, the Edo period? Everything happened so fast. Mere hours after my chef’s untimely injury, she was by his side at the hospital. (She had to be initiated into the mysteries of her brother’s menu before making her appearance at Kate.) Living in Koenji made it easy for her to go see him—to drop off fresh clothes, pick up dirty laundry, or ask for help with his more esoteric dishes. Chef’s back problems turned out to be pretty serious—just like he predicted. He was discharged after about two weeks, but he was basically an invalid. Whenever his sister wasn’t at school or on the job, she did the work of a live-in nurse.

What a sister.

All they had was each other.

“No, my dad’s alive,” she says one night. She’d just finished making dinner for the staff.

“He is?” I ask, taking my first bite.

My taste buds go wild for her Kyoto-style sablefish. The others love it, too. The Hindu inhales his helping; the Taoist is literally tearing up; the Romanian Christian cuts his fish neatly, then puts it away with the silence of the Black Sea.

“Yeah, he’s alive but… Hmph!”

What? What is that? Hmph?

Did something bad happen? Sounds like it.

Am I supposed to ask? Probably not. Let it go… She’s a knife-wielding teenager.

But I feel the temptation.

I clear my throat. Then ask—softly:

“Is it… complicated?”

“Nope.”

Right back to work. Sharpening her trusty sashimi knife while humming the theme song from Sazae-san .

Of course, her presence in Kate wasn’t sanctioned by the Governor of Tokyo. She was “unlicensed”. Yeah. Nice ring to it.

Kate had to work around her schedule. We called last order early, so her morning commute to school in Kita ward wouldn’t be a strain for her. Our lunch menu was limited to dishes that could be served cold or heated up in the microwave. But that didn’t mean we lowered our standards. Not with her. She kept her eye on the ball. And she really knew her stuff. Me? I was just technically in charge.

Every day, after school, she hit the kitchen. By five-thirty, everything was ready to go. Then, from six, she was a schoolgirl possessed—by the spirit of the knife.

God. What a sight.

Starting on 20th July—Ocean Day—she worked a full load. No more school. One hundred per cent Knife Girl. Did summer break actually come through for once? Under summer’s suspicious auspices, Kate had its second full-time chef.

During Obon, she tells me, “I was really happy to take my brother’s spot…” She’s wearing goggles and gripping a mini-torch in her left hand. “It got me out of Hatchobori.”

She triggers the flame and brings the surface of the crème brûlée to a crisp.

“You mean—there was something?”

I ask from the double-pump coffee machine.

“A lot of things…”

“A lot of things?”

No answer.

Well—it came days later. Under her breath: “My dad did a horrible thing…” She was standing by the mixer, fine-tuning a dessert of her own creation, a black sesame shiruko we named “Edgar Allan”. (By the way, this was not Kate’s first homage to the Master of the Macabre. We also had a chocolate cake we called “The Raven”.)

Taken aback, I say: “A horrible thing?”

“Yeah… It’s kinda hard to explain. I mean, he never hit me or anything. I just…”

“Yeah?”

She shakes her head. “Never mind…”

“No, never never mind,” says the eavesdropping Hindu.

“Asshole,” she says with a quick back fist.

“You’re the one who’s hitting people,” says the Taoist.

Then she thwacks him with the handle of her sashimi knife. Only the Romanian Christian holds his tongue. A wise decision. Well—he barely understands Japanese, so…

The Power of Kate. One big happy family. Long live the Trojan Horse!

Then summer break came to an end. Meaning my teenage chef was back to juggling school and work—not that there was any drop in the quality of her work or whatever. But, wait, there was something I wanted to say about that summer. It wasn’t cursed . It didn’t come to a grinding halt like when I was ten or eleven. It didn’t drag on forever like when I was nineteen. And that got me wondering. Was The Power of Kate working? It looked like it. I mean, I managed to escape Tokyo’s usual havoc, for once. Without even leaving the city.