Someone is always in the kitchen. The person who gets up before the family sits down at the table, who heats the soup and dishes out the side plates, and only takes a seat herself when everything is laid out. There is something strange about watching someone like that. When, I find myself wondering, was she hungry? While she was serving, what turned cold was not the food but her own hunger—that is what I keep thinking.
When I first read about Midori, that kitchen came to mind. She is always serving something. She brings homemade lunches, sets a Kansai-style spread on the table, pushes cucumber into her dying father’s mouth. Someone who has rarely been given keeps giving without end. And for her own portion she demands—says she wants—a strawberry shortcake she will not actually eat. She wants someone who won’t get angry even if you throw it out the window: buy it when she says she wants it, then not take offense when she says never mind, just throw it out. At first it sounds like cheerful pouting. But it keeps coming back. Why food of all things, and why love that can be thrown away?
Freud
Freud would have looked at Midori’s mouth. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he wrote that the most ancient form of love is the mouth. Suckling is nutrition and pleasure at once; at that stage, love and eating have not yet separated. And somewhere he adds a strange observation: that every person, regardless of the actual circumstances, carries some form of dissatisfaction about not having been suckled enough—and that this original hunger is essentially unsatisfiable. The pain of losing the breast, he wrote, is something no one ever fully overcomes. The child translates this insufficiency into one thing: there was not enough love.
Midori carries that mouth in an adult body. She speaks of love in the language of feeding. She brings lunches, sets tables, pushes food into her father’s mouth at his sickbed. Someone who was rarely given keeps giving without end. And for her own portion she asks for a cake she will not eat. Freud would have said the cake is ultimately the breast. Just as lovers at the height of intimacy say “I could eat you up,” what Midori wants from Watanabe is close to consuming him and taking him inside herself. She knows it cannot be filled, yet the mouth will not close. Wanting someone who won’t be angry when you throw the cake away is, in the end, wanting a breast that won’t disappear even if thrown away. Never having been loved quite that way, she can only imagine love in that impossible size.
Jung
Jung would have looked somewhere different. When Midori tosses out remarks about death and sex as if they were nothing, she takes what most people rush to cover and brings it out into the open. What sorts of lewd images she entertains, what thoughts crossed her mind before her father died—she says these things as if they were unremarkable. Jung called such dark material the shadow: the place where animal instincts gather, along with everything inferior and shameful. Deny it, he wrote, and a person becomes flat and loses substance. How could anything have weight without casting a shadow? Saying yes to the shadow is what moves a person not toward perfection but toward wholeness.
At this point Midori reads like a mirror held up to Naoko. Naoko cannot bring herself to embrace the dark things inside her; what is suppressed festers within until she collapses. Midori brings the same darkness out and lives it. That is why Midori has a three-dimensional weight that Naoko lacks. But Jung extends a blade alongside this. He distinguishes between bringing one’s darkness out and genuinely confronting it face to face. Displaying one’s shadow, or indulging in melancholy and guilt, is enormously tempting, he wrote—but it is another form of self-deception that conceals the real encounter. True integration demands immense moral effort. So which side is Midori’s relentless candor? Has she embraced her shadow, or is she displaying it to conceal something deeper still? I cannot decide, even by the last page. Probably both. The way Midori’s vitality is genuine and simultaneously a wall.
Buddhism
Moving to the Eastern side, the same longing takes a different face. Buddhism calls it 渴愛 (tanha—craving or thirst). In a passage from the 雜阿含經 (Saṃyukta-āgama, the Connected Discourses, one of the early Buddhist canonical collections), the Buddha describes craving as something that becomes a net, and glue, and a wellspring, and a lotus root. Once caught, it does not release; gripped in the hand, it clings stickily; filled, it springs up again. Another sutra adds: wherever craving arrives, it clings to what it finds. Where Freud speaks to where Midori’s hunger came from, Buddhism speaks to the fact itself—that this hunger simply does not close. Whether the cake is bought or Watanabe stays at her side, Midori’s longing does not end in satisfaction. Fill it, and the next longing rises immediately. The terror of craving is not that the object is insufficient but that no matter how fully the object is supplied, craving itself does not diminish. Midori is pitiable not because she received too little love but because even if she received it, that mouth would not close.
Yi Je-ma
Coming this far, as a practitioner of Korean medicine I think of Yi Je-ma. His 四象心學 (Sasang Simhak—the psycho-ethical dimension of four-constitution medicine) reads human nature in four registers; Midori’s unguardedness, her candor, her outward-reaching vitality all resemble the grain of the 少陽人 (soyang-in—the Lesser Yang constitution). Yi Je-ma assigns to the Soyang type the capacity of 度量 (doryang—measured discernment: the power to assess what one has seen and felt without inflation, and convey it to another as it actually is). When this 度量 slips, it becomes 過心 (gwasim—overblown perception: reporting what one has seen larger than it actually was). A commentator on Yi Je-ma likens this to the habit of describing a fairly large sparrow as eagle-sized—saying something bigger than it is in order to make oneself appear more than one is.
Lay Midori’s famous request over this. The simple desire to be loved she inflates to eagle-size: someone who won’t be angry even if you throw it out the window. She cannot ask for ordinary affection in ordinary terms; she enlarges it to an impossible shape and presents it. Her frank discourse on sexuality can be read the same way—“look at me” spoken in the size of a provocation. Though I do not want to close Midori with 過心 alone. Yi Je-ma saw another capacity in the Soyang type: 才幹 (jaegan—practical capability, the power to actually accomplish things by moving through the world). Midori has not lost that 才幹. She does not stay down. Even while speaking in overblown terms, she keeps laying tables, keeps vigil at the sickbed, keeps moving through life. The exaggeration is only the shadow of that vitality; it does not erase the vitality itself.
But — Did All of This Happen Only Inside Her?
Yet put these four books down and one thing keeps catching. Did all of this happen only inside Midori? If the unsatisfiable mouth, the displayed shadow, the unclosing craving, the inflating habit—if all of it is read only as the interior situation of one person named Midori, she ends up as a woman with a defective hunger and a tendency to exaggerate. But when you think about the position in which Midori came to have that mouth, that conclusion feels somehow unjust.
Yi Je-ma wrote that the position in which a person is placed commands that person’s capacity. The position in which Midori was placed was a classroom where she concealed poverty while drifting among affluent children—and the position of a young daughter who watched first her mother, then her father, through a sickbed and out of the world. Before anyone could teach her how to receive, the position had already assigned her the role of the one who serves. Open the 格致藁 (Gyeokchigo—Yi Je-ma’s collected philosophical writings) and he says something more pointed still: 我有識見人必歸我我必行欺, “When I have insight and perception, people will inevitably come to me—and from that position I will inevitably move toward exploitation.” The word inevitably appears twice in that sentence. This is not because the person is bad; it is because the position compels this behavior. The role assigned to Midori was that of the one who serves, and the one who serves goes unfed without receiving. Midori’s hunger was not something she made; it was something the position hardened into her.
That is why Yi Je-ma did not see a person’s crookedness as an innate seed. Just as the same water is a clear spring in the mountains, a river beside the riverbank, and seawater in the sea, it is only a matter of where and how a person has hardened in a given place. Midori’s hunger is not a flaw inherent to her as a person but the shape water takes when it hardens in that position. To read Midori as a woman full of defects is therefore to assign to one person alone the blame for a hardening that the position compelled.
So what is Midori’s vitality? Yi Je-ma has a word: 反誠 (banseong). It is commonly read as “returning to goodness,” but the current he intended runs differently. It is the movement of surfacing in a different form just before flowing into the hardened channel—closer to evaporating before sinking. And it is not a completion one reaches once and is done with. He confessed that even at fifty-seven he had not yet shed his deceiving mind, writing that he lost every time and returned every time. There is no destination. Only the inclination to surface at every moment—that is all there is.
That is where I place Midori’s brightness. It is not the smile of someone whose wounds have healed and who has come to peace. It is the movement that, at the very moment grief is hardening and about to sink, surfaces each time in a different form. Midori’s vitality, therefore, is not completion but process. Where Naoko sinks at last into the darkness inside herself, Midori does not sink—not because she has reached salvation but because at each moment of sinking she is in the act of surfacing once more. It is never finished with one surfacing, and so tomorrow she must surface again. That endless surfacing is what Midori’s vitality actually is.
Back to the Kitchen
The kitchen comes back to me. The person who lays out someone else’s table and is the last to take a seat. I no longer think of her only as someone who is hungry. A person who gets up every day and lights the burner even while starving; a person who, at the very place where she would sink, keeps choosing to surface one more time. Midori is still standing in that kitchen. With her own cold, unfed hunger held inside her, she is laying someone else’s table again today.
