Strawberry comments that Japanese chashu ramen tastes like a pig sty, and immediately I understand what he means: there’s something delectable, but undeniably disgusting, about the braised, slimy pork belly suspended alongside billows of flavored oil and shoestring noodles, in a slow-boiled broth that is fatty, sticky, and as richly gold as saturated urine.
I am nonetheless glad he makes the pig sty comment after we’ve finished our meal and are sitting lazily on the restaurant floor cushions. While he serves us both lukewarm water from a textured plastic jug on the low tabletop, my mind goes to a farmstead swathed in amber ears of corn, the porcine mewling coming from the muted red barn in the corner of “American Gothic.” I think about the scatological, the vulgar embedded in human lifestyle: underarm sweat trapped underneath my nylon rain jacket, pig lard emulsified in soup.
Outside, the first typhoon of the season announces its approach. We walk to the station in a rain like dust falling. I think of how cinematic this time of year can be: the leaves like August’s sarcophagus, the sudden darkness collapsing upon afternoons at five o’clock, a final, blazing amen from the fall. If I were a girl in a movie, this is where I’d rely on film-making’s deftness to produce feeling: the arrangement of a piano-heavy score, each note like velvet, coinciding with our steps against the pavement, the panning over the fragrant, lushly orange landscape. Cutting a take the way a gardener might labor over a delicately manicured hothouse flower.
Even when I find that the beauty created by the fine articulations of directorial input feels a touch too manufactured, I still am in love with it. Hopelessly, indulgently, and totally. For better or worse, I am a devoted patron of the manufacture of emotion. It’s the affectation encased in the part of me that wishes the replay of my first kiss came with artfully curated music, a shot of my face shrouded in airbrushed moonlight. Maybe the violins emerging in crescendo.
But kisses are, in fact, much more delectable, and infinitely more disgusting. The tongue trembling in your mouth. Sweat, glossy and acrid, building above the Cupid’s bow. The fleshiness of lips, slightly sweet and tender, like horse meat. Absolutely obscene. And that’s not even getting into the amount of saliva involved. But, truthfully, there may be nothing better than kissing in the mortal realm.
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