Chapter 14:
Nikujaga takes time.
This is its primary virtue and also its primary requirement — you can't rush it, you can't apply more heat to make it go faster, you can't will it into completion ahead of its schedule, it just needs the time it needs and the only thing you can do is be present for it, is stand near it and monitor it and trust the process which is a phrase I find generally irritating in most of its applications but which applies accurately to nikujaga —
The onions first.
Sliced thin. Not translucent yet, just — softening, just the beginning of the process where the onion stops being a raw thing and starts becoming something that will disappear into the dish, that will give everything it has to the surrounding broth and become indistinguishable from the whole —
I add the meat.
The specific sound of meat hitting a hot pan is one of the sounds that belongs to the category of sounds that are just correct, that produce an immediate and uncomplicated sense of rightness, that don't require analysis or taxonomy, that are just — good, just the sound of something doing exactly what it's supposed to do —
The potatoes.
Carrots.
The dashi.
The mirin and soy sauce in the ratio that I've adjusted over approximately thirty attempts to the specific ratio that is mine, that isn't from a recipe anymore, that has been modified enough through iteration that it belongs to the version of this dish that gets made in this kitchen by this person on evenings that needed something patient at the end of them —
Low heat.
Time doing most of the work.
I stand near it.
Chloe eats with the specific appreciation of someone who has been depleted and is being replenished and knows it and is not going to pretend otherwise.
"This is very good," she says.
"I know," I say.
"That was almost arrogant."
"It was accurate," I say.
"Accurate and arrogant are not mutually exclusive," she says. "They coexist constantly. They're basically roommates." She takes another bite. "The potato is perfect."
"The potato is always perfect."
"See that's the arrogant one."
"It's also accurate."
She points her chopsticks at me. "You're in a weird mood."
"I'm in a normal mood."
"You're in a mood that is normal for you which is not the same as a normal mood," she says. "You're in the mood where you make very good food and make accurate statements about it and seem almost like a regular person and I'm never sure if I should encourage it or leave it alone in case it goes away."
I eat my nikujaga.
"Leave it alone," I say.
"Leaving it alone," she says. "Logged. Filed. The collection grows."
The light novel.
After the dishes — mine, then Chloe's, she hands hers over without being asked, a small domestic choreography we've developed without discussing — after the dishes and the wiping down of the stove and the specific satisfaction of a kitchen returned to its clean configuration, I take the couch.
The book is on the side table where I left it this morning.
Nekomonogatari White.
Nisio Isin writes the way certain people think — in spirals, in recursions, in the specific rhythm of a mind that can't approach anything directly, that has to circle it seventeen times before landing, that finds the oblique angle more honest than the straight line. The prose is dense in the way that rewards attention. Every sentence is doing at least two things. Some are doing four. The wordplay operates on levels that only reveal themselves on rereading, that sit quietly in the text waiting for you to come back and find them —
I find this deeply satisfying.
I don't fully examine why.
The dialogue is the best part. The way characters say one thing and mean three others simultaneously. The way the conversations are technically about nothing and actually about everything. The way deflection becomes confession if you're paying the right kind of attention —
I don't examine this either.
I read.
Araragi.
I think about Araragi while reading because Araragi is the kind of protagonist you think about while reading, who generates thinking almost involuntarily, who is constructed specifically to produce thoughts in the reader about what he is and what he's doing and why —
He fixes things.
That's his whole project. People arrive broken or damaged or with something attached to them that shouldn't be there and Araragi inserts himself into the problem and takes the damage that the problem produces and considers this a reasonable exchange. He doesn't fix himself. He fixes everyone adjacent to himself and considers the adjacency sufficient.
He's very smart about other people.
He has a specific and comprehensive blind spot about himself that he has named and catalogued and documented extensively and is still somehow inside of.
I read.
I don't draw any lines between what I'm reading and anything else.
Hanekawa.
This is her book.
I've been waiting for this book since I finished Nekomonogatari Black which is her other book, which is the foundation, which is the establishing of what she is before White gets to show what she doesn't know she is —
Hanekawa is the most competent person in the series. The most composed. The most reliably present and functional and together. She knows an extraordinary amount about an extraordinary number of things. She is the person you go to when you need to understand something.
She doesn't know herself.
Not in the way she thinks she does.
She's examined herself carefully and thoroughly and produced a self-assessment that is accurate about the surface and completely wrong about the center. The suppression is so total and so practiced that it doesn't feel like suppression anymore. It just feels like who she is. The thing she's keeping down has been kept down for so long that she's forgotten she's keeping it —
I read the passage.
The one about only knowing what you know.
About the specific shape of a blind spot that exists not because you haven't looked but because the looking itself has limits, because the instrument you use to examine yourself is the same instrument that has the damage, and a damaged instrument produces damaged measurements, and you can be the most careful observer in the world and still miss the thing that is most centrally yours to find —
My monologue goes somewhere.
I don't follow it.
I find it again three sentences later and I'm back on the surface of the prose and the prose is very good and I keep reading —
Senjougahara.
She's cool and pretty.
That's the complete thought.
Moving on.
Shinobu.
The child form specifically.
This requires more thought than Senjougahara which required none, this requires the kind of thought that arrives while reading and doesn't announce itself, that just — settles, just accumulates as I read the passages where she appears —
She's ancient. Older than almost everything in the series. She's been alive long enough that time has a different texture for her, that what looks like a childhood is just the current container, just the shape she's occupying right now after occupying many others —
And she's small.
In the child form she's small enough that people underestimate what she contains. Small enough that the power isn't visible until it is. Small enough that she can move through the world without requiring acknowledgment, without her full weight being registered, without anyone knowing what they're standing next to —
I think about that for a while.
The specific utility of being underestimated.
The specific — I don't finish the thought.
I keep reading.
The sounds begin approximately forty minutes into the reading.
First: a sigh.
Not a small sigh. A sigh calibrated for an audience. A sigh that has been produced at a volume specifically designed to reach the couch from the kitchen table, to cross the distance between homework and light novel and land with enough weight to register —
I finish the paragraph I'm on.
Second: a larger sigh.
The kind of sigh that has given up all pretense of being involuntary. The kind of sigh that is a communication, that is saying something specific, that is fluent in the language of a fourteen-year-old who needs something and has decided that the something should come to her rather than going to it —
I finish the sentence I'm on.
Third: the pencil.
Put down with the specific weight of a person who has decided the pencil needs to know how they feel about the current situation. The pencil has been informed.
I put a finger on my page.
I look at her.
She's at the kitchen table with her math homework and the expression of someone encountering an obstacle of truly unreasonable proportions, an obstacle that no reasonable person could be expected to surmount alone, an obstacle that clearly requires the assistance of a person who is currently on the couch reading a light novel about vampire apparitions —
I know the expression.
I know she knows the math.
I know she knows I know she knows the math.
She's been scoring in the top percentile of her year since she was eleven. She has never once come home and not finished her homework. She does her homework while talking about other things with the left hemisphere of her brain while the right hemisphere constructs theories about morning as a personality test —
She doesn't need my help.
She has decided she wants it.
These are different things.
"What are you stuck on," I say.
She points at the paper.
I get up. Bring my book. Fold the corner of the page which I know is bad for the spine and do it anyway because dog-earing is faster than finding something to use as a bookmark and I want to come back to the Hanekawa passage —
I look at the problem.
Quadratic. Straightforward. The kind that has two clean solutions and no tricks, that rewards the methodical approach, that will respond correctly to the standard process if the process is applied without rushing —
I solve it in my head.
I sit down next to her.
"Okay," I say. "Walk me through what you've done so far."
"I haven't done anything."
"Walk me through that."
She looks at me. "That's not helpful."
"Start with what you know," I say. "What do you know about this equation."
"It's a quadratic."
"What does that mean."
"It means it has an x squared," she says. "Which is annoying."
"It means it has two possible solutions," I say. "Which is useful. Write down the formula."
She writes it.
She writes it correctly without hesitation.
She knows the formula.
I watch her write it and say nothing about the fact that she wrote it correctly without hesitation and she watches me watching her and says nothing about me saying nothing and we continue this way through the problem, through each step, her performing the working-it-out and me performing the explaining, both of us in the specific warmth of a fiction we've agreed to maintain because the fiction is really just —
This.
Just sitting next to each other at the kitchen table.
Just the specific proximity of a person who needs to be needed and a person who needs to need someone and both of them finding a quadratic equation an acceptable pretext —
"So both solutions are valid," she says.
"Both solutions are valid," I confirm.
"That seems like a lot of solutions."
"Sometimes problems have more than one answer," I say.
She writes it down.
Looks at it.
"Okay," she says. "I think I get it."
"Good."
"You can go back to your book."
"I know," I say.
I go back to my book.
The apartment in its evening configuration.
Chloe at the table. The specific sound of her pencil when she's working properly — different from the performance pencil, less weighted, more continuous, the sound of a tool being used rather than a statement being made. Her homework getting done the way it always gets done, efficiently and in parallel with whatever is happening in her head, the two processes running simultaneously without interfering with each other —
I read.
The Hanekawa passage again.
She only knows what she knows.
The blind spot isn't ignorance. It's the specific not-knowing of a careful person. The instrument examining itself. The damage in the measurement.
I read it twice.
I turn the page.
Outside the window the evening has gone fully dark. The apartment lamp doing its amber thing. The nikujaga smell still present in the kitchen, faded now but there, the memory of the meal rather than the meal itself —
From the table: the pencil.
Working.
I read.
The lamp hums slightly.
Chloe's pencil.
The page.
I don't understand everything about myself — I only understand what I understand. That's not a limitation I can fix by trying harder. It's just the shape of the thing.
I read the line.
I turn the page.
I don't say anything.
The lamp hums.
The pencil moves.
The evening holds us.
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