The Power of Food: Read Our Review of Meshi by Katherine Tamiko Arguile

For Katherine Tamiko Arguile, the Japanese food her mother cooked was a portal to a part of her that sometimes felt lost in the past. In Japan, food is never just food: it expresses a complex and fascinating history and is tied to tradition and spirituality intrinsic to Japanese culture.

Exploring the meals of her childhood through Japan’s twenty-four sekki (seasons), Katherine untangles the threads of meaning, memory and ritual woven through every glistening bowl of rice, every tender slice of sashimi and each steaming cup of green tea.

With rich, visceral prose, vivid insight and searing emotional honesty, Meshi (‘rice’ or ‘meal’) reveals the culture and spirit of one of the world’s most beloved cuisines.

Katherine Tamiko Arguile’s debut was The Things She Owned, a beautiful novel about grief, resilience and the legacy of what we leave behind, unfolding over two generations in Tokyo, London and the Japanese island of Okinawa. I have a long history with Japan, and this was one of my favourite reads of 2020, so I was thrilled to hear Tamiko Arguile was releasing a new book. This time, the Tokyo born, Adelaide based writer returns to her roots with her memoir Meshi: A personal history of Japanese food.

Meshi is a beautifully presented hardcover, with high-quality paper and a gorgeous design. It’s an excellent gift for anyone who loves food, Japan or travel literature, as it’s a wonderful combination of all three of these. But it’s also so much more.

The memoir is broken into twenty-four chapters based on Japan’s complex seasonal calendar. Tamiko Arguile writes, “I’ve never come across a seasonality – culinary or otherwise – that’s as deeply embedded in the national culture and psyche as it is in Japan.” In Japanese, there are hundreds of words for different weather patterns, and cultural traditions and food are tightly woven into this seasonal fabric. Plotting this story through the seasons of a year works beautifully. It is exquisitely written, with all the delicacy and space that makes Japan so unique.

Tamiko Arguile shares much of herself and her family in Meshi. For her, the ceremonial act of preparing and eating the Japanese food that her late mother cooked is a portal to a part of her that sometimes feels lost. Through food, she remains connected to her heritage and the home she left decades earlier.

It’s impossible to read Meshi and not crave Japanese food – not just to eat, but to savour and experience it as Tamiko Arguile does in this book.

Meshi is delicious. It’s interesting. It’s beautifully written. I read so many books for work, passing them on to others after I finish. I’m keeping this one to read, and read again.

Buy a copy of Meshi now.