First and last for In the Miso Soup

I think I'll have to think about this book for a few days before I can decide what I think of it (or even if I liked it-which usually means I did but it's complicated. This book is like meeting a married man in a hotel room. Who might follow you home and tape human skin to your door.)

First, here is the section that gives the book it's title and is my favorite part:

"There's just one thing I was hoping we could do that we never got around to. I wanted to have some miso soup with you, bit it's too late now. We won't be meeting again."

"Miso soup?"

"Yeah. I'm really interested in miso soup. I ordered it at a little sushi bar in Colorado once long ago, and I thought it was a darned peculiar kind of soup, the smell it had and everything, so I didn't eat it, but it intrigued me. It had that funny brown color and smelled kind of like human sweat, but it also looked delicate and refined somehow. I came to this country hoping to find out what the people who eat that soup on a daily basis might be like. So I'm a little disappointed we didn't get to have some together."

I asked him if he was going back to America right away. No, not right away, he said, so I suggested we could still have miso soup together sometime.....

"I don't need to eat the stuff now because now I'm here-right in the middle of it! The soup I ordered in Colorado had all these little slices of vegetables and things, which at the time just looked like kitchen scrapings to me. But now I'm in the miso soup myself, just like those bits of vegetable. I'm floating around in this giant bowl of it, and that's good enough for me."

I'd never say this to anyone who had never had miso but that's actually an excellent, indeed elegant, description. Smelling sort of like sweat but delicate.

Anyways, first and last.

First line:

My name is Kenji.

Last line:

"The feather of a swan," I said.