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Kaga-san always came to him when he was drunk and hungry. Sometimes, drunk or hungry. But always one of the two. There was going to be a time when Kandagawa would put his foot down and tell the young man that he wasn’t his goddamn nanny, and he should go home to his fancy house, with his servants, and do for himself, for a goddamn change –
But that time wasn’t this time.
This time, Toshiro opened his apartment door to see him again, standing there, soaked to the bone, his fine clothes clinging to his body, his dark hair matted to his forehead, and a look of the most intense, forlorn despondency that he had ever seen on a young man’s face. Why Kaga would leave the luxury of his mansion and come slum it down amongst the lowly folk of Tokyo’s working district, Kandagawa couldn’t fathom. Yet there he stood.
He sighed and opened his apartment’s door a little wider.
“You horse’s ass,” he scolded, letting Kaga stagger in.
“Mother and I had a quarrel,” was all the younger man murmured.
“What else is new?” Kandagawa grumbled, shutting the door behind him. Kaga struggled out of his shoes, but Kandagawa all but shoved him into a corner. “You’re soaking wet, you fool. Get out of those before you catch your death. Idiot. Idiot. ”
Kaga took the scolding just like he seemed to take everything since his father died. Cursed with an over-bearing mother and three older sisters who had already left the family registry and started families of their own, Kaga was suddenly the heir to a massive fortune .. and no ambition to do anything with it save please Lady Natsuhi.
They had known each other for years, Kandagawa and Kaga. His father, Kumao, had need of a chef, and Kandagawa had need of some cash. It was a match made in hell, because Kumao loved to eat and Natsuhi loved to keep him from eating the things that would make him most happy. He spent most of his time entertaining the young lord, Takeshi.
To the lowly Osakan, though, he was Kaga-san.
And Kaga-san was naked in his goddamn sitting room, trying to get warm under his ancient kotatsu. Kanagawa was grumbling, moving things around his meager kitchen.
“ – she has no imagination,” Kaga said, softly, as if to defend himself.
“And you have no goddamn sense!” Kandagawa scolded. “You are Kumao Kaga’s only son, and with him dead, you are in control of the family. By every right and every law and every tradition in Japan!”
“What good is tradition?” Kaga lamented. “If one does not believe?”
“Tradition is everything,” Kandagawa scoffed. “Now shut up.”
“Toshiro,” Kaga said, perhaps some scold in his own voice. Kandagawa gave him a shrewd look, but then rolled his eyes and looked away, back to what he was doing.
He sighed, after a long moment, firing up his burner, and got to work.
“So you went out, after a fight with your ma, got good and drunk, and ended up on my doorstep,” he said, tutting. He cracked an egg into a bowl, threw in a pinch of sugar, a dash of dashi, and a splash of mirin. With chopsticks, he whipped the devil out of the mixture, letting a little square pan heat on his burner, well oiled and well cultured.
“What’s so wrong with that?” Kaga asked, rubbing his face.
“Because I’m not your personal comfort object, Kaga,” Kandagawa scoffed, tapping his chopsticks on the edge of his bowl. He tutted, and then dumped the mix into the pan. It hissed and bubbled.
Kaga-san went quiet.
Kandagawa glanced over his shoulder at him and sighed, shaking his head. He was nine years Kaga’s senior. It might as well have been 90 years.
“What were you and Natsuhi bickering about this time?” He asked, rolling the egg as it puffed up.
“She does not believe in the Gourmet Academy – “
Kandagawa cut him off with a raucous and obnoxious groan.
“Oh, fuck , Takeshi! Not this damned day-dream of yours!” He moaned, shaking his head. He flipped the tamagoyaki from the pan onto a waiting plate. He speared it with a second set of chopsticks and took a bite.
Hm.
More dashi. A little more sugar.
He cracked another egg and added the mirin, the sugar, the dashi, whisking it once more with his mixing chopsticks.
“Do not mock me, Kandagawa,” Kaga scolded, his tone still soft.
“Pay me,” Kandagawa retorted, pouring this fresh mixture into the pan, tutting. “Pay me, Kaga-san, and never again will I snort at your nonsense little dreams.”
“It’s not nonsense,” Kaga insisted, shaking his head. “It’s an ideal. ”
“You know why they call them ideals? Because they’re for idealists. Because the ideal is unattainable,” Kandagawa snorted. “Like God , like Buddha. ”
“Food is like art, Kandawaga-san,” Kaga insisted, sounding almost reverent. “True artistic creations. Unique. Special .. As are the men and women who create it all – !”
“You know what your father’s failing was?” Kandagawa continued, matter of factly. He was folding another tamagoyaki, nice and fluffy, nice and firm. Out onto the plate it went, and another cracked egg, another careful bout of dashes and splashes and pinches, more whisking, more hissing from the pan as the mixture all went in. “What his fatal flaw was?”
“I don’t want to talk about my father’s fatal flaw is, no,” Kaga sighed, closing his eyes.
“He never made your mother learn how to cook!” Kandagawa said, clucking like a disapproving mother hen. “Not even a little! Ask the woman to boil rice, crack an egg, do anything – !”
“Oh, Toshiro – “
“ – Had your mother spent an iota of time in the kitchen,” Kandagawa continued, and continued making a small mountain of omelets as if his hands were working purely on their own. “It would remove this mystery and mystique from it all, and you’d never get it in your mind that food is art. Food is food. And food is tradition. And you, Takeshi Kaga, abhor tradition.” He nodded, as if in a matter of fact kind of air. “It’d never work. No one would want to be involved, none of the chefs I know anyway.”
He turned off his little burner, taking the plate of six rolled omelets off the counter. He paused at the fridge, retrieving two cans of beer with one rough, calloused hand, and thumped down on the opposite side of the kotatsu from Kaga-san. He set the plate between them and then cracked open each can.
“I don’t think I could drink anymore,” Kaga admitted, but it was just out of politeness. He paused and then sighed. “Thank you. Thank you for the meal.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Kandagawa scoffed, rolling his eyes. He reclined, sipping his drink. “If you’re gonna get drunk, you should eat eggs. Just makes sense.”
“Is it a tradition?” Kaga asked, smiling in that soft, joking way of his. Mischief given breath, thy name was Takeshi Kaga.
Kandagawa scoffed again.
“You want to do something smart with your father’s money? Your money?” He said, watching Kaga eat. “Become a patron. A simple patron. Find a restaurant you like, a chef you like, and fund their dream. You’ll get a nice private table and all the food you could eat, on any night you damn well please. And, you get a nice return on investment, if that chef is worth his salt.”
.. Kandagawa was too proud to ask. He would succeed on his own. He didn’t need Kaga-san’s money. He didn’t. He had grit, he had talent. He had tradition. He had been a child during the war. Not just any war, The War . Everyone in that county had lost something, but Kandagawa had lost a childhood. He worked. He worked hard, his fingers to the bone .. And now he was going to keep working and he was going to be somebody.
“That is something,” Kaga relented, taking a too-big bite of an omelet. “It’s just .. I want to do something bigger than myself. Is that so wrong?”
Kandagawa sighed, shaking his head.
“Eat. Eat so I can go to bed,” he grumbled.
Kaga did as he was told, polishing off those omelets as if he had never eaten before in his life.
His clothes were still wet and likely would stay that way until the storm would abate and Kandagawa could throw them onto the laundry line just outside his window. For now, though, he just caught the shirt that Kandagawa threw him, and when the time came, settled onto the right hand side of the futon, his back to Kandagawa as he slid in as well.
“Tell ya what,” Kandagawa said, laying down, pulling the duvet over them both. “When the time comes, and you gather your dream team of chefs, hire me.”
“You’d want to join in?” Kaga murmured, already falling asleep, full of food and beer.
“Sure, why not?” Kandagawa laughed. “Just remember me when you make it big and start your fancy ‘gourmet’ school.”
Kaga had already fallen asleep by the time Kandagawa had finished talking.
.. And, ultimately, Chairman Takeshi Kaga did not keep his promise to Toshiro Kandagawa.