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Documenting Food in Kagurabachi

(Warning: Long-Ass Post Hiding Under the Read-More)

Introduction:

I’ve seen it observed many a time that food is a recurring motif in Kagurabachi – both the sharing of food and the cooking of food for others. However, I have never seen anyone remark on just how frequently these food motifs recur! It’s not entirely surprising, of course: food is a great way to humanize characters! It’s versatile while also being universal, easily understood by anyone as a basic fact of life and community and therefore an efficient method for reaping tremendous emotional impact.

All the same, there are other ways to humanize characters – think pets, hobbies, media they enjoy, dreams for the future, fashion choices, well-realized living spaces, and so on and so forth. What really stands out about Kagurabachi’s use of food, what makes it feel like Hokazono is making a conscious choice to foreground food as a motif rather than just repeatedly grabbing for an easy narrative device without thinking any further than its immediate utility, is the incredible consistency with which food is used to emphasize narrative beats. And not just the wholesome ones! The absence of food, the perversions of what is consumed, and the use of ironic contrast between quality of food and overall experience of a meal are all used to equally great thematic effect.

Following is not intended to be a full thesis on Hokazono’s use of food in his manga; the thematic messages are not complex or difficult to grasp! Rather, it’s a measure of the sheer quantity of places food and drink come up in the story, compiled as a side project when I was doing a series reread for another upcoming piece. While there are certainly musings, even lengthy ones, included about what this-or-that bit of street food or lavish meal are communicating narratively, as well as cultural notes where they seem relevant, this is a project for thorough documentation of individual instances, not an analysis of the work on the whole.

The list is broken down by broad arc and includes specific chapter citations. Included are all instances I could find of anything related to food, beverages or consumption, as well as conspicuous absences thereof. This includes cooking, meals, snacks, kitchens, restaurants, utensils and tools, sorcery that involves consumption, and that classic standby of food-themed horror, everyone’s favorite meal of last resort, cannibalism!

For people who're new to my copious footnoting style: any chapter footnotes can be found at the end of each chapter's bullet points. Footnotes are numbered and their notations colored; the first one per chapter will be the same color as the section header text; if there's more than one in a given chapter, I progress through different colors as a visual aid to help the reader keep track of their position in the text.

Hit the jump.

Opening Arc + Sojo Genichi:

Chapter 1:

Chihiro, the story implies, does most of the cooking for his household; the first thing we see of him and his father after some early morning work in the forge is them sitting down for a breakfast Chihiro made while Kunishige talked to their pet goldfish, the bowl for which is kept in the kitchen. The two discuss what the goldfish said (or at least Kunishige’s account of what they said) over the meal – rice, a soup of some sort, sunny-side-up fried eggs, something that I think is bacon, and a carafe of water. Notably, the framing of this meal has the fishbowl appearing to sit on the table between father and son. It’s actually placed on a nearby cabinet below a window; it merely appears to sit between them due to a bit of forced perspective. That image, though, will form the basis of a related image very key to the story as it continues.

During another forge interlude, Chihiro reflects back on how, when his father first brought the fish home, Chihiro had to ask him to stop calling them “fresh fish,” because it sounded like he was planning to eat them. Chihiro decided to look after the fish when his father made a, “Oh, that’s an idea!” face.

This second forge scene (third if you count the introductory color pages) is interrupted by the arrival of Shiba, but it would have ended soon anyway – Kunishige asks Chihiro if wants to stop soon, not for a general break, to rest or catch their breath or hit the can, but rather for lunch.

The first thing we see Shiba do after greeting the pair at the entrance to the forge is feeding the fish and remarking on how they’ve grown. Notice how consistently the fish, despite being pets, are interwoven with food; this, too, will be relevant later.

The conversation with Shiba about Rokuhira’s role in the war happens at that same small table in the kitchen that breakfast did. The trio probably just finished lunch, as father and son were just stopping to eat when Shiba arrived and Kunishige is standing at the sink with his back to the conversation, probably doing dishes after the table was cleared off. No word on who cooked this one; Shiba brought “souvenirs” that might have included some food, but I doubt the bag was large enough to contain a meal for three.

A thing I’ll note here because I’m definitely not going to note it every time it comes up: both here and in other scenes and locales as the manga progresses (particularly Sojo’s connected hideouts), we see guards sitting at tables, usually small square ones, like card tables. At no point did I ever notice a guard eating at one of these tables, even so much as a canned coffee or a bag of chips. Despite the presence of a table they could be eating at, none of that sense of community and domesticity is present in these slices of those mens’ lives.

On the train, Shiba is eating grilled smelt, a small fish (native in Japan to Hokkaido) that can be cooked and eaten whole. He offers some to Chihiro, who declines, seeming to find it a little strange and possibly off-putting that Shiba is just walking around biting the heads off whole fish. (I lack the cultural context to say whether Chihiro’s an accurate judge of this or whether he just has virtually no exposure to Japanese street cart food; either seems plausible given later evidence.)

Chapter 2:

In the Hishaku’s attack, much of the Rokuhira home was severely damaged; of several panels depicting the destruction, the most emotional is the one showing the wrecked kitchen.[1] We see that an enormous hole was blown through the wall behind the kitchen cabinet, just high enough to knock the fishbowl to the floor, shattering it. The goldfish are seen in the rubble, having asphyxiated during the brief battle and yawning empty aftermath; they lie near the upturned table.

On the same page, we see Chihiro’s memories of his previously undisturbed, normal life take the form of an image of himself and his father having a meal at the table, but rather than the fishbowl being framed as if it’s sitting between them, the table is now inside the fishbowl, a scene set in miniature like a fishtank castle, the three goldfish arcing over and around the Rokuhiras through the water. This is the image he and the story will return to over and over again whenever he's feeling particularly strongly reminded of what he lost.

1: An earlier page showed the broken-into basement where the swords were kept, but the other two panels sharing page-space with the image of the kitchen show, respectively, the house’s main entrance and the particularly trashed workshop containing the forge, which has taken significantly more structural damage than the main house and is in the process of burning down for good measure. It does give one cause to suspect particularly vicious feelings about Rokuhira Kunishige’s sword-making on the part of the mastermind of this attack!) Chapter 3:

Hinao operates her information broker business out of what appears to be a coffee shop or teahouse,[2] Café Haru Haru, where a great many saucers, cups, wine glasses, and large jars of the sort that would normally display pastries can be seen lining the shelves of the cabinets lining the wall behind her bar-style counter. It’s an eclectically decorated place; we see items like potted cacti, a large clay frog, an incense burner, a Dogu figure replica, and so on.

Chihiro gets Char to start opening up after she largely stonewalls Shiba by offering to buy her food; she immediately jumps to wanting tempura soba, presumably not on offer at Café Haru Haru, so the trio go out. (Shiba waits outside with the car, though.)

Inside the restaurant, Char gets her tempura soba while Chihiro has cold soba,[3] and he tries to press her a little more for information while they eat. She remains somewhat reluctant, however, more willing to talk about her captor and his magic sword and many henchmen than she is why people are after her specifically.

Daruma then disturbs the peace and burgeoning conversation by killing a(n admittedly pretty mouthy) waiter and blowing a hole in the wall.

2: The kanji on the sign can denote either.

3: Also favored by Shouto and Dabi, from BNHA!

Chapter 5:

Char, having only gotten a few bites of her tempura soba before Daruma’s interruption, claims to still be hungry. Hinao says there’s nothing to eat at Haru Haru; this could mean a few things that the manga doesn’t weigh in on one way or another. It’s possible the café is pure front for her information selling business and she doesn’t actually serve anything there – the surroundings as established suggest the entrance is only accessible on foot, tucked somewhere in a relatively narrow alley off a busier street. Not exactly welcoming to idle passers-by! This would track with how, even when she’s got people sitting up at the bar, they never seem to have drinks to hand. Alternatively, maybe she only only serves drinks, or the only food she has is light pastry desserts, not food-food, especially not for a kid who needs a real meal. Of course, judging by her expression when she makes the nothing-to-eat-here claim, there’s at least a chance that she does have some amount of food around but doesn’t want to pour her food budget down the cavernous maw of a rather persistently hungry child, though this would be oddly cold for her usual sunny attitude, especially since she could probably lean on Chihiro or Shiba to pay for it. Whichever is the case, though, Chihiro leaves Char in Hinao’s care while he goes to buy something.

However, Char immediately sneaks into the car, wanting to be with Chihiro and with Hinao’s tacit approval (as Chihiro is much more capable of keeping the kid safe than she is). After asking a few more questions Char remains hesitant to answer in any detail, Chihiro asks what she wants to eat; she requests a sandwich.

After a brief interlude with Shiba and Daruma, Chihiro and Char acquire a rather huge sandwich from someplace called Babylonia. This turns into an impromptu restaurant-crawl as, across three identically paneled pages, Char continues to request more food – an ice cream cone from a place called Tanda, then, from somewhere named Bloom, a drink resembling a frozen coffee with whipped cream but with the sort of large straw you’d get with boba tea. Chihiro, with straight-faced but growing exasperation, repeatedly asks that she not make a mess eating in the car and if she’s ready to go back.

Meanwhile, Sojo’s first appearance is in one of his much-beloved bath houses, this one much, much fancier than the ones we’ll see him visiting in his later Bathhouse Adventure gag chapters; the bath has a picture window view of the Tokyo skyline, the rear walls painted with traditional art. Sojo’s attended by a number of geisha (undisturbed, at least outwardly, by him carrying on his grisly business). While this scene mostly stands out for those upscale bathhouse aesthetics, the relevance for this documentation is that Sojo is dining as well as bathing: he's being served sake, though he finishes up by emptying a serving bottle rather than drinking from the cup. There’s both a small ceramic serving bottle and a full-sized, labeled glass bottle, as well as two cups; I would guess that the glass bottle is chilled and the porcelain one is heated, with separate cups to be used for each. Notably, while I call them cups, the drinking vessels are of the wider, shallow dish style rather than the cylindrical, handleless small cup that is the most common way of serving sake at restaurants.[4] The dish style Sojo is served – which a number of English-language resources call sakazuki, but don’t hold me to that being an exclusive term! – is more frequently seen in ceremonies, particularly those held to formalize bonds. They’re used in weddings, but also, and more pertinently for Sojo, in yakuza circles. He’s drinking alone in this scene, and as mentioned straight from the bottle, but the cup style does feel intentionally chosen for that more ceremonial air, underlining the scene’s mixture of aesthetic elements communicating VIP wealth, traditional Japanese trappings, and underworld violence. It’s certainly the most “Hollywood” scene in this introductory material, clearly reflecting Hokazono’s fondness for glossy Western action films and the version of Japan found in them.

Finally, Char confides that she was held in a dark place for a long time, given only “mushy stuff” to eat. Attempts to further explain are interrupted by the next attack, this time while they’re in traffic.

4: A third option is a wooden box vessel called a masu; it’s ultra-traditional, but disfavored by most sake brewers because the wood can affect the sake’s flavor and aroma. Sometimes you’ll see a sake cup/glass served inside a masu, though, like a teacup resting in a saucer, for that traditional flair. In this case, sake can be overpoured by the server so that it overflows the rim of the cup and spills into the masu; this represents generosity on the part of the host/proprietor.

Chapter 6:

The trauma sorcerer dumps Chihiro right back into his domestic days with his father, and wouldn’t you know it, they’re sitting at that kitchen table again, Kunishige heartily complimenting the food a heartbeat before he’s sitting dead in the same place, eyes blank, covered in blood. Once again, the goldfish are intertwined with the food imagery: while a full meal can still be seen at Chihiro’s table setting near the bottom edge of the panel,[5] in front of Kunishige is only that shattered fishbowl, the table strewn with broken glass, puddled water, and a trio of dead fish.

The mud doll sorcerer (or one of his controlled copies) asks if they should eat Char, apparently in reference to a story about how eating the flesh of her clan can make one immortal. Given the to-say-the-least prominent fish and water motifs of the series, this is almost certainly referencing Japanese legends about mermaids (ningyo), which are said to grant immortality in the same fashion.

The trauma sorcerer says that story is nonsense, but rooted in a seed of truth: that the Kyonagi clan have healing powers, and these are also behind their clan’s hunt to extinction. Char, therefore, will not be living a peaceful life for quite some time. This dialogue is layered over a quick shot of a very institutional-looking tray of mushy food slurry, unappealing even by the standards of hospital food.

With the above three points, we get our first examples of the active perversion of the imagery of food used to signify bonds and community; here, it’s used to communicate violence, the destruction of family, the isolation and exploitation of the innocent. That we get so many examples of this sort of negative food imagery (because these won’t be the last by any means!) alongside the positive stuff is what inclines me to think Hokazono is including food as a conscious choice to further the themes, rather than just incidentally.

Rounding out the chapter, however, Chihiro saves the day and offers Char his sandwich, which he’d been planning to save for later. It’s gotten a bit squashed,[6] but for Char, it’s clearly the thought that counts.

5: The meal in question is a cut of salmon, miso soup, rice, a few garnishes, and water. The spread is much more visible in the volume release; I’ve noticed in this comb-through of the manga that there are a lot of instances where the volume release contains full versions of panels that in the weekly release are cut off at the bottom, frequently right in the middle of a character’s face! I have no idea if this is a Viz problem, a browser problem, an issue stemming from Hokazono’s known reliance on panel reuse, or some fourth thing, but it’s an excellent reason to get the volume releases where you can!

6: Because he’s just been carrying it in an inner coat pocket rather than putting it in the glove compartment of the car like a sensible human being.

Chapter 8:

When Char is mumbling shiritori in her sleep, all of the words she uses are foods, and reasonably well-localized for the English release, at that: meatballs (tsukune), seaweed (konbu), and tangerine (mikan).[7]

7: Shiritori is a Japanese word game involving multiple players taking turns thinking of a word that begins with the same syllable the last person’s word ended with. You lose if you use a word someone else already did or if you pick a word that ends with the syllable ‘n’ (ん), as no words in Japanese begin with it. Given that Char’s own words skip syllables – in the Japanese text as well as the English translation – she must have someone she’s playing with in her dream. I wonder if they’re using all food words as well?

Chapter 9:

When Azami and Shiba are (presumably) heading to the meeting with Azami’s superiors which they’ve requested he bring Shiba in for, Shiba is once again eating street cart food. It looks like smelt again, so possibly Shiba has a favorite snack. He does a degree of gesticulation with it, prompting an annoyed Azami to tell him to stop playing with his food in a serious conversation.

Volume 1 Bonus Chapter:

In the volume-only bonus chapter, Chihiro wins the impromptu “who do the fish like better” contest because he’s the one who feeds them.

Chapter 11:

Shiba has brought Hinao something to eat at the hospital: the quintessential Japanese hospital snack, sliced apples. Because he’s not as good as Chihiro at taking care of people, however, his are “coarsely chopped” (per him) with a “gross texture” (per her).

The first beat we hit of Char back in captivity is her once again getting a cheap cafeteria tray of awful-looking slop, three different colors of mush with indeterminate chunks.

One of Sojo’s mohawk goons asks if it wouldn’t be better to fatten Char up some, seeing as how they’re using her flesh for Sojo’s datenseki experiments. Sojo snorts at this, saying all they have to do is “shave it” multiple times. It’s a markedly dehumanizing horror they’re putting Char through anyway, of course, but the phrasing also evokes the slicing of meat as for meal preparation.[8]

8: I always warn to take my looked-it-up-online Japanese with a grain of salt, and that applies to this piece, too, but with that being said: the verb Sojo uses in the Japanese seems to be more frequently associated with shaving as in wood carving or pencil sharpening, but does nonetheless turn up in a phrase used to describe slicing food, things like vegetables or chicken breasts, diagonally or in thin slices.

Chapter 12:

Sojo attends a much more run-down bathhouse to mull over his encounter with Chihiro and what it means for his regard for Kunishige and his understanding of the enchanted blades; food only stands out here for its absence in comparison to the sake in his initial scene or the fruit milks he’ll struggle so much for in the gag chapters later on. Seems he’s a little preoccupied to observe his normal bath time rituals!

Chapter 15:

Char’s backstory literally opens with a shot of homemade sandwiches on a placemat. Stickers and magnets cover a refrigerator at the level of a young girl’s reach. We find Char and her mother in the kitchen of their apartment as Char’s mother attends to some small childhood injury Char took and cautions her about only confiding in her powers to people truly, deeply special to her. This is the first and only time we’ll see them in such domesticity; setting the scene in a kitchen demonstrates that the association of that space with lost familial contentment is not limited to Chihiro, a pattern we’ll see borne out several more times still.

Sojo’s intrusion into this modest happiness is visualized by a full glass beside the plate being knocked over and spilling its dark contents across the placemat like a blood stain.[9] The fridge door has been pulled open in the struggle, spilling milk, eggs, and fruit to lie abandoned on the floor of the now-empty apartment. The sense of loss is underlined even further with a cruel and tragic thematic echo: Sojo bringing up the story about eating Kyonagi flesh and how it led to the clan’s near-extermination.

Upon decapitating the last two guards, Chihiro immediately whips out a sandwich – seriously, he snaps that thing out like a stage magician – to offer Char. This time it’s not squashed! Char demands, in tears, to know why he’s so late, but she does grab the sandwich anyway, with a single flashback beat to – what else? – that lunch at the table with her mom, where her mom said she was the happiest person in the world solely because of who she was with.

9: If you want to go out on a limb, you can even note that the drink had ice cubes in it that are now scattered across the table, and Sojo is associated with ice via Cloud Gouger’s Yui ability. If that sounds like a stretch, let me point out that of all the drinks I have and will point out in this piece, I only found three that are drawn as containing ice cubes, and one of the others is the soda Hakuri is drinking when he first sees Chihiro – at the time, fighting Sojo. The third, though, is the one that breaks the pattern, an iced coffee Hatshaku's having in Chapter 73.

Chapter 16:

Char’s still hanging onto the sandwich as of the beginning of this chapter.

As she begins (probably for the first time in her life!) to try to use her healing powers on someone other than herself, every one of the three memories she flashes back to involves being fed – Chihiro taking her for soba, eating with her mother, and the non-squashed sandwich.

Chapter 17:

My god, just everything about the mochi scene.

A meal as communication, as communion, as opening both a literal and metaphorical table for sharing perspectives and finding common ground.

The décor as indicative of Sojo inviting Chihiro into his own “space” to break bread with him – the low lacquered table and tatami floor is in a whole different aesthetic world than the dining table of Chihiro’s memories!

Sojo sharing a favorite snack – and especially something as relatively sweet, soft and childish as mochi! – as a humanizing element.

Chihiro first refusing to eat and then giving way as a sign of his acceptance of Sojo having a valid claim to grasping the meaning of the swords.

The conflation of fighting to understand each other with eating together as a sign of that understanding; the contrast between the meal and the intense magical violence and bloodshed that meal is allegorizing. This scene is so goddamn good.

Rakuzaichi Arc:

Chapter 19:

The very first page of the arc – and Hakuri’s introduction – is him drinking a soda as he sits alone in a restaurant booth musing on having “lost” (“been disowned by,” as we will later find) his family. He’s deeply out of it, thinking about clenching his teeth to get through the loss, move past it, but roundly failing to do that – rather literally, as when he takes a big sip of the soda, his mouth is hanging open and the drink thus immediately spills back out onto the table.

Later on, we find Chihiro and Shiba sitting in what I would guess from their attire to be a traditional ryokan, either in a public sitting area or on the screened porch of a rented room. From the context, they’re probably at some sort of overnight accommodation while traveling to search for more leads on the Hishaku to pick up, but the notable thing is that they’re also drinking, some sort of chilled bottled cider, per the label.[10] They’re also talking about family – the Sazanami family, specifically, and how reclusive and mysterious the clan is.

10: Chihiro, at 18, is two years under the legal drinking age in irl!Japan, though who knows if it’s the same in Hokozono’s pseudo-Japan where it’s legal to own a katana for self-defense.

Chapter 22:

Bringing Hakuri into the fold, we find the group in Yet Another Fucking Kitchen. Food is notable for its absence in this scene, given that the major topic of conversation after getting Hakuri up to speed is his family, previously a topic that’s always been associated with food. This is what’s called “foreshadowing.”That said, on a meta level, it may just be that there’s no food to be had in the kitchen, if it’s some kind of safehouse and has supplies tocook with, obliging anyone staying there to provide their own grub. It’s also possible that it’s just Hinao’s actual residence, as we find Café Haru Haru is still under reconstruction from Sojo blowing a hole clear through the wall of it and the building next door, but it would be pretty odd for neither Hinao’s home nor her place of business to have any food on premises, so a safehouse she’s also staying at is probably the better bet.

Kyora returns to a lavish traditional Japanese estate, whereupon he is greeted enthusiastically as “Father!”[11] by a pair of faceless white-haired kids; he greets them with passing conviviality and immediately retires to have the first home-cooked meal we see associated with anyone in the family: a specific type of tea, to be prepared by a maid and delivered to his room, where he will be meditating in private, in precisely ten minutes. The difference between this and the prior domestic meal scenes is immediately obvious.

11: “Tousama!” in the Japanese; Hakuri uses the slightly more familiar “Tousan.” Also, just as a note, and the Viz translation notwithstanding, Chihiro also uses “Tousan” to refer to Kunishige.

Chapter 23:

We find the maid tasked with making the tea in the nicest kitchen we’ve seen yet, though that’s not a particularly high bar. It’s roomy, well-lit, clean and well-kept, but she’s in it alone, making food for an employer, and it noticeably lacks the kitchen table we’ve seen in the other kitchens we’ve seen to date – Chihiro’s, Char’s, even the safehouse’s (if that’s what it is).

Chapter 24:

The chapter endswith a shot of a tea set sitting on Kyora’s desk, the same one we saw in the kitchen with the maid last chapter, presumably delivered right on time. Mr. Father of the Year stands at his broken window and savors his sencha as he meditates on the sight of his kids/elite bodyguards preparing to kick the shit out of a teenager three-to-one.

Chapter 26:

After a tense and largely foodless foray into the spartan Sazanami clan, Chapter 26 opens on an enormous plate of spaghetti and a very sensibly sized parfait: Hiyuki and Tafuku (in that order) eating in preparation for their upcoming unauthorized go at the Rakuzaichi. Hiyuki says she needs to “charge up” and so it’s gotta be spaghetti, and lots of it.

In an attempt to cheer Hakuri up, Shiba finally offers to feed the kid, asking if he wants ice cream.[12] Hakuri politely declines, though Char is ever-ready to jump on such offers.

12: You can almost hear the Hapless Uncle train of thought there. “What do kids like? Ice cream? Char likes ice cream. I like ice cream. Chihiro doesn’t like ice cream, but Chihiro’s a weird kid who doesn’t like sweets; he doesn’t count. Let’s try ice cream.”

Chapter 28:

While I imagine they did get ice cream that first time, they end up getting it again, on-panel this time, while trying to do recon on the storehouse. Chihiro and Shiba are waiting in the car hashing out Chihiro’s newest intel while Hinao, Char and Hakuri sit on an outside bench eating soft serve cones – in early November, no less!

Hakuri gives Char his cone when Chihiro calls him over for some questions.)

This outing is contrasted immediately by, on the opposite page, one of the victims in the storehouse having a tray of food slid into their cage. Notably, the contrast is even more pointed than just the opposite page mirroring! Consider that Hakuri is having cold snack food on what’s likely a cold day, but in warm company; the human trafficking victim of the Rakuzaichi is being fed a reasonably hearty, hot meal (we see a big bowl of rice, a sizeable filet of fish, and something that’s either a small side or a condiment) in a temperature-controlled environment,[13] yet there’s no human warmth to be found at all.

Looking back to earlier events, the quality of this meal also serves to contrast the sort of food Char was getting in her captivity. She was only being kept alive enough to periodically carve pieces off of, with no care for her welfare beyond that, so she got cheap, slapdash mush. Kyora wants his wares in optimum condition so they fetch the best price, so his human trafficking victims are being much more carefully tended.

13: The human wares for the auction are all dressed in the same simple white kimonos, after all – barefoot, even. While I doubt it’s exactly toasty, it’s also got to be a stable enough temperature that none of the lightly dressed people inside are catching chills.

Chapter 31:

Chihiro encounters Yura and keeps the vestiges of his cool only up until Yura turns the tables on him in combat, at which point the questions swirling in his brain rise up like a tide before falling away around a single image, a single memory, a single emotion – the meal in the fishbowl with his father, that simple happiness now lost. That image precedes the fantastic panel of Chihiro breaking down and screaming, “Why did you kill my father?!”

Chapter 35:

After another foodless sojourn through combat, we land in Hakuri’s flashback to his meeting with the icy-skinned woman, where we find the communal aspects of food once again being perverted by the horrors of the Sazanami clan. As with the mochi scene between Chihiro and Sojo, there’s a lot going on in this flashback, so let’s break it down:

Hakuri has been tasked with feeding the “merchandise” in pre-registration intake (on the tray: a loaf of bread, a clear soup, some croquettes and julienne-cut something, and what looks like maybe some dried fruit chips or sliced bananas), but Lot #24, “Girl with Icy Skin,” is refusing meals. Hakuri says she’s in his care until she’s transferred to the storehouse, and he won’t let her die no matter what – he’ll make her eat even if it means hurting her, or put her on an IV if it comes to that.

In response, she observes that meals are supposed to be enjoyed with other people – he returns that he can’t take her out of the solitary confinement cell she’s in because her Strange Power means she’d cause harm to others she was placed near. (Note that, judging by the room the chapter opens in, she’d be by herself in a cage regardless, not a truly communal space – she’d just be in a room containing multiple other caged people.) The icy girl says she’ll eat if Hakuri himself sticks around, someone to talk with while she eats, which he agrees to do for the sake of the Rakuzaichi, which of course he’s been raised quite explicitly to value above all else. She likely has ulterior motives even now, but Hakuri is a bit too sheltered to think about that.

Over the course of the conversation, we hit one more even worse thing that’s relevant to this accounting. One of the “tools” Soya tried to use on Hakuri is a peeler, as one might use to skin apples or potatoes: a simple, basic kitchen implement turned to the purposes of torture. And not torture like Shiba would do – cold, rational, used to the minimum degree necessary against enemies to gather information – but torture out of a sick sort of love, used against a younger sibling.

Icy Girl comes on pretty strong, an unabashed seduction,[14] to which Hakuri tells her not to get carried away and forget their respective status – he’s only eating with her for the sake of the auction, but he’s a merchant and she’s merchandise. As the scene progresses, though, we see her tray being more and more emptied as the weeks pass, her health improving as she begins finishing meals, and her continuing to ice his wounds.

Near the end, Hakuri comes in more badly roughed up than usual, particularly disheartened and upset; she comforts him by saying that even if his family doesn’t value him, he has value – after all, he made her meals better by talking with her.

This serves as a final tipping point – he makes the decision to run away with her, which he does by inviting her for a meal outside. …At which point she does what she’s been planning to do the whole time and commits suicide. The language he used towards her at the beginning only reinforced what she already believed; so long as he was talking to her under the auspices of the Rakuzaichi, no amount of warm mealtime talks and sense of connection with a fellow reject could erase that underlying truth.

It's no wonder, perhaps, that Hakuri couldn’t swallow that first sip of soda we saw him taking.

14: I think she’s playing a bit of reverse psychology in telling him right away that it’s her intention to coax him into running away with her, letting him think he has his guard up as a way of lulling him into thinking he’s being more cautious than he actually is.

Chapter 36:

The only time we actually see any of the Sazanami taking a meal together in reality, and it’s not even really a meal at all, but rather Kyora pouring tea as he and Soya discuss Soya inheriting the family’s storehouse sorcery and with it the position of family patriarch, as well as some expository text about the family’s founder and, what feels like Kyora’s primary aim with the conversation, trying to get Soya to shake his obsession with Hakuri. It’s notable that we never see either of them move to drink the tea, and that fits with how Soya intersects with what Kyora’s tea habit has previously communicated thematically. I’ll skip the fanon Soya apologetics as being beyond the scope of this piece, but he is ambivalent to the point of listlessness for this whole scene, and that behavior is in line with how he acts basically anytime Hakuri isn’t involved. It’s not a big stretch, then, to assume that Soya has little in the way of warm feelings for his father or emotional investment in succeeding him. Meanwhile, Kyora’s attempts to engage with his eldest are all draped in rhetoric about Duty To Your Station, not noticing or not caring that this approach leaves Soya utterly cold. Fittingly, he does this over tea, which we previously saw him ordering a maid to prepare with exacting specificity, and then drinking when it arrived just in time for him to watch a death match involving three of his own children going down in his yard. Also too, the culture around formal tea service codes this: him pouring the tea for both of them is not him showing humility; it’s him being in control. Thus, him pouring tea here is a trapping of his power in the household, tuned to his tastes and entirely disregarding any preferences Soya might have just as readily as he tells Soya to stop caring about literally the only human being Soya is ever shown to care about.

Chapter 40:

Sitting at a table with a very nice vase, in a moderately run-down room, tucked somewhere in a very run-down alley, we find Yura and his likely second-in-command, the as-yet unnamed Hishaku wearing the hat, talking about Kyora and the Shinuchi over wine. The aesthetic is similar enough that I wonder if it’s related to the as-yet unexplained Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle-style lair we saw them meeting Sojo in, but it’s looking a lot more, uh, Euclidean than the last time we saw it, if so.[15] Very villainous, swilling wine and talking about their evil plans, but the vibe is thrown off by doing it in a claustrophobically trashy alley hideaway. Oh, Hishaku; you do contain multitudes!

15: That one specific Mystery Vase is in no less than three Hishaku meeting scenes, and the Infinity Castle has décor that resembles the vase’s design – the common element is the pine tree, which potentially ties it to Hatshaku and his sorcery.

Chapter 43:

Kyora’s dying wife isn’t shown directly in the hospital room, but we do see bags and tubes hanging by the bed. While the clear color of the contents makes me assume she’s on a saline drip,[16] which doesn’t imply anything about her ability to eat on her own one way or another, if she’s in the final stages of whatever condition is killing her, it’s very possible that she can’t. If that’s correct, it means she can’t partake in wholesome family meal imagery, not even “apples for the patient” like we see with Shiba and Hinao or a meal brought from home like we’ll later see with Inori.

The starkness of this – nutrition delivered directly because her system can’t take any of the extra trappings that caloric intake would normally require, or a lack of any nutrition at all because she’s in hospice care – would underline her statement that she’s being wholly, brutally honest with her husband because there’s no longer any point in niceties or lies to keep a “peace” that left her miserable. It’s the opposite pole and companion image to what immediately follows.

The “If the Rakuzaichi never took place” imagine spot Kyora has is, naturally enough, a meal with his family. Not him taking tea alone, not Hakuri feeding prisoners, but simply Kyora and his sons and his (sigh) dead wife. It’s too brief to get much detail out of before Kyora shatters it with his devotion to the auction, but we can discern a few things.

Firstly, the surroundings suggest it’s a small family home rather than the Sazanami estate. The dinner table is tucked into what’s obviously a fairly small corner, with a bookshelf behind Soya and Hakuri’s side, a sliding paper door behind Nameless Sazanami Wife and Tenri, a sliding glass door out to a patio or balcony beyond the unoccupied end of the table, and a kitchen visible over the half-wall behind Kyora. It’s much more modern, and much more modest, than the Sazanami estate, and the walls and arrangement of the kitchen are different than the one we saw the maid in before.

Secondly, everyone is dressed normally. The kids still have their distinctive hairstyles, and Kyora his mustache, but they’re wearing pullovers and polo shirts, or simple button-downs, with neither Kyora’s fancy vest nor the Tou uniforms in evidence.

Thirdly, there’s no sign whatsoever of Enji and Tamaki in this happy family vision, suggesting (as much we see elsewhere does also) that their familial situation is different. Children of a previous marriage, children of a mistress, adopted children from a branch family: there are a lot of options, some which maintain Kyora as their birth father and some which don’t, but they’re definitely not full-blooded siblings of Hakuri and the rest, and their absence here does signal something of how Kyora regards them despite their loyalty.

Fourthly, while Tenri’s immense dedication to his father remains somewhat visible – note how they’re wearing the same style of shirt! – Soya and Hakuri seem to have a much healthier relationship! Also too, the etiquette is very relaxed. Note how Soya is cheerfully stretching an arm waaay over to get food off a distant dish rather than just asking for it to be handed his way; note also how Hakuri quite fearlessly snatches the dish up and scolds his laughing older brother. Not something either of them would ever do at a dinner table together in front of Kyora in real life, one imagines!

Finally, subtle and searing, a tiny, barely visible grace note: a growth chart on the door jamb by the sliding door. It marks this vision as that of loving family in which parents track their children’s development not by setting unforgiving benchmarks for training in combat sorcery, but simply by scratching pencil marks, humble but indelible, into the wall of their home, right beside the table where they all come together to eat.

Here, then, at last, we see every bit of the normal familial food imagery that’s been missing or only present in a twisted way for the Sazanami for this whole arc. And it’s an illusion – a fantasy, an idle daydream, a hallucination. It doesn’t and can’t exist in reality because of Kyora’s loyalty to the Rakuzaichi.[17]

16: As best I can tell from some cursory image searching, both tube feeding bags and intravenous nutrition bags tend to have more solid-colored contents. I’m certainly no medical professional, though, so take my observations with a drop grain of salt. In any case, one thing I definitely don’t think the bags are is catheter bags, as those seem to typically be hung along the base of the bed rather than beside it.

17: Kyora himself reflects in his last moments that it wasn’t the Rakuzaichi’s existence, but rather his own misjudgment that has led to this failure. However, I’m inclined to think this is just a sign of how deep his dedication runs, that even in death, he can’t blame the thing he’s dedicated his and his family’s lives to, but rather must take the fault onto himself. In a real sense, it would be impossible for Kyora to ever to make a different judgement about Hakuri because a Kyora willing to make allowances for Hakuri’s childhood weakness implies a Kyora willing to depart even slightly from the clan motto of, “Honor the Rakuzaichi above all else.” And that departure, no matter how minor, would be so huge that it’s hard to imagine that version of Kyora ever being made patriarch in the first place.

Swordbearer Assassination Arc:

Chapter 45:

Chihiro and Hakuri come to at the place Char and Hinao have been staying, whatever it is, and we immediately find more food heralding the now more comfortable alliance. Hiyuki is engaged in a fiery video game death match with a calmly confident Shiba, cheered on by Tafuku and Char; they’ve apparently been at this all night, as attested to by the presence of mostly empty bags of chips and cup ramen.

Though we will not be seeing more of it or its associated bearer for a long while yet, one of the locations holding a swordbearer is at least nominally a sushi joint, Sushi Subaru. More on this later.

Chapter 47:

Fushimi delivers the news of Kunishige and Ibuki’s deaths at a table over soup or possibly a drinking bowl of tea, which Uruha knocks over when he slumps over in his grief.

In a flashback on what I would guess to be a bullet train, as Chihiro explains that pacting with an enchanted blade means the bearer loses access to their original sorcery, Chihiro and Hakuri are sharing some kind of travel snack – note that Hakuri’s white sleeve is on the hand holding the cup of pretzel sticks (or whatever), while Chihiro’s black sleeve is extracting one.

Chapter 48:

Hiruhiko is introduced at a drink machine, admiring its selection compared to what’s available in wherever it is that the Hishaku work out of. He has what might possibly be a Coke, judging by the ribbon on the label, guzzling most of it before crunching the can and dropping it to the floor of the empty train station. He is certainly not sharing with the Hishaku’s medic and scholarly sorcerer,[18] who’s observing Hiruhiko’s carefree attitude with exasperated concern. One or both of them are fresh off of killing Uruha’s guards, too.

18: Best Jeanist I Mean Medic is the member who seems to do most of the Hishaku’s written sorcerery, including painting their teleport mandala, using bandages with words inscribed on them to reattach Hiruhiko’s arms, and holding up the book Yura pulls his sword out of. This all kind of looks like the sort of generic sorcery that can be learned by anyone, so it’s anyone’s guess as to what his personal sorcery is like.

Chapter 50:

Chihiro’s first meeting with Samura came about because Shiba took him out to a festival. No one’s directly eating in the scene, but it takes place surrounded by food – okonomiyaki, yakitori, and similar stall foods.

Chapter 53:

As Samura and Chihiro talk about doing what you have to on the battlefield – how it isn’t heroism, rather a thing that turns you into a monster, but being willing to do it to save others is maybe worth respect, if not admiration – they share tea and some traditional tea service snack cakes of some sort, possibly mochi.

Chapter 55:

Ro emulates Samura in a few ways, one of which is the cigarettes, but where Samura has real ones he mostly just lets dangle in his mouth save for when he has to get himself psyched up to kill a bunch of people, Ro (age 22) has candy ones he eats for his mental kick.

Chapter 56:

When Samura’s personally appointed ninja death squad is insisting, early on in their time together, that they’re merely tools for his use, he in turn insists that he’s not going to have children sacrificing themselves for him (foreshadowing lol) and that, if they’re going to live together, they’re going to impose on each other. Relevant to this piece, one of the complaints he makes to illustrate that the Masumi’s non-presence vanishing act is creepy and too self-sacrificial is that meals just appear out of the ether the moment his stomach growls. Meals, then, are things you take with people. He wants them to stop pretending they’re objects with no human needs of their own that he's allowed to witness; meals, and the human connection that comes with them, are implicitly among those needs.

Chapter 58.1 Bathhouse Quest:

Part of Sojo’s “relax the mind and body before an important job” routine is a fruit milk at the bathhouse – finding only coffee-flavored milk is one of many small irritants he faces when he’s psyching himself up to receive Cloud Gouger from the Hishaku.

Chapter 60:

The remaining two sword bearers sans the increasingly ominous sword master are hidden following the attacks; the man is identified as being the resident of Sushi Subaru, which has also been hidden.[19] One of the Kamunabi heads notes ruefully, “That old coot would never stay put unless you let him make sushi.” A cast member who really threw everything he had into cooking, then, someone who loves it for its own sake, rather than doing it solely in connection with family. We haven’t met the dude yet, but I suspect he’s next up! (Which is just as well; Chihiro could probably stand to talk to another artisan, given the events of Chapter 108.) Notable here is that unless Sushi Subaru is really different in how it operates and what its function is compared to Kokugoku and Senkutsuji, in ways that go considerably beyond aesthetic variation, then it isn’t and can’t be a real restaurant, at least not one that’s open to the public. At best, “Subaru” can cook for its/his protectors, but he can’t cook for strangers, people who come for no reason than that they love the food and atmosphere. It’s a restaurant in a bottle, a simulacra given as a compromise to pacify the man who lives there. That’s not to say it’s necessarily cold or soulless – Uruha plainly loved and was loved by the men at Kokugoku – just that it is an arrangement, and that can’t help but color the meaning it conveys. (I wonder, very much, if we'll get a comparison between the restaurant in a bottle and the kitchen table in a bowl. For all that Chihiro loved his father, his home, and his life, it was a tremendously sheltered existence in ways he was afforded zero agency in choosing, as the upcoming material with Iori will make particularly clear.)

19: The Viz translation names the bearer in question as Subaru, but the name is in quotation brackets in the original text, suggesting a title or quote. I’m thus inclined to think that the Subaru being discussed is the restaurant, not the man, though it’s possible that they share the name.

Chapter 61:

With a new temp master, the Masumi fall back on old habits, as illustrated by them and Chihiro eating together at a café, with Chihiro unable to eat under his own power because every time he tries, he finds a fork at his mouth, a napkin at his lips, a drink being poured into the cup in his hand, and so on. He finds all this just as off-putting as Samura did, give or take the fact that he can just physically see them, so they’re less ghostlike for him than for Samura.

In fairness to the Masumi, they do seem to have improved somewhat, in that they also have plates for themselves; Chihiro is not the only one with food. On Ro’s plate, for example, we have hamburger steak with a fried egg, ebi shrimp, something I would guess is fried rice, some sort of pasta salad, and, the most childish touches, a flan pudding and octopus-cut weenies.

Meanwhile, Kuguri is introduced standing in front of a fresh seafood counter, staring wistfully at the salmon cuts and musing under his breath about how he, too, wants to slice something. Given that we know he’s trucking around with an enchanted blade, and that he took Sojo’s dubious advice about “deepening your relationship” with the sword, and that Kuguri has a lot more respect for kenjutsu than most of the cast, it’s likely that this scene is mostly foreshadowing that the sword he’s got strapped to his back belongs to the sushi chef blade bearer and he’s trying to connect with it by sightseeing things he thinks its previous bearer liked. After all, that personage was just hinted at two chapters previously, and readers will later see the interior of his restaurant via Shiba sitting next to a phone at the bar and fretting about the radio silence. All the same, even if it is mostly just foreshadowing, we can still note that Kuguri’s interest in salmon is not about the food in itself, but rather about the food as a means by which to further his real interest, that being swords, swordplay, and cutting things and/or people with swords. That is to say, he doesn’t admire the fish as part of a meal; he admires the fish because it’s a thing that’s cut.[20]

20: Übel Sousou no Frieren, eat your heart out.

Chapter 62:

Iori’s first perspective scene includes her eating breakfast before school. Perhaps notably, the woman she calls her mother (likely actually her aunt) makes the food but isn’t shown eating it with her, a little disconnect that seems innocuous enough in the moment, but stand out somewhat in retrospect: those two aren’t introduced sharing a Family Togetherness meal because, while they technically are family, they are not the family that Iori has been led to believe they are.

When Iori is having a weird morning (dreams she can’t remember but knows she’s had before, flashes of memory she has no context for, weird timing alignments with the enormous fucking owl face blotting out the sun…), her friend proposes going out for sweets after school, for the stress relief.

This chapter also hints at Toto’s sorcery, her ability to gain information by tasting someone’s blood. This is not the last nor remotely the most disturbing of consumption-focused powers that will crop up in the Hishaku, but it is playing pretty heavily towards taboo, with blood being seen as unclean in Shinto, one of Japan’s key religious traditions. It gets a little more explication, though still roundabout, in Chapter 68, in which Hiruhiko says they “asked [the hotel manager’s] brain” which room Chihiro and company were in. So Toto’s blood-drinking would seem to work on both the living and the dead (the latter also being unclean!) and also totally bypasses any notion of consent or the ability to resist her information-gathering. Stealing secrets by drinking blood: another villainous perversion of food imagery as representing safety and community.

Chapter 63:

I’m not going to document every instance of it, because it stretches across several chapters, but the café scene that started in Chapter 61 is flashed back to here and several more times over the next few chapters, and while food is not visible in all of those scenes, others do show the group continuing to eat while discussing things like Chihiro needing to trust some of his burden to his allies and honing his swordsmanship because, while his compatibility with Enten is top-notch, his swordplay isn’t on par.

Chapter 65:

Meal in a fishbowl imagery again here as Chihiro is struck to painful empathy with Iori over the prospect of being denied the chance to have a bond with one’s parent in the name of safety and normalcy.

Chapter 66:

Ro gives Iori a snack bread of some sort when it’s agreed that they’ll fill her in on everything, which she wolfs down in short order.

The first indication of the harassment the Samura father/daughter pair were dealing with comes with a jarring, full-page, intrusive memory of the defaced wall outside their gate. The hateful, suicide-baiting graffiti stands out the most, but also included are a heap of full-to-bursting garbage bags, atop one of which is sitting a large crow, picking through the refuse for scraps to eat. Crows have a generally better folkloric rep in Japan than in the West, being regarded as emblems of wisdom and guidance, but they still get used in plenty of ominous anime and manga scenes involving battle or urban decay/claustrophobia, as we see here. (A crow eating garbage can’t help but smack of foreshadowing for where Samura winds up after giving up Iori, too.)

Hiruhiko, preparing to slaughter an entire hotel lobby full of combat-capable staff and miscellaneous guests’ bodyguards, encourages Toto to sit tight and enjoy her tea while he gets in some sword practice. Admittedly, there’s no tea visible in her hands or on the table they’re sitting at, but perhaps they ordered some from the kitchen?

Chapter 67

In talking with Chihiro about their respective everyday battles, one of the things Iori mentions her and her peers stealing each other’s desserts at lunchtime, with a close-up of a pudding cup.

Chapter 69:

Ikura’s focus chapter, and as he’s emblematic of Iori’s “everyday life,” it’s perhaps worth mentioning at this point that, when written in only katakana (イクラ), ikura is a food word referring to salmon roe. Further, while the kanji of his name don’t refer to that specific food, both have meanings that can relate to other food and drink. 井 with the i reading means “well” (as in the thing you draw water from), while 倉 kura can refer to warehouses or storehouses but also granaries or, with other things attached, rice storehouses or breweries.

Chapter 71:

A huge portion of Samura and Iori’s early bond is over cooking for Inori. At first Iori tries to make it a contest, one she’s fairly certain she’ll win because she cooks all the time with her mother – indeed, even the discussion about that cooking happens as Samura is eating food Iori prepared (nominally with him, but given the way he compliments the taste, we can assume she either did most of the work or gave the majority of the instructions). Samura, some years now a divorcee, is no kind of cook at all, but leans into the contest aspect to get Iori’s mind off her mother’s health problems.

At first, their cooking is purely competitive, but we rapidly montage into the two of them shopping together, cooking together, and presenting Inori the resulting (delicious) bento together. Iori promises to get even better at cooking, results to be seen when Inori gets out of the hospital.

Alas, the Sick Anime Mom curse is stronger than all of them, and when Inori admits to her ex-husband that she doesn’t think she’s going to make it, that admission is framed over the bento box scraped clean and empty.

Inori asks Samura when he learned to cook – he certainly couldn’t back when they were married! – and he confesses that he got the guys at his dojo to coach him on the side, presumably so as to both be able to keep up with Iori at all and also to be able to, you know, feed her.

Chapter 72:

The Malediction is waaaay more relevant to Kagurabachi’s food theming than it would appear in English. The Japanese name for the ability is Kodoku (蠱) and it refers to a specific, ritual means (originating in China, but very much practiced in historical Japan as well) to create a hideously lethal drug/curse. The creator/caster takes a bunch of venomous insects or similar creatures and seals them all together in a single container, in which they are forced to devour one another until only a single creature remains. According to traditional lore, this one creature has now concentrated within itself the poison of all the rest, and can in turn be used as a particularly potent means of killing one’s enemies, be it via direct use as a poison or indirect use as a curse. Kodoku crops up all over the place in Japanese and Chinese media, appearing as its literal self, as inspiration for scenarios that pit human beings against each other, and any number of things in between. Wikipedia has a list of examples, doubtlessly nonexhaustive. Whether literal or via allusion, though, kodoku is almost invariably associated with deep, powerful, malicious evil. The ominous dread so frequently associated with the shinuchi’s power in Kagurabachi is right in line with that sort of presentation, then, and indeed, we will find later on that the blade literally drains the life energy of anything living around it, concentrating that energy into its bearer. The Magatsumi is a devouring blade, overtaking those who attempt to bear it without being contracted to it, subsuming their will and cutting off access to their original sorcery (as all the enchanted blades do), and seeking to remake them into vessels for its true bearer. In keeping with this, the visual representation of Kodoku/the Malediction is of the enemy's home island devoured, skeletons picked bare by flowers and insects alike crawling through the bones of the dead. No other example of the series using cannibalism to pervert the usual themes associated with food is as harrowing or far-reaching as Kodoku’s expression of the Magatsumi’s true realm.

Chapter 73:

Now living together in Samura’s home, we see Iori and her father cooking together once again as they discuss how Iori is settling in at school (which Iori is flagrantly lying about).

As the passive-aggressive neighborhood bullying gets worse, the pile of trash left outside the home gets bigger; eventually it starts attracting scavengers in the form of crows, eating scraps as the rot mounts. This is, I think, the full version of the memory fragment Iori saw back in Chapter 66.

Yura and Hatshaku talk about their rumor-spreading to trash Samura’s reputation and push him into a more psychologically vulnerable place over coffee, seemingly in a café of some sort.

The mounting harassment at school includes Iori having bottled drinks or paper cups dumped over her head or thrown at her.

Samura gets the call about Kunishige’s murder in a kitchen with an empty table, dishes piling up, unwashed, in the sink. In a living room, a dining table that was previously visible from the porch is now gone, leaving only a bare tatami floor.

Chapter 74:

Iori flashes back to her mother’s last smile – reflecting that, even through all the pain, being “Samura Seiichi’s daughter” allows her to remember that. Her mother loving her food, cooking alongside her father, running to share the food they made: these are the most central memories of her family, the things that made all the rest worthwhile.

Chapter 75:

The first revealed of the Kumeyuri’s powers is Banquet, also translatable as “party” or “feast,” its dizzying illusions associated with geisha pouring fine alcohol.

Chapter 79:

The commander of West Gate entrance to Kamunabi HQ has, amongst various detritus scattered on his desk, an empty coffee mug – a humanizing touch alongside the picture of his nephew and messy pile of paperwork.

Chapter 80:

Hatshaku has, after having raised hell against the barrier for no reason save to threaten The Public enough to get the Kamunabi to let his comrades into the first level of the building, retired to a now-abandoned café and is tracking their hostage situation and playing phone relay while enjoying a nice hot cuppa. (The Hishaku are all hilarious.)

Chapter 85:

The fishbowl pops up again as Chihiro vehemently insists that he’s already living the only life he wants or will accept, the best life he can imagine how to live, not giving up on a past he’d rather die than forget, and refusing to surrender to any pain that would stop him from moving forward. In the same sequence, because Chihiro’s words are the same as are in Iori’s heart, we also see the bit of her and Samura running up the hill, back in the direction of the hospital, with the bag full of food they made for Inori.

Chapter 86:

Iori flashes again to her mother’s last smile, enjoying the food her daughter and ex-husband made together for her, and this is one of the things that she holds against Samura for his abandonment – that he took these treasured memories away from her with no regard for how much they mean to her.

It’s revealed that the sword master, in his imprisonment, has been sustained entirely by magical life support – he hasn’t eaten food in eighteen years. This serves to underscore his profound isolation: How alone has he been? Well, he hasn’t had even so much as the brief human contact of having a plate of food – food that was grown, harvested, and prepared by human hands – shoved through a grate by an unspeaking guard. That’s how alone he’s been.

Chapter 88:

Bitty!Kiri is hungry in flashback; Samura and Uruha scramble to fulfill the request lest they get annihilated by her grandfather/their swordsmanship master.

Chapter 89:

Hokuto is introduced hanging around the sales counter of a small tobacco shop, albeit one with an enormous storefront façade. It mostly advertises and displays cigarettes, but there is a drink machine on the left as well, albeit not one Hokuto is paying any attention to.

Hatshaku is continuing to enjoy his tea/coffee.

Bathhouse Quest 2, Chapter 92.1

Sojo’s continuing adventures in getting the right drink to top off his bath. I imagine his hangup on fruit milk exists to strike a more comedic tone for his Bathhouse Quest chapters, but it is interesting all the same, to ponder whether he drank sake at that luxury bathhouse he was introduced in because he likes fancier drinks in fancier surroundings, because he being mindful of his reputation at the more observed upscale places like that but would drink fruit milk there if he could, or if the literal only reason he didn't have geisha bringing him fruit milk is because it’s not on their menu.

Chapter 93:

The other Hishaku sorcery that has to do with eating things, and the much more disturbing one: Bingo eating people to power his dancing lion summons. That particular magic is warping other otherwise positive associations right and left, too, not just the food themes! The lion dance, called shishi-mai in Japan,[21] is a New Years’ festivity classically performed for good luck in the coming year and driving away evil spirits; being “bitten” on the head by the lion is particularly lucky and folklorically brings good health. Shishi-mai is also used in some Shinto ceremonies, wherein it’s called shishi kagura or shishimai kagura to distinguish it from the more popular/secular type. Kagura (for any who haven’t read this about Kagurabachi’s title!) is a ritual dance performed for the gods, used (among other things) for purification and oracular insight. So, Bingo eating people (and particularly Bingo biting off people’s heads – er, top halves) via a lion dance mask is obviously invoking all kinds of symbolism that was never intended for violence, death, and least of all cannibalism. You might compare it to someone in a Santa Claus outfit beating a victim to death with a wrapped present.[22] In any case, it’s somewhat unclear whether Bingo’s sorcery can only be powered by human flesh – maybe any sort of meat would suffice, or maybe he can eat whatever he likes so long as he’s eating lots of it! Maybe he filled up at a diner beforehand but combat applications of his sorcery burn through a lot of his energy reserves and he’s gotten used to refilling with the calories that are available, even if they’re not the calories he’d like. He’s pretty clearly accustomed to eating people, in any case, doing it with a jaded and apathetic air while reminding Uran for the umpteenth time that no, they don’t taste good.

21: Lion dances are most famously and visibly Chinese, though they're theorized to have originated elsewhere. Bingo’s is clearly based on the Japanese version, though; the Chinese lion heads are much furrier and more fancifully colored, while the Japanese ones have more of a lacquered wood look.

22: Not least because I wouldn’t be surprised if it reads as similarly shlocky to a Japanese audience. And if the eventual anime adaptation scores this scene with ominous traditional flute and drum music, you can add in “while ‘Silent Night’ is playing on the soundtrack” to the Santa Claus analogy above.

Chapter 97:

The person serving as the core for the Kamunabi’s force field is a nexus through whom the ambient spirit energy the building absorbs is transmuted into the building’s controllable magical barrier. The first step to being able to serve as this nexus is to swallow a certain sorcery-infused scroll and then survive the next four months of physical and metaphysical changes. It’s grueling enough that the Kamunabi has one person do it for ten years at a time, after which they retire with money enough to keep them in leisure for the rest of their lives. While there’s no indication that doing this takes years off of one’s life, given the whole “loss of several organs” thing, one has to imagine that a chunk of that money is going to funding the kinds of diet, medicine and medical equipment that allow a person to survive with e.g. no liver. In that sense, “eating” the scroll is basically doing the opposite of every goal you would normally want “eating” to serve—filling you up, promoting your physical health, tasting good—on top of putting a pretty serious crimp in your social life for the foreseeable future.

Chapter 98:

In the hospital ward, Hagiwara has been barely touching his food, too listless and self-loathing over the deaths of four-fifths of his squad to be much concerned with survival – not actively trying to starve himself to death, but not bothered by the prospect of it, either. A few bites of fish and rice, a nibble of dessert, and that’s all he can manage before running out of volition for it.

His first combat encounters during the invasion, perhaps naturally enough, are the dude who’s been overeating on people and the kid who swallowed the back-up vessel scroll.

Chapter 100:

What may well be the first time Azami saw Chihiro following Kunishige’s death happens at some manner of café setting, definitely not someone’s house.

Shiba, we find, has been assigned to the sushi joint swordbearer protectorate, though in neither this nor the flashback above does anyone seem to be eating anything.

Chapter 102:

Shiba’s big solo evacuation feat starts here, and while most of what we see of his jaunts will be office surroundings or the train – appropriate to the very downtown, city-center location the fight unfolds in – the first place we see him rescuing people is a restaurant, some urban joint with biiiiig glass windows to watch the city go by. A coffee cup thus serves as the focal point to emphasize the shattered normalcy rather than some item native to white collar office environs or transport hubs.

Chapter 104:

Yura’s flashback to his lost life as a normal person with a beloved wife/fiancée is set – where else would you expect by this point? – in a small kitchen, with a visibly younger Yura finishing up the preparation of a meal[23] his partner says smells delicious. There’s a carafe and a single glass of tea or juice (where they just going to share?) on the table, which is in the kitchen again rather than a separate dining room. While Yura doesn’t flashback directly to this moment again, it is the obvious preface for the climactic scene when he finally answers Chihiro’s question from their Rakuzaichi encounter. Chihiro’s grief and Yura’s rage stem from the exact same sense of loss, and that loss is represented by the same image: a small kitchen, a table, togetherness with a loved one, sharing a home-cooked meal.

23: Looks like he’s draining oil from a pan-fried dish into their sink.

Chapter 106:

For what is I think the first time since the very beginning of the series, we find Chihiro, Kunishige and the fishbowl separated from each other – that is, all three are present in the room, but rather than being unified (or indicative of a lost unity, as with the trauma sorcerer’s vision), they’re specifically on different wavelengths. The angle has changed so that the fishbowl is no longer giving the illusion of being on the kitchen table between them, but rather is clearly visible as sitting on the cabinet beneath the window, whereas the table is situated in the middle of the floor. Chihiro is sitting at the table like he always has, a carafe and a glass on the table and ready to be shared, but Kunishige isn’t sitting with him anymore. Rather, he’s pulled the other chair away from the table to instead park it at the window, where he’s propped an elbow up on the cabinet and is staring moodily off into the outside world, not talking about or even looking at the fish, and noticeably facing away from his son – and, of course, away from his his son’s open textbook. It’s a visual signifier underlining how disconnected Chihiro and Kunishige are where matters of the war and in particular Soga Akemura are concerned. Kunishige is closed off and distant, not wanting to reveal the truth of his perspective with the person sitting at the table asking for a share of that truth – a literalized version of Sojo inviting Chihiro to sit at his allegorical table and share a meal with him and Chihiro refusing to do so.

One of the things Akemura whips out in an attempt to make Chihiro understand the nature of their relationship is that he bought Chihiro’s bib, back when he was still a baby. Not toys, not baby booties, not a pacifier or a blanket or a crib – a bib, the thing an infant Chihiro would have worn to eat.

Conclusion:

And that brings us up to date – the most recent chapter as of this publication was Chapter 111, though if anything food-related crops up in the cool-down chapter I expect us to be getting this weekend, I'll come back to this post and edit it accordingly.

Stats and Fun Facts:

The longest the series has thus far gone without including something worth mentioning in this piece is five chapters, its current stretch of 107 to 111. The next-longest stretch was four chapters, from 81 to 84, though even that did still have one tiny flashback I didn’t cover, to Samura and Chihiro’s conversation on Samura’s back porch where they’re having tea and snacks. I didn't bring it up because the food in that moment, while worth mentioning when we first saw it, is incidental to why it’s being flashed back to. Otherwise, the longest the series has managed go without a mention of something food-, drink-, or consumption-related is three chapters.

The longest uninterrupted run of chapters containing stuff for this piece to mention is five, Chapters 71 to 75, i.e. the extended Samura and Iori flashback and the material immediately following it, as well as the introduction of Kodoku/the Malediction.

The chapter with the highest number of individual points of culinary note is the very first one, with seven. Next up is the ultra-concentrated burst of sub-points in Hakuri’s flashback chapter with the icy girl, Chapter 35. After that, it’d be a tie between several five-point chapters.

Character Whose Arc Is Completely Inextricable From Food Themes: Char. Nearly every one of her character beats, positive or negative, even the ones after “her” arc, are about wanting food, being fed, the contrast between good meals and bad, and being exploited in dehumanizing ways that liken her to livestock and which connect to stories involving cannibalism in search of immortality. Chihiro almost certainly has the most food beats, but his connections to crafting and using katana mean his percentage of food-beats-per-appearance can’t reach the heights of Char’s.

Character Who Needs To Stop Being An Intractable Badass For Five Minutes And Eat A Damn Sandwich: Obviously there are lots of minor characters and side cast who are never shown around food nor do any kind of consumption even if it’s bad, but for sheer imbalance between number of appearances and instances of Eating A Damn Sandwich, I have to nominate Azami. My dude, you have got to get with the cafeteria program.

Total number of chapters that include something relevant to this essay: 59, meaning slightly more than half of the chapters the series has published period.

Total number of bullet points in the body of the essay: 122. This includes the sub-bullets of the three particularly food-intensive scenes (Sojo and mochi; Hakuri and the Icy Girl; Kyora’s Imagine Spot) as individual points but does not include the jokey stat points here in the conclusion. That averages to slightly more than one bullet point per chapter.

Yeah. I think maybe it’s a theme!

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

I hope you enjoyed this latest installment of Stillness’s Autism Drives Her To Tally Things Like An Old-Timey General Store Clerk For Funsies. If anyone remembers or spots something I missed, please comment or message me to let me know and I’ll add it in! I’ll be the first to admit that my attention was somewhat divided when I was doing the reread for this, as I was also taking notes for a more analytical project on Chihiro’s arc. I found a few examples myself of stuff I overlooked just in the process of formatting this, so I’d not be at all surprised if there were others.

Also, I’d be curious if people would like to see continuing documentation on this topic, either on a chapter-by-chapter basis or as a major update once the series has e.g. another hundred chapters under its belt. If you have any thoughts on that, you’re welcome to share them also. I will, in any case, at least update this piece with any observations that crop up in however many aftermath chapters we get before it feels to me like the next arc is officially starting up, at which point I'll call this version of the piece complete.

If you want to throw some support behind further pieces like this, consider following or joining my Patreon. (You can find it and my Kofi page linked here.) While major pieces will always get posted here eventually, I do post to Patreon up to two weeks in advance. I also post deleted material, early drafts of in-progress pieces, stray notes and observations I take for myself during read-throughs that may or may not ever become posts of their own, and other such miscellanea over there.

Thanks for reading, everyone! Please join me in eagerly anticipating the first time the series shows Soga Akemura eating real food for the first time in nearly a generation. Also someone ask me about my fanfic idea involving him cooking for the Hishaku.

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