The Restaurant of Love Regained (2008) is set in a rural village in Japan
in contemporary times.
The narrator is 25-year-old Rinko – but called Ringo. She returned home one
evening from her part-time job in a Turkish restaurant to an empty apartment.
All her furniture, clothes, precious possessions and her Indian boyfriend of
three years had all gone. ‘There was no pain; no discomfort,’ but she loses her
voice. She headed straight for the bus station to go to her to her mother’s
village that she left 10 years before.
Ringo’s mother, Ruriko, lives in a village with an ageing population of
less than 5,000, with her partner, Neocon, president of a concrete company.
Ringo had never known her father – she was a love child. In fact, her name,
Rinko, means love child. Ringo, the name she prefers, means apple.
In her mother’s village, ‘surrounded by mountains, the ocean, rivers and
fields – all treasure troves of ingredients.’ She decides to open her own
restaurant: ‘not a cafe, not a bar, not an izakaya,
but an eatery.’ And not just any eatery. She would serve only one pair of
customers a day – with a meal of several courses according to their desires,
and prepared over days with love and care.
Ringo names her restaurant The Snail. Her childhood friend, Kuma, helps
her. He paints a tricycle blue, and adds a basket so that she can forage for
food amongst nature. She works night and day to prepare for her opening day,
accompanied by an old pet pig, Hermes, and Grandpa Owl, that hoots only at
midnight.
Kuma was her first customer. His meal was pomegranate curry. Her next
customer was an elderly woman who only wore black mourning clothes and walked
with a cane. Ringo made a ‘dinner with the power to bring the dying cells of
her body back to life.’ Days later, the woman shunned her mourning clothes,
wearing a red coat, a feathered hat, and peach lipstick. Rumour spread throughout
the village that ‘a meal at The Snail could fuel magic and provide the
sustenance to make dreams come true.’
But not everyone welcomed Ringo with open arms. The novel describes each
customer, or couple, and the meal prepared for them. Each time, Ringo would
watch their reactions from behind a curtain in the kitchen. What does she prepare
for a young girl, Momo, in love with Satoru? What does she cook for a man who
was the heir to a farm whe doesn’t want? What does she feed an anorexic rabbit?
Or her mother and her mother’s partner?
The story is simply told, delighting in the description of the food and the
process for its preparation, intricately involving aspects of her customer’s
wishes, and a touch or two of her own thoughtful inspirations. Behind every
meal is a back story. None more profound than her mother’s secrets, which are
revealed as Ringo prepares her meal. And in her mother’s secrets are the
answers to Ringo’s childhood and the father she has never known.
MARTINA NICOLLS is an international
aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of
Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet
(2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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