when i was cooking japanese curry last night i remembered a scene from an ayako miura novel, where a mother, asking her daughter's boyfriend what dish he most liked, and receiving the reply "curry rice", frowned disapprovingly to herself: "low-class food". in fact, everytime i eat japanese curry that scene would come to my mind. i began thinking about the story again tonight, and since i'm quite sure most people have not read the book, i wanted to describe it here for you. published in 1964, miura's first novel, it became a bestseller in japan. i did a thematic study of the novel for my sec three research project, which is why i'm especially fond of it, although since then i have never read it again. the general plot will be accurate, i dare say, though i'm not sure the details will be.

a japanese family. the husband is a very prominent doctor in a hospital. his wife develops feelings for his up-and-coming colleague, a young eye specialist, who had removed a cataract for her earlier. the younger man, a don juan type, is quick to perceive this, and comes to the house one day making overtures to her. she succumbs to his seduction at first, allowing him to caress her and to kiss her neck, but changes her mind and fights him off. at that point, her young daughter walks in on them, and although she doesn't understand the sexual implications she knows that something is wrong, that the doctor is a "bad man who's bullying mummy". the flustered woman cries no, no, nothing's wrong, darling, run along now, play outside for the afternoon. and the girl storms out of the house. later that same day, the child will be found murdered by a brook not far from home. the wife is wrecked with guilt. if i hadn't received my lover and sent the child out of the house, this would never have happened. at the same time, she feels herself the victim of unfair fate. afterall, she had stopped herself. can the price of just a few kisses be death?" her grieving husband notices the lovebite on her neck, and learning from his son that his colleague had been here that afternoon, swelled with rage. why, he thinks, i'm being cuckolded, and the callous woman had sent our daughter out to be killed while she was making love to someone else. he does not, however, accuse his wife yet.

at this point, the murderer turns himself in. not a maniacal serial-killer, but a menial labourer, whelmed in poverty, with a wife recently dead, trying to raise a baby that he can barely care for or afford to keep, and driven half-insane by his sitation. he had left home to get away from the baby, and had met the young girl by the brook. at first they strike up a conversation, afterwards perhaps because she began to cry, reminding him of his crying baby at home, he throttles her and leaves her in the snow. the murderer is taken into custody. his baby girl is taken into a home, and the husband is summoned to the police station and told this much. not long after, a perverse thought came to the husband. we'll adopt a child. not any particular one, but the child of the man who murdered ours. he explains to his friend, a well-connected man who is able to arrange the adoption, that this is an exercise in supreme forgiveness, "although we must not tell my wife, you know how women are." his true intention is to punish his wife for the affair he imagines she has had. he plans to let his wife raise the child, love the child, and when she is grown, to announce her true identity, so that his wife may know what it is to lose a child a second time, and to have wasted her life caring for the daughter of the very man who had murdered their own daughter. with this astonishing, black premise, the novel takes off.

the girl grows up to be sweet, intelligent, and beautiful, his wife loved the girl as her own, and the son adores his little sister, being extra nice to her on account of her being adopted. the husband, on the other hand, mindful of his original purpose, will not permit himself to be more than cold to the child, much to the puzzlement of the rest of the family. but the extremely lovable child eventually wins him over, and as he grows to love her, so does he come to forgive his wife. revenge is now out of the question, he is ready for a happy-ever-after with his family. the child is thirteen or fourteen when his wife stumbles on his early diary, in which he had recorded his dark reasons for adopting the girl. the discovery fills the woman with contempt for her husband, and having now learnt her identity, turns her anger upon the child. she does not confront her husband with this information, but prepares to upset his victory, to fling back at him when the moment of revelation arrives - i have known all the time, you have not succeeded in your revenge. from this point on, her relationship with her husband deterioriates, while her treatment of the girl becomes increasingly unkind. in a plain reversal of the first half of the book, her husband becomes critical of her cooling treatment of the daughter, while the wife, angrily denying this, regards her husband as hypocritical and reacts with more malice towards the girl. the girl is of a sunny disposition, and bears these changes bravely and cheerfully.

additional complication: as the children grow older, the son becomes attracted to his sister. afterall, he muses, we're not real siblings, and there is no reason i cannot marry her. the parents do not like this development, ostensibly on the grounds of incest, but really because they, each privately, considers her parentage and are horrified that their son will marry a murderer's daughter. the boy, on the otherhand, becomes furious with his parents for this obstinacy. moreover, perceiving the growing chasm between his parents, and indignant for what he observes to be his mother's ill-will towards his sister, starts to rebel. now into her late teens, the girl meets a young man, to whom the mother is slightly attracted, and over whom she grows jealous of her hated daughter. (this is where the curry comes in) she makes advances on the young man; when spurned, out of fury and embarrassment, her hostility towards the girl reaches an unprecedented height. the family is now at dagger points. the incensed mother can no longer hold her hand, reveals her husband's revenge plan and announces triumphantly to all that the girl is the daughter of a common murderer, a madman. her plan backfires - the son stands by his sister, as does the young man, but the family is in an uproar. the girl however, takes this all very calmly. yes, i see, she muses, i am tainted by the murder my father commited, the very murder which has destroyed your family. she commits suicide to atone for her father's murder. (a sequel was written later, in which we see that she survives the attempt, and we see also the eventual rehabilitation of the family. but at the end of the first book - the novel ends on a description of the harsh winter outside the hospital where she is lying unconscious. i don't think miura had meant to write a sequel, nor that we were meant to expect she would live.)

in a final twist, we learn from the family friend who had arranged for the adoption that the girl he had given to them was not in fact the murderer's child. that child, shortly after being taken into a home, had died (or something, my memory isn't very clear on that). instead, at that time, a woman friend of his who has had an unwanted pregnancy sought his help in placing her child with a good family. the man, considering his doctor's family most suitable, but, curious to see if this "experiment in forgiveness" would really work, had given the child over without telling him of the switcheroo.

it is a terrifying story, of the destruction of a family, of revenge and deceit and mixed personal motives, culminating in the death of an innocent girl. (who really is one of the most likable characters in fiction, i think) i am not, incidentally, telling people to go out and read the book. it's nearly 1000 pages in the chinese translation. i was merely cooking curry.