The little karaage, one of the most popular snacks in Japan, is a delicate and intricate version of fried chicken that is a staple across the country. This delightfully crunchy treat is so beloved that every year, hundreds of thousands of people vote in a country-wide competition to determine which karaage shop serves the best ones. While shops from massive metropolises like Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka should be dominating any large-scale contest, it's shops from one small town, Nakatsu City, located in the Oita prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu, that typically garner the most awards.
The rest of the iPhone video documents my mother’s bustling kitchen on the eve of the big holiday meal. My other son is eating Cheerios, but my father and sister are making the family version of kartoffelklösse, the German potato dumplings my sister and I have cherished since we were kids. She’s dropping rounded balls of a simple dough — boiled potato mash, egg, salt and flour, kneaded together and then rolled into spheres the size of shooter marbles — into a stockpot of simmering water. My father is tending the boil with an old enamel skimming spoon, pulling the dumplings from the water once they float to the top and (in the classic family test of doneness) “wiggle-woggle” there for a bit.
At one point I pan to my mother, seated by the window. “Mom, what are you doing?” I ask, in faux-documentary mode.
“I’m cool as a cucumber,” she says, not participating, looking amused.
Off-camera, my sister laughs. The joke is that she’s not at all cool.
So this is both a mystery story and a coming-of-age tale, narrated from the dual perspectives of mother and son, Avani and 18-year-old Nik. The Things That We Lost travels back and forth between Avani’s adolescent years as a British Indian in 1980s London, and Nik’s experiences as a mixed-race young man in post-Brexit Britain. Decades apart, their experiences are mirrored: not much has changed in the racial prejudice they encounter.
Since the earth began, 4.5 billion years ago, there has been a cycle of night and day – a cycle harnessed by the rhythm gene. The cycle is broken by artificial light. Every living thing has a timetable. The timetable is a fundamental element of us all. Disrupting a fundamental element has fundamental consequences.
Eklöf, in a book composed of forty-three very short, accessible chapters, each of which could be read as a free-standing essay, illustrates many of those consequences, building a compelling case against our colonial expansion into and trashing of the night. He tells us about clownfish, whose eggs will hatch only in the dark (no dark, no clownfish); about moths that use the moon for navigation and are disastrously disorientated by bright lights; about insects being drawn in vast numbers to cities and the consequent effects on pollination; about newly hatched turtles, programmed to head west to reach the sea, scuttling instead towards the promenade; about the birds you’ve heard singing in the middle of the night, whose reproductive cycles go haywire in the perpetual day; and about coral reefs imperilled because the synchronous release of the eggs and sperm of coral organisms is dictated by the cycles of the moon, which is now often outshone by LEDs. When it comes to humans, Eklöf looks at the association between artificial light and sleep deprivation, obesity and depression, and between night shifts and (particularly hormone-related) cancers.
One season my stomach shrank
from staying in bed for months
so hungry. When bears hibernate,