Before I became a parent or moved in baby-saturated social circles, I equated “fussy” with a mild negative affect, picturing a sour-faced infant emitting occasional cries of displeasure. Surely a fussy baby existed in the same emotional octave as an adult who’s fussy about punctuation: a low simmer of complaint, not a rolling boil. But in conversations with pediatricians, postpartum care providers, and fellow parents, I heard the term applied to a huge swath of the affective spectrum. Sometimes it meant the fleeting irritation I’d imagined. Other times it meant incessant, tortured screaming—what I would have called “completely losing it,” or “having lost it so thoroughly that having had it at all is only a dim memory.”
“Boy crazy” was what people called it. “She was so boy crazy,” I would hear about my girlfriends. I never heard the reverse, that a boy was “girl crazy.” Girls having crushes, sneaking out at night to have fun: It seems innocent enough. But in my small, conservative town, a “wrong” choice at a young age could cut girls off from their future dreams, leaving them mired in despair.
Growing up in the ’90s in Clinton, Arkansas, all that my best friend, Darci Brawner, and I dreamed about was getting out. “I want to see new people and new places,” I wrote in my journal when I was 12. I wanted to move to California but would take “any state besides Oklahoma or Mississippi.” We wanted careers, we wanted to be rich and famous, we wanted to be far away. Boys and sex would only stop us, catch us, or so my mother had warned.
For more than a thousand years, the spicy, pungent Korean cabbage dish known as kimchi was fermented in earthenware vessels called “onggi.” Now, a pair of mechanical engineers have unraveled why these ancient Tupperware, made of mud slapped and pressed by hand and spun on a pottery wheel, are exquisitely suited to fostering the growth of probiotic microbes that transform humble cabbage into a culinary superstar.
The Japanese title, “Ten to Sen” (literally, “Points and Lines”), is more accurate in terms of the action, or rather the meticulously planned lack of action, within its pages. Nor does “Tokyo Express” quite express the sheer magnitude of the story. I say lack of action, but that’s not to say the book is dull or slow-moving. Far from it. Often cited as Matsumoto’s masterpiece — quite a feat considering the 1958 book was his first published novel (and at the age of 40, too) — it’s a twisting tale of obsessively planned details and the logic, not to mention perseverance, it takes to unravel the truth.