A bowl of gyūdon, for years a symbol of Japan’s deflationary spiral, is the lunch of choice for time-poor office workers on a budget, even after the chain – which has about 1,200 outlets across the country – raised the dish’s price in 2021 for the first time in seven years.
But the enthusiasm with which they demolish bowl after bowl of the salty, satisfying dish masks an unsettling trend for its staple ingredient: the Japanese are eating less rice than at any time in their history.
This book reminds you, more often, of why readers cared about her in the first place. She’s a dry yet earthy writer, in touch with moods and manners, with an eye for passing comedy. (One character mistakes Burt Bacharach, on television, for Jeffrey Epstein.) She is a fine appraiser of socioeconomic detail. (The nouveau riche and their pineapple doorknockers!) She takes notes on her species, as if she were a naturalist observing robins. She pries at the mystery of life. There’s a strong feeling of convergence in her best stories.
Wittgenstein wrote that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language,” which is to say: It’s not about what you say, but how you say it. Manazir Siddiqi seems to have taken this to heart with “The Centre,” a novel that knows that whether you’re trying to place an errant foreign word or unlock a dark secret behind a pedagogical miracle, context is key. This is a book whose many delights and horrors are unlikely to be lost in translation.
Lipsky’s book is a project of maximum ambition. He retells the entire climate story, from the dawn of electricity to the dire straits of our present day. It’s well-trod ground, but Lipsky, a newcomer to the climate field (he is best known for “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” a memoir set on a road trip with David Foster Wallace), makes it page turning and appropriately infuriating. He says it up front: He wants this to be like a Netflix series, bingeable.