Getting What You Want

Tonight I read two books: Seconds, by Bryan Lee O’Malley and Just So Happens…, by Fumio Obata. Fundamentally, they carry very similar stories of responsibility, dreams, self-interest and expectation. Where they diverge comes from their main characters. Their goals may align but how they handle the adversity is both disparate and infuriating.

In Seconds, we are introduced to Katie Clay, founder and former head-chef of the titular restaurant. Katie was a master of her craft, well respected and charming. And yet she felt the thing that gave her notoriety was not her own. Seconds was opened with friends, and so while Katie found success, she could not say she accomplished it alone. It was too small to fit her dreams, and thus she dives into Lucknow, a risky venture that has so far gone nowhere. The contractors are constantly hung up and it’s sucky her coffers dry. Along the way she’s made plenty of personal allowances, from dodging her ex to sleeping with her protege. And the impetus of the story starts there, when a magic mushroom gives her the power to rewrite her past.

Throughout the book, Katie keeps running, ironically, from the ownership of her actions. After all, she can fix any mistake with a mushroom! We watch her spiral, as time travelers do, to find the perfect timeline, one where she gets everything. Every time something is not the way she wants, she doesn’t look for a way to make it better — she merely eats a mushroom and erases the problem from existence. Katie had two desires: her own restaurant, and Max, the love of her life. Or really, who she expected to be the love of her life. When she starts abusing her power to try to have both, her plans constantly crumble when she realizes loving Max means sharing her dreams. That was never the plan. Her inability to compromise feels like a dogged stubbornness that’s supposed to be charming but instead feels selfish. Max is propped up as someone with his own desires and dreams but we never get a look at them, only that somehow, he’s in the way of Katie’s. Her selfishness is the core of Katie’s disingenuous apology.

Naturally, Katie learns by the end that her original timeline was the best timeline for her, despite the problems she had at the time. Unfortunately by then she’d reduces her life to a barren wasteland. And yet, all she had to do was apologize for abusing her opportunities, for breaking the rules. A genuine apology means taking ownership of your actions, and I posit that Katie does not do that. When she’s managed to fuck over the entire world, when she has no chances to turn back time, when she has no more chances to break the rules, that’s when she says sorry. That’s not genuine regret or character growth. That’s just regretting that she didn’t get away with it. It’s like a kid who lies and when presented with the truth, says, “Oh, well then I guess I did do those things. My bad, I promise to be better!”

In Just So Happens…, we meet Yumiko, who’s struggling with her dreams as well. She feels like she’s compromising her identity in order to pursue them, and yet every time she confronts that missing part of her, she only finds a cynical lens that pushes a facade of traditionalism. The book opens with Yumiko already living in London for the past ten years, having left Japan in her past. Unlike Katie, she’s found a little more success as a designer, and she’s already engaged, with friends that care for and about one another. And yet, even with that time in London, she still feels like an outsider, like she hasn’t made London her own, and wonders if that’s even possible in a city where you can disappear into any crowd.

Where Katie took no responsibility for her actions, Yumiko can’t burder herself enough. Her story is rife with permissions: her father’s permission to go to London, her father’s permission to visit her mother, her heart’s permission to cry at her father’s funeral, her mother’s permission to get married. Yumiko asks these questions, even after she’s already decided, because she knows she must decide for herself, for her self-interest, and yet each thing she’s asking for is counter to the expectations she feels that her family and her culture demands of her. She’s brave enough to make the decisions but can’t escape that feeling that she’s doing something wrong by being selfish. So still, she must ask. It’s out of respect, but also out of the maturity to know her decisions will affect others — something Katie doesn’t show until it’s too late.

Why is it okay that Katie gets away with her selfishness? In all semblance of reality, she would not be able to flip a switch and be done with it, reset back to where she started. But this is fiction, and I can’t deny that she at least felt the consequences of her actions. It’s not wrong for Katie to dream, to want perfection, but damn if it isn’t hard to root for her when her methods are deceitful, irresponsible and without respect to the people around her.

Deceit wracks Yumiko’s conscience as well. She describes her previous returns to Japan clinically, finding herself out of place and time. She’s forgotten how hot it gets; she’s become a foreigner to her homeland. Throughout the book, the traditionalism of the Noh (masked) theatre haunt her. At the heart of the theatre is suppression, of movement, of emotion. Its goal is purity in practice. Strip away the excess and show only what’s needed. Be efficient. These visions clash with Yumiko’s cynicism, seeing the heavy hand of strict Japanese tradition when faced with modern Japanese efficiency: paying your way for a better name in the afterlife, the clockwork precision of a funeral home’s schedule, a monk speeding on his motorbike in order to make his appointments. Yumiko recognizes the dichotomy in it and casts it against the dichotomy in herself.

Rather than accepting that cynicism, though, Yumiko feels guilt: she’s ran away from home, just like her mother divorced her father; she hasn’t cried at her father’s funeral; her fiancée is white. She’s bucked tradition to pursue her dreams. She’s cut out part of her identity, and only accepts it at the book’s end. Contrarily, Katie cannot eschew her individuality because it so closely ties to her dreams, and therefore fights hard to have her love and her restaurant at the same time. She has the luxury of fighting for it because she doesn’t feel the weight of responsibility to the people in her life, past or present, her ex included. When life threw expectations her way, she wrote them down and tried to deny their existence. Trying to live with it, trying to reconcile that conflict, took too much courage.

It bothers me that Yumiko finishes her story by figuring out her Noh mask and blending into London’s harsh, messy bustle. It bothers me that for her, taking ownership of her actions means giving something up. It’s too real, when for Katie, she gets to have her cake and eat it too. All she has to do is apologize for not seeing it before, and everything’s looking up for her from there forward.

If an apology could fix selfishness, we’d all take our friends and family for granted. If that’s all it takes to get what we want, our dreams wouldn’t cost anything more than our honesty. And I refuse to believe that’s okay.