Summary
Narrated in the past-tense by an unnamed first-person narrator, “A Family Supper” begins with an explanation of fugu, a variety of poisonous pufferfish served as a delicacy in Japan. The narrator comments that the fish is significant to him because his mother died after eating fugu.
The poison is in the fish’s sexual glands, which must be removed carefully to avoid the poison leaking into the fish’s veins. Most victims of fugu poisoning tend to spend the night rolling around in pain and are dead by morning. Fugu became popular in Japan after World War II, and people would perform the gutting at home and invite neighbors to the feast. Stricter regulations were eventually imposed on the sale and consumption of the fish.
The narrator is living in California when his mother dies, and doesn’t learn of her death until he returns to Tokyo two years after it occurred, his relationship with family having become strained. On the ride from the airport to his father’s home in the Kamakura district, at the end of a sunny autumn day, the narrator learns that his mother had always refused to eat fugu, but she’d been invited to a feast by an old school friend she hadn’t wanted to offend. Their conversation is punctuated by long pauses. The narrator’s father is intimidating-looking, with a strong jaw and angry black eyebrows. He is proud of the pure samurai bloodline he is descended from.
While waiting in the tatami sitting room for the narrator’s sister, Kikuko, to arrive, he and his father discuss the collapse of his father’s firm. His business partner of seventeen years, Watanabe, killed himself because he couldn’t live with the disgrace of the failure. His father says he is in retirement now because business has changed, and he doesn’t enjoy having to deal with foreigners, doing things their way.
The narrator’s father says he is glad his son has returned to Japan, and that he hopes it will be more than a brief visit. He says his mother always welcomed him back, despite his upsetting behavior. He now believes the narrator has no evil intentions in his mind, and that he was “swayed by certain influences. Like so many others.”
Kikuko arrives, the sight of her older brother making her giggle nervously. She calms down as they discuss her living in Osaka to attend university. Soon conversation becomes as stilted as earlier, when it was just the narrator and his father. Their father leaves to make supper, and Kikuko visibly relaxes. They slip on straw sandals on the veranda and take a walk so Kikuko can smoke a cigarette, a habit she’d been hiding from their father.
While walking, Kikuko excitedly reveals that she has a boyfriend, Suichi, who wants her to go to America with him so they can hitchhike. She says she isn’t sure if she wants to leave her Osaka friends behind, and she isn’t sure if she wants to spend so much time with Suichi. The narrator says he understands her hesitation.
They reach an old well past the shrubs. Kikuko skips ahead and asks if the narrator remembers how he used to say the well was haunted. He says he does. They peer over the well’s side. Kikuko says their mother told her the narrator hadn’t seen a ghost but the old woman from the vegetable store. The narrator says their mother told him the same, and that the old woman had even confessed; she’d been taking a shortcut through the family’s garden. The narrator says he imagines she would have had trouble climbing the walls to get in.
Analysis
Ishiguro starts “A Family Supper” by establishing a sense of verisimilitude, writing the narration in a first-person voice more commonly found in personal essays rather than fiction. The narrator’s matter-of-fact voice casually notes that his mother died from eating pufferfish, a statement delivered in the same tone as the facts about the fish’s historical place in Japanese culture and its biological particularities.
The sense of emotional remove from the facts the narrator reports is carried forward when the essayistic voice transitions into a scene between the narrator and his father. With little embellishment, the narrator’s father informs his son that his mother has been dead for two years. By way of explanation for his ignorance of the major event, the narrator simply says that his relationship with his family had been strained at the time. With characteristic emotional restraint, the narrator expresses no incredulity or upset at the fact his father didn’t bother to notify him that his mother had died.
As the scene progresses, it becomes clear that the narrator inherited his restraint from his father, who has almost nothing to say when commenting on his business partner’s suicide. The father is a proud and traditional man, out of place in a new Japanese society that has been shaped by the foreign influence of the United States in the post-WWII era. He cites this cultural influence as a reason not to bother starting a new business, and also gestures to it when he speaks of “certain influences” that swayed the narrator toward an independent lifestyle that disappointed his parents.
With Kikuko’s arrival comes the theme of a growing tension between the father’s traditional Japanese expectations and his children’s desire for a modern, Americanized lifestyle in which personal liberty is prized above familial obligation. The narrator notices how restrained and uncomfortable Kikuko seems around their father, an obliging facade that drops as soon as Father leaves the room. With the oppressive father figure out of earshot, Kikuko sneaks a cigarette in the garden and reveals to her brother that she is thinking of going to America, just like he did.
After the siblings spend a moment engaging in somewhat frivolous conversation, the ominous presence of grief inserts itself between the siblings. Rather than address their mother’s death directly, Kikuko and the narrator discuss the ghost the narrator once saw by the well in the garden. Kikuko evokes the mother’s memory by citing the explanation she gave for who the narrator saw, but the narrator’s and the father’s emotional restraint is a trait also shared by Kikuko. Like them, she avoids a direct confrontation with her grief.
