1971

1971, called the “Year of Spaghetti,” is the year the narrator turns cooking into a solitary daily discipline. Its recurring meals give the calendar a private rhythm, while the phone call that arrives in December opens that routine to an uncertain human encounter. Elsewhere in the book, food rituals similarly expose the distance between outwardly orderly habits and what remains hidden beneath them.

The Year of Spaghetti

The narrator identifies 1971 as the year of spaghetti and describes himself as cooking it in order to live, then living in order to cook it. Steam from an aluminum pot becomes a source of pride; bubbling tomato sauce, a slender hope. The scale of the preparation is deliberately outsized: he buys a huge pot, a kitchen timer, unfamiliar spices, a pasta cookbook, and tomatoes by the dozen, then tries every brand of spaghetti and every sauce he can find.

Cooking fills more than the kitchen. Garlic, onion, and olive oil scent the tiny apartment, reaching the floor, ceiling, walls, clothes, books, records, tennis racket, and old letters. The diffuse fragrance makes the practice seem to have spread through the narrator’s whole life. Yet the meal itself remains insistently private: he is convinced that spaghetti is best eaten alone, though he cannot explain why.

Repetition and Solitude

Each meal follows a modest pattern. The narrator drinks tea, eats lettuce-and-cucumber salad, arranges everything neatly, and reads the paper at an unhurried pace. One Spaghetti Day succeeds another; Sunday begins a new Spaghetti Week. The repeated routine gives the year its structure without changing its essential circumstances. Its sameness is not presented as a problem to be solved so much as the chosen form of the narrator’s days.

Rainy afternoons sharpen the sense of expectation. Sitting down to spaghetti, the narrator often imagines that someone is about to knock. The visitor changes from one occasion to the next: a stranger, an acquaintance, a former high-school girlfriend, the narrator himself from a few years earlier, or William Holden accompanied by Jennifer Jones. These imagined arrivals give solitude a threshold, but do not alter the meal’s actual pattern. At the year’s end, the spaghetti strands are figured as having been born in heat, carried down the river of 1971, and lost; the narrator mourns them as the year’s vanished contents.

The December Interruption

At three twenty on a December afternoon, the narrator lies on tatami in a pool of winter sunlight, vacant and staring at the ceiling. The phone’s ring first seems like an unfamiliar memory slipping into the air; only gradually does it become unmistakably real. The contrast is striking: after a year defined by meals made and eaten alone, an ordinary call arrives as something almost difficult to recognize.

The caller is an indistinct young woman, the former girlfriend of a friend. By four thirty, the narrator thinks, she might have disappeared altogether. Their relationship began through circumstances in which the narrator had reluctantly helped bring her and his friend together. The call therefore introduces a person connected to the narrator’s past, but the evidence leaves the encounter’s subsequent course unresolved.

Food as Routine and Ritual

The book sets this solitary cooking against other food routines whose repetitions carry different social meanings. At a restaurant, the owner never appears before the staff; the manager delivers dinner to his room at eight every night on a hotel-style cart, then returns an hour later with the empty dishes. The ritual repeatedly removes the manager during the restaurant’s busiest period, and the owner’s meal is always chicken, regardless of the day’s recipe or the chefs’ attempts at variation. The narrator’s private repetition and the restaurant’s institutional routine both persist through sameness, but one is chosen solitude and the other an unchangeable workplace custom.

In another account, a couple on vacation in Singapore eat crab dishes at a small restaurant over four consecutive days. Their meals become part of an intimate holiday rhythm of beach visits, evening dinners, and lovemaking. On the final night, the young man wakes sick after eating crab; in the bathroom he sees that the vomited crabmeat is covered with countless tiny, moving worms. The discovery turns a pleasurable shared routine into bodily alarm, while his sleeping girlfriend remains unaware that they ate the same food. Across these scenes, food is never only sustenance: it can fill an isolated year, enforce a daily ritual, or reveal a danger concealed inside an apparently ordinary meal.

Time, Memory, and Interruption

The title makes a single year legible through one repeated act. Rather than recounting 1971 as a sequence of public milestones, the narrative measures it through shopping, cooking, eating, and the gradual passage from one Sunday to the next. The imagined visitors and the December call disturb that closed cycle in different ways: one set exists only in anticipation, while the other comes through the telephone as an actual interruption.

The year’s ending does not provide a resolution to the caller’s story. Instead, the phone’s arrival interrupts the narrator’s solitude at the precise point where the spaghetti of 1971 is already figured as having disappeared. The result is a contrast between what can be repeated and consumed day after day and the human contact that, once it appears, cannot be neatly folded into the routine.