“Perfect selfishness”

“Perfect selfishness” is Midori Kobayashi’s name for a love that answers her particular, shifting desires with extravagant attention. In her strawberry-shortbread example, the beloved’s willingness to fetch a treat, accept its rejection, and try again matters more than reason or efficiency: Midori imagines love as the readiness to keep responding to her, not as a bargain in which care is withdrawn once it proves inconvenient.

The hunger behind the expression

Midori connects this idea to a childhood in which she felt loved somewhere between “not enough” and “not at all.” She describes herself as hungry for love and recalls that when she sought comfort, her parents pushed her away and complained about the cost. While still in primary school, she resolved to find someone who would love her unconditionally throughout the year. The phrase “perfect selfishness” therefore emerges not as a casual joke but as the adult form of a long-standing wish: to receive love so freely that she need not plead or ration her need for it.

The strawberry-shortbread test

Midori distinguishes her ideal from perfect love in the abstract. Her example is concrete: she tells a man she wants strawberry shortbread; he stops what he is doing, runs out to buy it, returns out of breath, and offers it to her. She then says she no longer wants it and throws it out of the window. The extravagance lies not simply in obtaining the food, but in the imagined sequence of attention, changed desire, and continued response. Even after the effort has been rejected, she wants him to recognize that he misunderstood her and to ask what she wants instead.

The desired reply extends the test beyond mere compliance. Midori imagines the man apologizing for having failed to anticipate her change of mind, then offering alternatives such as chocolate mousse or cheesecake. His willingness to absorb the inconvenience and try again is what she treats as proof of devotion. The discarded shortbread makes the scene deliberately unreasonable: the point is not that the request should be obeyed efficiently, but that care should survive the frustration of having obeyed it and still not satisfied her.

A personal definition, not a general rule

When Toru Watanabe questions whether this has anything to do with love, Midori insists that it does, while acknowledging that other people may not understand. She explains that for a certain kind of person, love begins with something tiny or silly—or does not begin at all. The example thus gives significance to an everyday, even ridiculous gesture: a small act can carry the emotional weight of being seen and cherished.

Midori also describes the difficulty of finding what she wants. She has been waiting so long, she says, that she may be searching for perfection; yet she immediately clarifies that she is not asking for perfect love. The distinction sharpens the expression’s meaning. Her standard is not flawless understanding but a particular kind of responsive devotion: someone should continue to attend to her, apologize when they miss the mark, and try to make amends.

Candor and vulnerability

The conversation is playful in its imagery but serious in its stakes. Midori knows her example sounds crazy to Watanabe, yet she does not retreat from it; she presents it as what love means to her and says she is telling him honestly what she believes. Her head rests against his shoulder as she explains, then she shakes her head and picks at a cuticle while describing how people take her candor for joking or play-acting. The gesture and the confession place the comic demand beside the vulnerability it expresses.

“Perfect selfishness” consequently names both a wish and a risk. Midori wants a love that will not answer her needs with a calculation of cost, but the shortbread story makes that wish difficult to satisfy: even lavish effort may be rejected, and the other person must be willing to begin again. The expression does not resolve that tension. It makes Midori’s definition unmistakably her own, and turns an absurdly small dessert into a vivid measure of whether love can endure an unpredictable demand.