Rice pudding and macaroni gratin

Rice pudding and macaroni gratin is May Kasahara’s image for the gap between what people expect the world to do and what actually happens. By imagining rice pudding mix emerging from a microwave as macaroni gratin, she makes contingency visible as a change hidden beneath an ordinary surface—and suggests that an inexplicable result can feel more real than a neat causal account. The image becomes a compact statement of her resistance to the demand that life be logical and consistent.

The Covered Bowl

In a sleepless letter to Toru Okada, May begins with what she sees as a common belief: people treat the world or life as a place where everything is, or ought to be, fundamentally logical and consistent. When something happens, they explain it by pointing to a preceding cause, and others accept the explanation as though the connection had settled the matter. May objects that “A is like this, so that’s why B happened” does not explain what occurs between the cause and the result. The gap is the point: people may agree on an account without being able to see the process it claims to explain.

Her example is deliberately plain. Someone puts instant rice pudding mix in a bowl, switches on the microwave, waits for the bell, and lifts the cover. The expected pudding appears, but the closed appliance conceals whatever happened in between. May proposes that the mixture might first have become macaroni gratin in the darkness and only then turned back into pudding. The possibility is absurd on the level of kitchen routine, yet it gives form to a serious uncertainty: an observed result does not make the unseen passage to it transparent.

The imagined substitution also reverses the ordinary hierarchy of explanation and surprise. May admits that macaroni gratin would shock her, but thinks she might feel relieved as well, because an outcome that breaks expectation would seem, in some ways, “a whole lot more real.” Consistency, in her analogy, can be less a proof of how the world works than a presumption people preserve because the usual result is familiar. The unexpected dish exposes that presumption without replacing it with another definitive account.

A Life Without a Straight Line

May uses the image to describe the shape of her own life, which she cannot arrange into a stable sequence of causes and consequences. She questions how she could have been born to parents she regards as boring and unlike herself, and why she did not become like them despite being raised by them. She also cannot explain why other people began to dislike her, insisting that she had been living in the usual way and had not done anything wrong. These questions remain unresolved; the metaphor does not supply a hidden explanation for them.

Instead, May remembers events as disconnected turns. She met a boy with a motorcycle and they had an accident, but, as she recalls the sequence, one thing did not naturally follow from another. It was like lifting the microwave cover to find something she had never seen before. Later she stopped going to school and spent time at home, but before meeting Toru in the back alley that summer she had worked conducting surveys for a wig company. She cannot remember why she chose that work, and wonders whether the accident affected her memory or whether its psychological shock led her to conceal memories from herself, as a squirrel hides a nut and forgets where it is buried.

The wig company extends the metaphor from life’s unpredictable events to the unlikely attachments that grow from them. May cannot say why wigs, rather than stockings or rice scoops, became important to her; nevertheless, the survey work gave her a fondness for wigs and led to work at a wig factory. What appears in retrospect as a defining interest has no clear origin in her account. The chain is real in its consequences, but its links do not add up to a logic she can recover.

The Chain That Reaches Toru

May traces this uncertain sequence toward Toru without pretending that she can prove every connection. If she had not had the motorcycle accident, she probably would not have met him in the back alley. If they had not met, he might never have learned about the Miyawaki well; without that encounter with the well, he might not have acquired the mark on his face or become involved in the strange events that followed. Her repeated qualification that these outcomes are only probable matters: the chain offers a way to see how one life touches another, not a reliable demonstration that every consequence was inevitable.

That chain gives the household metaphor its narrative reach. A minor, poorly understood event in May’s life—the accident—stands at the beginning of a route that leads through her work and her meeting with Toru to the well, the mark, and the events surrounding him. She can lay out those connections after they have occurred, but laying them out does not resolve why they happened. The image therefore holds causality and randomness together: one event can have consequences without making the whole sequence logically transparent.

May’s imagined difference between two kinds of people sharpens the contrast. One kind inhabits a “completely logical, rice pudding place”; the other lives amid “hit-or-miss macaroni gratin.” She imagines that her parents, confronted with macaroni gratin in place of the expected pudding, would assume someone had used the wrong mix or insist that the dish was really rice pudding. In her account, they would preserve consistency by correcting the evidence to fit their expectations. May identifies herself instead with the person willing to accept the unexpected result as what it is, even without knowing why it appeared.

The Metaphor’s Limits and Meaning

The image does not claim that the world is simply chaotic, nor does May offer a rival system that explains every surprise. Its force lies in refusing to equate a plausible explanation with complete knowledge. The covered microwave stands for an interval that cannot be inspected; the food at the end of the cycle is visible, but the transformation remains inaccessible. For May, the ordinary expectation of rice pudding can therefore seem less secure than the shocking appearance of macaroni gratin, because the latter makes the limits of explanation impossible to ignore.

This is why the metaphor suits the form of May’s letter. She moves through questions, memories, guesses, and conditional connections rather than delivering a settled account of herself. She can identify the accident, the wig work, the back-alley meeting, the Miyawaki well, and Toru’s mark, but she cannot make their sequence feel necessary. The letter’s movement resembles the microwave image: details go under the cover of memory and return in an order that resists tidy explanation. Rice pudding and macaroni gratin names not an answer to that uncertainty but May’s insistence that the unexpected result belongs to reality too.