A Family Supper

Kazuo Ishiguro is an English and Japanese author who is most well-known for prizewinning novels such as The Remains of the Day (1989) and Never Let Me Go (2005), the latter of which was adapted into a film in 2010. “A Family Supper” is a 1983 short story that was originally published in a volume of Ishiguro’s works, titled Firebird 2: Writing Today.

The short story begins when an unnamed narrator returns to his homeland of Japan after years abroad in California. After his father picks him up from the airport, the narrator learns how his mother died two years prior. She died from eating fugu, a species of poisonous blowfish caught off the Pacific shores of Japan. The blowfish contains two sacks of poison that must be carefully removed during preparation, or the poison will spread through the fish and kill those who consume it. Due to the need for expert preparation, fugu is often eaten as a delicacy. According to the narrator, there is no way to determine if fugu has been prepared correctly. Ishiguro writes, “The proof is, as it were, in the eating” (1).