My friend, my mochi
I took a Japanese class when I was fifteen years old. My ADD-addled brain probably figured it’d take me about three weeks to learn how to play video games in Japanese. I think it may have also had something to do with the fact that I was into the totally awesome speed metal band Sex Machineguns. Anyway, I met a whole host of interesting people there: another dude who was out of his depth who’d one day become one of my closest friends, a Chinese guy who loved pop music and had a twin brother who loved the WWF (now WWE, I suppose), a cute blonde girl who loved Pocky. I also met a kid who we’ll call Ryan who loved Japan. He ate, drank, and breathed Japanese culture. He made me watch a bunch of anime, most of which I didn’t dig (although there was the occasional quality series— only then did I see Cowboy Bebop, for example, and another one called Weiss Kreuz, whose homosexual undertones only became apparent to me years later. Ryan’s homosexual undertones became obvious much sooner than that, but I suppose that’s another story). He also showed me a bunch of his imported Japanese games, which I didn’t understand, because I wasn’t paying attention in class, and, even if I were, I doubt they’d have taught us enough by then.
One day Ryan and I went to our town’s “Chinatown,” which was about half a block across. There was a dim sum place, a Pan-Asian grocer, and a place with weird karaoke DVDs. He treated me to a mochi (I had an allowance of two dollars a week, which I only actually received about once a month when my parents remembered and had money, so I tended to make friends with kids who could buy me things. Manipulative? Maybe a bit). I got to pick a flavour, so, in my idiot cloud of “whatever the fuck,” I picked red bean. Now, this wasn’t a bad pick. I still love red bean bubble tea to this day. It tastes like those pink wafer cookies. Sort of.
The problem with theis mochi was the texture. It wasn’t unpleasant; quite the opposite, really. It was too pleasant. To the touch, it was soft and smooth and squishy. In my mouth, it was similar. For lack of a better word, it tasted cute.
I couldn’t handle it. I felt as if I had just eaten a little kid or a Pokemon or something. I had just eaten something that felt and tasted cute. The guilt, not the mochi, gave me a stomachache. I felt sad that it was gone. I was sad that I no longer had my mochi companion to ride with me on the bus. I wanted to hld and poke that foodstuff more than I wanted to eat it. We could have grown old together. Me, with my wrinkles; he, with his decades of now-sentient mold. By the way, I WAS fifteen at this point. I don’t even think I had started with weed yet.
To this day I can’t handle the texture of mochi in my mouth. No matter the flavour (I’ve tried green tea, red bean, and some other brown one) or the size (I had full-sized and bite-sized) I feel pangs of guilt and angst and regret. I don’t feel them when I eat beef, or lamb, or chicken, or even when I went to the aforementioned dim sum and ate a little octopus who looked like a cartoon character; no, I have only ever felt this way about a processed ball of sugar-powdered rice. Because of the way it felt in my mouth.
