Review: Bento Box in the Heartland

It seems I just can't get enough of food literature, because although today's offering is my third food-memoir this year, I have loved it every bit as much as the others. Savor this review, readers; it is the last before my wedding this weekend and a long honeymoon in the mountains.

Genre: nonfiction, food memoir

Plot: When author Linda Furiya was growing up in 1960s rural Indiana, her family was the only group of Asian Americans within 30 miles. Her unusual heritage brought about many struggles, but produced a story of family, culture, and most importantly, the food that shapes our identities.

Structure: Furiya's memoir is very loose; that is, it is organized on thematic rather than chronological lines. At the end of each chapter, to my delight, I found that Furiya chose to include a mouthwatering recipe she mentioned in the chapter.

Execution: There is definitly a Japanese aesthetic at play here. Furiya's stories are not happy, not exactly. There is an undertone of subtle sadness in every page, coloring every memory. Perhaps its because death marked her childhood frequently, and neither she nor her parents enjoyed a happy life. Although her early chapters were beautifully structured and had a nice roundness to them, toward the end they became both longer and more abrupt. One recipe was repeated twice, though through printer error or author's intention I do not know. Also, jumping around chronologically worked in terms of storytelling, but sometimes it left me very confused and aching to fill in the gaps. Overall, it lent a sense of privacy to her memoir I think was unintended, as if she was saying, "I will tell you this much but no more."

Theme: Japanese Americans, World War II, Japanese food, 1960s Americana

Read this if you enjoy Asian food at all, this will leave you itching to break out your sushi mats.

4 out of 5 stars

Other works:
Furiya, a newspaper columnist, also wrote about her time in China in her book How to Cook a Dragon.

If you liked this, you might also like:
Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love
Nicole Mones' The Last Chinese Chef
Katherine Darling's Under the Table