Before I Ever Held a Knife
For three years in high school, I gave up almost everything that wasn’t a textbook. No time spent with friends, no long conversations, no meals shared for the sake of sharing them — just a desk, and the belief that if I studied hard enough, I would get into the university I wanted. Looking back, it was a life badly out of balance. But it was carried by one quiet promise I kept making to myself: once I got there, I would finally learn how to enjoy being with people.
That promise came true faster than I expected.
I moved to Tokyo that spring, into a one-room apartment barely big enough to turn around in. Most of my new friends were the same — first-timers in the city, each living alone for the first time. It made visiting each other absurdly easy. We were always just one door away.
One evening, it was my idea: six of us, six different cakes from a shop near campus, each cake cut so everyone could taste a little of all six. I don’t think I cared much about the cake itself. I wanted an excuse to spend time together, and this was the shape I gave it. What I hadn’t expected was how much that one small ritual — passing plates, comparing bites, arguing about which was best — did for something I didn’t yet have a word for.
We were also, that year, part of an a cappella circle, which meant we spent a lot of our time thinking about how to make very different voices sound like one thing. Some of us could really sing. Others were hopeless but showed up anyway. We argued for hours about how a group like that could ever sound good together. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but that question — how do you let different people stay different and still create something whole — was the same question I was quietly working out over cake, and later, over a shared pot of nabe.
The nabe nights were less polished than the cake ones. We’d talk about nothing in particular — circle gossip, what to sing at the next concert, who forgot their part again — but underneath the laughter, I think we were all filling the same hole. Living alone in a new city, however exciting, comes with its own quiet loneliness. Everyone wants somewhere to belong. A pot in the middle of a table, with six pairs of chopsticks reaching toward it, turned out to be a surprisingly effective answer.
Somewhere in that same year, I had my first girlfriend. We were both from elsewhere, both living alone, and our two tiny rooms became one shared routine — whoever’s schedule allowed it, we’d cook dinner together, just the two of us. We didn’t know yet how to spend time with someone that way; we were figuring it out as we went. But over those simple dinners, we talked about the future — I told her, half-seriously, that I wanted to start my own business one day. None of it required money we didn’t have. A home-cooked meal, eaten slowly, was enough to make the evening feel full.
What I understand now, and didn’t then, is that all of this — the cake, the pot, the two plates on a small table — was really about the same discovery. Eating together gave us a reason to talk, and talking gave us a way to actually know each other. I remember feeling, often, a little outmatched — one friend could sing in a way I never would, another understood computers better than I understood almost anything. It was humbling. But it also made me want to become someone worth sitting at that table. I didn’t need anything expensive to make that happen. I needed a shared plate and enough time.
That was the real thing the exam years had taken from me — not free time, but the simple pleasure of discovering that other people are not like you, and that this difference is interesting rather than threatening. Sharing food gave that discovery back to me.
I think about this often now, standing at my own counter with a knife in hand. A sushi class, when it works, isn’t really about the fish. It’s six strangers — or a couple, or a family — gathered around one shared act, each of them a little different from the others, figuring out, plate by plate, how to make something together. It’s the cake cut into six. It’s the pot in the middle of the table. It’s the same question I first asked in an a cappella practice room: how do people who are different from each other end up making one good thing.
Long before I ever picked up a knife, I was already learning how to run this kind of table. I just didn’t know it yet.