San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Niki Nakayama: A Chef’s Tale in 13 Bites
Written by Jamie Michalak and Debbi Michiko Florence; illustrated by Yuko Jones (Farrar Straus & Giroux; 40 pages; $18.99; ages 4-8)
“You can’t.” This is a warning Niki Nakayama often hears from parents, teachers and even fellow chefs, according to this cleverly told story about how she comes to open a restaurant in her native Los Angeles to serve kaiseki. Thirteen small chapters, or “bites,” correspond to the 13 courses in that very special Japanese meal, traditionally created only by men. Born in 1974, Nakayama dreams big, works hard and experiences kuyashii, Japanese for the feeling of defiance triggered by doubters. “I’ll show them,” Nakayama repeats throughout this neatly illustrated tale. She does indeed, as perhaps the world’s only female kaiseki chef. In 2019, her restaurant garners two Michelin stars. This fine biography focuses on how one audacious woman honors her heritage, beats back sexism and pursues originality in dishes designed to foster laughter and love.
Susan Faust is a member of the Association for Library Service to Children, most recently serving on the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award selection committee. She was a librarian at Katherine Delmar Burke School in San Francisco for 33 years.
From politics to public health, the past few years have furnished us with countless reminders that life is strange and volatile. The bizarre, droll stories in Kate Folk’s first book would be satisfying to read in any era, but they’re particularly well suited to this one.
In “Out There,” Folk’s protagonists — young women, mostly — are beset by ambulatory chatbots, anthropomorphic buildings and apocalyptic emergencies. It’s not hard to understand why Hulu is adapting her stories for the screen. Toggling between pathos and farce, Folk, who lives in San Francisco and was a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, writes witty, cinematic fiction that merges familiar scenarios with uncanny menace.
“The Void Wife,” maybe the book’s funniest story, focuses on Elise, a Midwesterner who flees to the Bay Area as an unexplained force lays waste to the planet. The recently discovered “void” is a “belt around the globe” that widens by the hour, extinguishing all life and leaving behind, well, nothing at all. Humans can’t stop it, so millions have embraced the notion that the void is, as one character says, “a straight chute to heaven.” Elise doesn’t believe this, but she can’t persuade her flinty mother to take evasive measures. When her mother likens it to a bad storm, Elise matter-of-factly replies, “It’s not a tornado, Mom. It’s a curtain of absence that negates everything it touches.”
In San Francisco, Elise meets a man who promises her a spot on the cruise ship he purportedly owns. At sea, Robert says, they’ll be able to dodge the void. But Robert promises way more than he can deliver. A wry character study of a woman who keeps it together in exceedingly tough times, “The Void Wife” is also a deft satire that takes aim at religion, COVID truthers and
Silicon Valley bluster.
The stories that bookend the collection — “Out There” and “Big Sur” — are about Bay Area women who, in this bewildering era of artificial intelligence, don’t know whether they’re dating people or “biomorphic humanoids” known as “blots.” Flummoxed by awkward, suspiciously polite might-be blots — one of them gives his dinner date a 3-foottall sunflower — Folk’s protagonists begin to see sketchy behavior as evidence they’re dating actual men. One guy asks his new girlfriend to sleep over but “pretend (she doesn’t) exist” because his roommates might hear her. “It was a little degrading,” she says, “which I took as another promising sign.”
In three stories, houses take on disturbingly human characteristics. One place has walls that crack open unless they’re constantly treated with expensive lotion; another’s floorboards have sprouted “a man’s head.” Showcasing Folk’s ear for halting, deadpan dialogue — “It seems like now there’s the matter of like. Human rights,” a character says of the floor head — these are skillful parodies of smart-home technology and real-estate fetishization.
Once or twice, in her effort to foreground wild scenarios, Folk builds her narratives around relatively forgettable protagonists, sidelining her most promising characters. The lotion-craving-house story centers on a philanderer who has destroyed his marriage. His mother, based on a few brief mentions, sounds more interesting. A onetime Berkeley “radical,” she “now lived in Argentina with her younger boyfriend, a retired soccer star who modeled in billboard ads.” Alas, she’s only alluded to, never a presence in the story.
Will this iconoclastic cougar make an appearance in the novel that, per her website, Folk is writing? We can hope. For now, let’s savor Folk’s winning debut, a book that capably captures the lunacy of the moment we’re living through.
By L.A. Taggart
Rebecca Scherm’s “A House Between Earth and the Moon” grapples with a gaggle of redhot current issues: income inequality, surveillance, capitalist overreach, AI, cyberbullying, gun control. She packs them all into the powerful rocket engine of climate disaster — the biggest, baddest issue of all — and launches the whole shebang into space.
It’s a rocking ride. The novel is propulsive, captivating, touching, funny — and utterly terrifying. It’s so frightening because this future world becomes so vividly, devastatingly real. Set in 2033, the near future, “A House” is also set in near space: 220 miles up, on Parallaxis I, the first luxury space station designed for longterm habitation. It’s a home between the Earth and the moon that will provide safe haven for billionaires escaping the horrific fires, heat waves, drought, mass shootings, mudslides, hurricanes and resource scarcity of the planet.
But first, Parallaxis has to be assembled. Enter the scientists, engineers and astronauts building the beta stage, and the doctors supporting them. Today’s construction timelines, of course, always get delayed — but imagine builders in space. Zero-G design has so many unexpected stumbling blocks: what to do with all that space dust, how to move couches with muscles weakened from living without gravity, how to come up with material to construct couches in the first place, and how to make a decent cup of coffee. (The last task proves impossible.)
California writer Scherm earned praise with her debut novel, “Unbecoming,” a psychological
A House Between Earth and the Moon thriller about an art heist. Here, she skillfully brings alive a large cast of characters, including Alex, a research scientist trying to create a super-algae that can gobble carbon to correct global warming yet who is heartsick over abandoning his wife and two children; his daughter, Mary Agnes, who seeks revenge on her former crush, a fellow teen, who took advantage of their burgeoning friendship to use her face in a deepfake sex tape released to their high school class; Rachel Son, one of two sisters who founded Sensus, the all-powerful, all-knowing maker of ubiquitous phones that track users’ every move, word and vision; and Tess, a Stanford grad and brilliant social scientist specializing in predicting human behavior. Tess doesn’t want to sell out to Sensus but can’t say no to the research opportunity from a
Book Passage presents Rebecca Scherm in conversation with Edan Lepucki: Virtual event. 5:30 p.m. April 6. Free. www.bookpassage. com corporate giant with access to users’ mind’s eyes.
When contact with the planet is cut off, the residents of Parallaxis can only gaze down at Earth, imagining the stories: “They watched in horror as an extratropical cyclone appeared to ravage the northeastern United States and eastern Canada, and they despaired of what they could not see beneath the clouds.” They are powerless witnesses to destruction, unsettlingly parallel to our current place, imagining results of climate change.
For all of the future’s technological innovations, though, Scherm predicts some things won’t change: Teenagers will make dumb decisions even if all the guidance in the world is only two blinks away; vanity and shame will continue to misdirect the best intentions; and love and forgiveness remain the qualities that make us human, as well as our greatest gifts to each other.
Daisy Pitkin’s book “On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union” is a strange hybrid: part memoir, part history of American unions, part passionate call to action. It’s also poetic, stirring and odd (we’ll get to the moths later).
In the early 2000s, a young Pitkin, a collegeeducated white woman from a working-class Ohio background, was sent to Phoenix by the Unite union to help organize the workers (mostly Latinas) in the industrial laundries there. In addition to long hours, poverty wages and mechanical dangers, the workers on the “soil sort” line sometimes found “syringes and scalpels, sometimes body parts wrapped in the linens.” They were daily exposed to all manner of human excretions and forced to rinse and
reuse the flimsy rubber gloves the company, Sodexo, provided. It was grueling work managed by a company that preyed on poor, undereducated, immigrant labor.
Early in the organizing, Pitkin meets Alma Gomez García, a soil sort worker eager to help organize a union. The rest of the book is addressed, like an elegiac letter, to Gomez García, a middle-aged Mexican woman who eventually becomes something of a labor “rock star” and Pitkin’s dear friend and organizing partner. Together they refer to themselves as “las Polillas,” the Moths.
The moths. Pitkin is admittedly
On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union a bit obsessed with them. It starts with her dreams, in which “Every cell of [my] skin is carpeted with moths. Every inch graywhite-brown. Scaly. Dusty. Fluttering.” This all before Arizona experiences an “extraordinarily large flight of miller moths,” the kind of infestation that forces you off the road because your windshield is opaque with their remains, during their first year of organizing.
Alternating chapters in “On the Line” are called either “Las Polillas” or “Fires,” and in them we get not only the grueling story of trying to unionize Alma’s laundry, but also the history and mythology of moths and a study of women in labor movements from the silkworm strikes in Lyon, France, in the 1830s (moth-related) to the shirtwaist strike, known as the Uprising of the 20,000, in 1909 New York to modernday struggles in farmwork, textiles and laundries.
While Pitkin does sometimes succumb to an insidebaseball approach to labor history (the acronyms alone are dizzying), the narrative is strong enough to pull the reader through the legal rigamarole and union infighting and into a more nuanced exploration of what solidarity truly means, why some people are driven to fight for what’s right, and what it means for a white woman of relative means to “organize” working-class women of color.
In the end, Pitkin entwines these various threads into a heartfelt and persuasive argument for organized labor now more than ever. The epitaph in her book is from author and organizer Jane McAlevey and reads, “Unions are such a pain in the ass, really. Anyone who has dealt with a union understands. … But unions, Americans may finally be coming to realize, are absolutely essential to democracy.” This could be the elevator pitch for “On the Line.”