Japanese Breakfast singer-songwriter looks back in emotional memoir
“How cyclical and bittersweet for a child to retrace the image of their mother. For a subject to turn back to document their archivist,” Michelle Zauner observes in her memoir “Crying In H Mart.”
“Cyclical” and “bittersweet” describe Zauner’s journey well as the 32-year-old writer and musician documents her mother’s untimely death from cancer while also examining issues of early adulthood, identity and family.
Zauner most frequently shares both literal and figurative descriptions of the food her Korean mother enjoyed with her as a device for demonstrating both connection and disconnection. The elaborately described dishes range from delicacies enjoyed at restaurants in Seoul to meals Zauner’s relatives idiosyncratically and sometimes secretly prepared to classic foods Zauner learned to cook by watching YouTuber Maangchi.
Sometimes bibimbap is just bibimbap, a jjigae just a jjigae, but when Zauner reaches for greater meaning in Korean food, her prose dazzles. Her realizations about the variety of processes for making kimchi start off like a literary science lesson: “Left alone, a head of cabbage molds and decomposes. It becomes rotten, inedible. But when brined and stored, the course of its decay is altered. ... It exists in time and transforms. So it is not quite controlled death because it enjoys a new life altogether.” And then she just as adeptly relates it all to learning to live without her mom: “The memories I had stored, I could not let fester. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. ... The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes.”
Tension exists below all the glorious depictions of cooking and food, however. Zauner’s father is white, and his different tastes, expectations and life experiences sometimes wreak havoc with his relationship with both his daughter and wife. A Korean woman, Kye, brought in to help shoulder some of the burden of caring for Zauner’s ill mother soon begins to irritate with her abilities to soothe and bond in ways our protagonist can not. And cancer practically becomes a character, too, thwarting family plans and causing unpredictable and heartbreaking suffering.
While Zauner’s writing is fluid and thoughtful throughout, her narrative gets bogged down at times in the minutiae of the day-to-day of the year spent putting her career and personal relationships on hold to focus on savoring the last bits of time with her mother. Events, even as emotionally fraught as they often are, can begin to feel a bit list-y and repetitive. And while the focus is clearly, and rightly, on Zauner’s relationship with her mother, her father and boyfriend-then-husband end up a bit flat on the page. Ditto Zauner’s role as auteur behind the music group Japanese Breakfast, a band whose 2016 album, “Psychopomp,” sprung lyrically from many of the same life experiences covered in “H Mart.”
Yet, Zauner’s tour-concluding appearance with Japanese Breakfast in Korea allows for a lovely, poetic denouement. Family relationships are refreshed and renewed, Zauner finally gets unburdened time with her new husband to explore her mother’s home country, and culinary delights abound. Probably not coincidentally, some of that same peacefulness and joy shines through on the recently released Japanese Breakfast album “Jubilee,” which could stand as a bright companion to the heavier, grief-filled and frank-yetbeautiful “Crying In H Mart.”