Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown: Recipes and Stories from the Birthplace of Chinese American Food

For Katherine Tamiko Arguile, the Japanese food her mother cooked was a portal to a part of her that sometimes felt lost in the past. In Japan, food is never just food: it expresses a complex and fascinating history, and is tied to tradition and spirituality intrinsic to Japanese culture.

Exploring the meals of her childhood through Japan’s twenty-four sekki (seasons), Katherine untangles the threads of meaning, memory and ritual woven through every glistening bowl of rice, every tender slice of sashimi and each steaming cup of green tea. With rich, visceral prose, vivid insight and searing emotional honesty, Meshi(‘rice’ or ‘meal’) reveals the culture and spirit of one of the world’s most beloved cuisines.

Born and raised in Tokyo, Katherine Tamiko Arguile is a Japanese-British-Australian arts journalist and author. She migrated from London to Adelaide in 2008, where she now lives beside the sea. A graduate of Cambridge University, she has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide. Her award-winning short stories have been published in anthologies in the UK and in Australia and her debut novel, The Things She Owned, was published in 2020