The topic of food and eating has been theorized extensively by feminist, cultural, and literary critics who have created scholarship on the connections between subjectivity, the body, and food[1]. Positing that eating is always a social, cultural and psychological act tied to both gender and race, these theorists often maintain that food is the ultimate cultural marker. It therefore follows that many feminists and post-colonialists connect food to theories on difference and “otherness” and often use food metaphors to talk about race[2]. This theoretical link between food and race is also often explored thematically in the literary works of racialized authors and those who write from subject positions at a tangent to dominant communities. Self-identified “ethnic” or “hybrid’ authors, these writers[3] explore links between memory, race and eating by writing about the experience of being identified by and “othered” through food. For instance, in both of Hiromi Goto’s novels, The Kappa Child and Chorus of Mushrooms, eating is a gendered and racialized act that constantly informs how the characters see themselves emotionally and psychologically. Food, race and identity are slippery categories in Goto’s work, and she purposely mixes them up to highlight their constructed nature; eating is part of how the characters explore their backgrounds, tell their histories, and come to terms with racism. Although The Kappa Child and Chorus of Mushrooms portray two very different experiences of growing up Japanese-Canadian in the prairies, they are both stories that deal with the horrors of racism and the healing power of friendship and family. One is the tale of a cucumber-chomping protagonist with an alien pregnancy, the other the tale of a rodeo grandmother and the granddaughter she communicates with telepathically. Full of magical and mythical creatures, the strongest connection between The Kappa Child and Chorus of Mushrooms is the way that each novel connects food and eating to race, language, and healing. Food is important to how the protagonists – nameless in The Kappa Child, Naoe and Muriel in Chorus of Mushrooms – see themselves culturally and emotionally. For instance, in The Kappa Child the nameless protagonist’s relationship to eating parallels her acceptance of her own “otherness” as a Japanese-Canadian woman and her acceptance of her “alien” pregnancy with a kappa child. On the other hand, eating in Chorus of Mushrooms is a way for both Muriel and her grandmother Naoe to access a shared heritage and history and communicate wordlessly. Always a gendered and racialized act, eating in both novels connects to how the characters push against and play with the boundaries of their identities and, in turn, come to terms with themselves and their families.

The Kappa Child and Chorus of Mushrooms are rich with descriptions of food, eating and the body that are emotionally charged and unsettling. In The Kappa Child, for instance, the way that the protagonist eats is linked directly to her emotional state. Starting with the first family meal at Easter and ending with the last meal with her friends Midori and Genevieve, each incident of eating in The Kappa Child is a catalyst for some experience of exclusion or acceptance, and taken as a whole these incidents chart the process of healing in the novel. This timeline – different than the novel’s “real time” which jumps around constantly – highlights themes such as family, sexuality, immigration, and violence and acts as a psychological chart for how the protagonist feels about herself based on how she relates to food. Goto’s choice to put Easter dinner as the first meal is significant. Easter dinner introduces the protagonist’s dysfunctional Japanese-Canadian family, her feelings of isolation from them, and serves as a starting point for the novel’s exploration of her childhood. It is also the first time that the protagonist and her sisters stand united against their violent father, an act that begins the protagonist’s seclusion, depression, and eventual acceptance of herself and her family. In other words, it is both traumatic and inspirational. Further, how the family behaves and what they eat at Easter directly plays into their identity as a family and as “Canadians.” As Uma Narayan states in “Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity, and Indian Food,” acts of eating are often “connected to complicated and sometimes contradictory cultural meanings. Food plays into national identity and establishes who is inside and outside specific groups” (161). As the family eats a turkey they would have “killed for” (25) when children and celebrates Easter as a way to negotiate (not so successfully) their identity as a “Canadian family” they actually end up reifying their strangeness and leaving everyone uncomfortable. This awkwardness is reflected most obviously in the description of the meal, as the food is depicted as both horrifying and appealing. For instance, the protagonist’s sister, PG, is described as shoving food in her mouth and eating “dark meat from the thighs of the turkey like meat is going extinct” (25) while the other sisters all pick at their meals and “giggle for no reason” (25) and their mother, Okasan, simply drinks a martini. Their disjointed eating and the meal’s discomfort ends, however, when another sister, Mice, accidentally spills turkey on their father’s lap and he turns on the table in a fit of rage and destroys dinner – a violent act made all the more horrifying through the detailed listing of the messy food all over the floor: “turkey carcass, stewed cabbage rolls, buns, sashimi, sekihan, potato salad, peas and carrots. The hours of work Okasan has spent, wasted on the floor” (27). While this type of violence is obviously disturbing, the father only turns on the table after the sisters literally stand up united and stop him from hitting one of them. Therefore, dinner manages to be inspirational and disgusting at once as the sisters, who usually “slip into [their] childhood roles” (28) every time they are home, actually stand up to their father; a move that begins their transformation from infantile adults into capable people by the end of the novel.

Easter dinner triggers the protagonist’s memories of growing up in an immigrant family in Alberta and begins The Kappa Child’s exploration of the protagonist’s childhood. Most of these memories involve descriptions of food and eating juxtaposed with incidents of violence or racism, as in the “eggs in the car” memory where the protagonist is hit by her father after hiding eggs in the car because she hoped they would turn into chickens (178). One of the most disturbing memories in the novel is a series of events that starts with the protagonist’s family arriving in their new town and ends with her and her sisters having extreme diarrhea and covered in feces. The family comes to town for the first time to view what will become their new farm and have a “celebration” lunch of fried chicken bought by their father that has actually gone rotten. Sitting outside in the hot prairie sun and forced to eat the drumstick off the chicken even though she is disgusted, the protagonist describes how she tears “off big chunks with [her] colossal teeth and gulp[s] them whole so [she doesn’t] have to feel the texture” (36) of the chicken and to stop herself from gagging. While this experience is described as physically disgusting, it is also psychologically disgusting and the protagonist’s food loathing here is linked to the anger and shame she feels for herself and her family throughout the novel. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection provides a possible framework for further exploration of the connections between eating, race and abjection in this instance. Thinking about food and eating “can help to reveal the rich and messy textures of our attempts at self-understanding, as well as the interesting and problematic understandings of our relationship to social others” (Narayan 161), and Kristeva’s theory of the abject offers a useful way of thinking about the relationship between eating, abjection, and the social stigmatization of racialized bodies in Canada – themes Goto explores thoroughly in The Kappa Child.

In “Powers of Horror,” relying on the work of Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger (1969), Kristeva outlines her theory of abjection. To summarize, she states that every society is founded on the construction of boundaries; every society is founded on the abject, on that which is “radically excluded” (Kristeva 230). Abjection, then, might be loosely defined as the negative attempt to establish the boundaries of self by expelling that which is not-self with the primal scene of abjection seen as birth, separation from the mother’s body and movement into the Symbolic order (Kristeva 231). The child must separate from the mother and to do so abjects her in order to imagine herself as the autonomous, independent subject idealized by Western society. In fact, this construction relies on making the maternal body abject, so that the “womb is cursed” and the “birthmark is denied” (Witt 274). The child, however, knowing that she was once part of another, realizes the impossibility of complete autonomy and in attempting to abject the mother must also “spit herself out” (Kristeva 232). Since Kristeva posits that subjectivity relies on both an “identification and separation” (Kristeva 226) with the maternal body in infanthood and a replaying of this identification and separation throughout our lives, abject rituals and taboos continue throughout life. The infant-turned-adult must continue to “spit out” herself and abject the things in life – feces, blood, vomit, food – which call into question the borders of her body and the (illusory) autonomy of her identity. In other words, abjection is both the desire for separation – from the maternal, from the body, from things, words or foods that seem filthy or scary – and the realization of the impossibility of this separation. This impossibility is due in part to the fact that the abject is in-betweeness and “does not have, properly speaking, a definable object” (Kristeva 229). Rather, it is what draws us “toward the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 230) and is the very “want through which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded” (Kristeva 232). The abject is what threatens stability and identity. It is “neither good nor evil, subject nor object, ego nor unconscious, nature nor culture, but something that threatens the distinctions themselves” (Oliver 70/71); it calls into question both the identity of the subject and the unity of the social order.

While the fundamental abject threat for Kristeva is the mother’s body, she also theorizes that abject rituals of separation are repeated over and over again in different forms on various levels of culture. For instance, she sees language, law, and morality in Western culture as all based on abjection, and food taboos and loathing as the most basic form of abjection. Eating, like other bodily functions, is an act that attracts and repulses because it highlights our attempts to keep our bodies clean and autonomous. Like all abject acts, eating calls into question the borders of our bodies and the ways we see ourselves; abjection points to the instability of our identities. Therefore, the abject actually suggests the “fragility of the system through which privileged identities such as whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality are maintained” (Witt 268). This means Kristeva’s theory can offer a useful way of thinking about the relationship between the abject and the stigmatization of certain bodies (for example, Japanese-Canadian bodies) and certain practices (such as eating) in connection to identity. With this in mind, the previously explored scene – where the protagonist eats rotten chicken – takes on new significance. The protagonist’s disgust at the “black threads of blood” on the drumstick and the hot chicken that grows “like tapeworms” (36) in her stomach reflects the idea that food loathing is “perhaps the most elementary and archaic form of abjection” (Witt 266). Since abjection is the process of psychologically “spitting out” the things in life that call into question the borders of our bodies and, therefore, our identities, this moment of loathing, like the violence at Easter dinner, is connected to how the protagonist copes with herself and sees her family; her abject reaction to the food is an abject reaction to her father as well, as she realizes she must pretend to enjoy the chicken or risk shaming her father, and by extension herself. This connection between eating, family and shame is further solidified when, after their meal, the family is “othered” and humiliated by a white shopkeeper as soon as they enter their new town. Frustrated and embarrassed, father strikes his wife, Okasan, in front of the shopkeeper in response; an abject reaction compounded by the fact that he has not only bought rotten food for his family, but is now humiliating himself and his family in response to racial humiliation by another[4]. This double embarrassment for the family is then followed by the sisters having extreme diarrhea in their pants, an experience that solidifies the connection between eating and shitting and points directly to abjection and the tenuous borders of the body. Since one way of seeing the abject is in “food, what is taken into the body, along with excrement, what is expelled from the body” (Oliver 1992: 71), this sequence of events is the most obvious example of abjection in the novel. This scene is fascinating, disgusting and humorous all at once, especially when Slither, the protagonist’s most perfect sister is “sobbing, soiled panties and polyester pants all stink-shit goo” while “fudge trickle[s] down [the protagonist’s] stocky thighs” (72).

Many of the moments in The Kappa Child where food and shame coincide often also involve the protagonist trying to negotiate her racial identity and understand what it means to be both Japanese and Canadian in a context where Canadian usually signifies “white.” While it is a leap to suggest that abjection can be simply or neatly applied to theories on racism, or to suggest that all taboos and biases stem from abjecting the maternal body, abjection can be “expansively construed” (Witt 268) in an attempt to understand the processes of “othering” on a psychological level. In both The Kappa Child and Chorus of Mushrooms, abjection plays an important part in how the protagonists negotiate their racial identities, and the “ethnic” body as abject is shown repeatedly in both novels, especially in those instances where the protagonists engage in confessions about themselves. For instance, in The Kappa Child the protagonist recalls a memory of her mother scolding her for calling their lunch meshi (rice with egg) even though that is exactly what they are eating. Okasan tells the protagonist not to say meshi because “that’s what low-class people say” (110), and conflates class and race with shame over using the word meshi. Here, embarrassment over being Japanese, being low-class and eating meshi are mixed together, and instead of connecting meshi to something “Japanese people eat” the mother relates meshi to something “low-class people say.” Since eating “recalls with force the elemental nature of class, gender, sexuality, nation” (Probyn 23) Okasan’s comment highlights the slippery border between eating and speaking in the novel and reveals the way food, race, and language interweave. The nameless protagonist responds to her mother’s sharp words by licking her “salty upper arm and [gnawing] on the firm flesh hard enough to leave bruises. Almost like beef” (111). This reaction points to the ambiguous border between what is food and not-food and the impossible identification/separation the protagonist faces with the meshi, her race and her family. As the protagonist gnaws on her “almost like beef” arm she encounters the place where “hegemonic meaning collapses” (Witt 266) and the line between being/ingesting/speaking Japanese and being/ingesting/speaking herself is blurred. Abjection is a desire for separation with a feeling of the impossibility of that separation, and the protagonist’s “gnawing” is a good example of just how difficult that separation is and of the complicated lines in the novel between race, body and food.

The Kappa Child jumps between reality, myth, memory and dreams and it is in a dream that one of the most important acts of eating occurs – eating the mother. At first this dream, in which the protagonist’s father takes little pieces of her mother’s flesh and “ball[s] them up” (159) for the kids to eat, seems sickening in its overt abjection; the protagonist describes eating her mother as “something terrible happening,” that she can’t stop and can’t see and “no one else [can] either” (159). In fact, if seen as ceremonial rather than horrifying, this dream of ingesting the mother is psychologically essential to the protagonist’s movement away from abjection toward healing. Seen as an act of matricide that mimics Freud’s theories of patricide,[5] and plays with abjection by blurring the boundaries of mother and daughter, the dream ironically achieves the opposite of a typical totemic meal. It sacrifices the mother with ceremony in a way usually reserved solely for the father. The dream, therefore, can be seen to sacrilize the mother in a way that stands in direct opposition to the way the mother is often sacrificed without ceremony in Western society. As Amber Jacobs states in “Towards a Structural Theory of Matricide,” to identify matricide “means to identify its specific place [for the maternal] in the order of symbolic laws” (23). As the protagonist describes tasting her mother and it being “so good” that she “ate and ate and ate … faster, faster, more and more” (159) she creates that “specific” place within the novel and makes her mother into a totem symbol of power. Rather than simply relegating Okasan to the realm of the imaginary, this allows the protagonist to imagine her mother in a way that is psychologically empowering. In fact, it is only after this dream that the protagonist sees her mother as not only a mother, but also as a woman with her own desires. Further, after this dream Okasan (who is also contacted by “alien” creatures in the novel) starts her own life, leaves her abusive husband, and travels around America with a female neighbor looking for other “alien” abduction survivors. While the father fades away without ceremony in The Kappa Child, the mother becomes larger than life. This matricide allows the protagonist to produce “new ways of mourning, remembering, knowing and representing” (Jacobs 32); imagining both herself and her mother in a new way.

While eating in Chorus of Mushrooms is often more celebratory than in The Kappa Child, food plays an equally important role in Muriel and her grandmother Naoe’s stories from the beginning of Chorus of Mushrooms. The novel is framed as stories within a story, and Muriel (named Murasaki by Naoe) opens the novel promising to her lover to tell him/us a “true story” (2). The “true stories” that unfold are told by Muriel and her grandmother, who tell both their own histories and retell traditional Japanese myths in a way “in which teller and listener are mutually at risk, and where trust is responsible for the unique existence of each” (McCullough 151). The first story begins when Muriel is a child and her grandmother lives with her family on their mushroom farm in Nanton, Alberta. Muriel is unable to understand her grandmother since she has never learned Japanese because her mother, Keiko, refuses to speak it and her father has “forgotten” how. In response to what she sees as Keiko’s betrayal of her language and culture, Naoe refuses to speak English to the family even though she understands it, since English makes her “tongue [swell] in revolt” (15). So, Naoe and Murasaki begin Chorus of Mushrooms by speaking to each other with food. Unlike her daughter, Keiko, who Naoe disgustedly states has converted “from rice and daikon to wieners and beans” (13), Naoe finds her granddaughter more than willing to share Japanese treats with her and listen to her almost constant chatter. As Murasaki and Naoe hide in Naoe’s bed, eating salted squid and drinking sake, grandmother and granddaughter communicate through the smacking of their lips and the expressions on their faces. Muriel may not understand what her grandmother says to her literally, but as Obachan chews and speaks simultaneously Muriel understands her emotionally. Food and words are imagined as one when Muriel notices that “Obachan [Naoe] always chewed [the squid] like mad, words falling out with each snap of her jaw” (18). This concept of exchanging food for words continues as Muriel finds she is suddenly able to hear and speak Japanese and that food becomes the catalyst “for precipitating communication – in some ways magically” (Gunew 230). As Terry Eagleton states in “Edible ecriture,” food “makes up our bodies, just as words make up our mind,” so “if body and mind are hard to distinguish it is no wonder that eating and speaking should continuously cross over in metaphorical exchange” (207). In Chorus of Mushrooms, this “metaphorical exchange” is reflected most obviously when Naoe leaves home and Keiko becomes catatonic. Naoe leaves to re-think (and re-eat) her own identity, but her absence throws Keiko into a state where she is unable to speak or eat. Unsure of what to do, Muriel acts as a maternal figure to her mother and cooks Japanese food for her based on the telepathic advice she receives from her grandmother. Keiko only begins to speak again after she eats this food and effectively substitutes food for her mother’s presence and constant chatter. The fact that Muriel is the preparer of this substitution allows Muriel to also begin exploring her Japanese heritage and gain the pleasure of communicating with her own mother in a new way. In fact, Muriel finds a new and previously unknown emotional connection with her family as she cooks for them and they sit and eat, “no one saying a word, just the smack of lips and tongues” (153). The food they eat becomes an extension of Naoe and all she represents (excess, sensuality, pleasure), especially since it is Naoe’s voice that tells Muriel to go to the “oriental food store in Calgary” (134) and buy Japanese food – a trip that is one of the most obvious clues to how important food is to subjectivity in the novel. At the food store Muriel is told by the clerk (who acts as mythical food guide) that “eating is a part of being” (138) and is informed that her last name – Tonkatsu – means a “type of breaded deep-fried pork cutlet” (137). Considering the word does not even exist as a name in Japanese culture, and tonkatsu is a Westernized Japanese dish, the surname is an obvious example of how food, language, and body are mixed “in blurring profusion” (Gunew 231) in the text, a theme which reaches its apex when Muriel actually cooks and eats her own name. While it is possible to see this trip to the Asian grocery, and Muriel’s cooking, as a romanticized and essentialized attempt to connect with her “colour” or “culture,” this experience is not about claiming “an authentic Japanese identity” (Beauregard 59). Rather, it is about exploring the “possibility of finding nourishment and sustenance in a hybrid cultural/culinary identity” through re-creating a family ritual that connects “cultural and the culinary” (Beauregard 59) and sets the stage for a changed relationship between Muriel, her mother and Naoe.

The most traumatic incidents involving food in Chorus of Mushrooms are similar to those in The Kappa Child in that they often involve racial shame and fear of “otherness.” As a child Muriel eats so many Mandarin oranges – “Jap oranges” – one Christmas that her hands turn yellow. This makes her “laugh out loud” (92) and run to show her mother because she is as “excited as the time [she] had red shit from eating too many beets” (92). Instead of laughing, however, her mother drags her to the sink and scrubs her hands and arms with an SOS pad in fear that her daughter is actually “turning yellow” (92). While Muriel screams, her mother scrubs at her and mutters “Yellow … Yellow, she’s turningyellow she’sturningyellow she’s – ” (92). Completely panicked, Keiko only stops her violent actions when Naoe, who constantly chatters in Japanese and whose “voice is as constant as the prairie wind” (92), stops rambling. This “sudden silence after fourteen years of torrential words hits [Keiko] over the head like a concrete block” (92) and she ends up spending three days in bed recovering from her outburst. Keiko’s reaction to her daughter ‘turning yellow’ reflects “a kind of crisis in identity” (Oliver 71) that proves her identity as a so-called normal Canadian is very fragile. Kristeva theorizes that maintaining our tenuous identities as autonomous, independent subjects not only relies on abjection, but that abjection also points to the inherent instability of our identities. Since any subject formation that relies on exclusion points directly to the fragility of that formation, the implication of this part of Kristeva’s theory is that the process of abjecting the maternal body in infanthood and other instances of social abjection throughout life actually point to the fragility of the system through which privileged identities are maintained. With this in mind, Keiko’s reaction to Muriel “turning yellow” takes on new significance. Keiko’s panic reflects both the vulnerability of her identity as a “normal” Canadian and her realization of that vulnerability; she is terrified by anything that threatens the homogeneous “white” lifestyle she has created. As she states herself, “if you live in Canada, you should live like a Canadian” (189) and in Keiko’s world emigrating from Japan and being a “true” Canadian seem incompatible. In an obvious play on the old racist fear of a “yellow peril,” this incident recalls the slipperiness of identity and the inability to maintain any type of identity free of “peril.” Abjection “calls into question borders and threatens identities” (Kristeva 225) and in this instance Keiko actually abjects herself as she scrubs at her daughter’s arms and desperately tries to control the threat to her “normal” Canadian identity.

Naoe leaves her daughter’s repressive home and “endless evenings of tedious roast chicken and honey smoked ham and overdone rump roast” (13) near the beginning of Chorus of Mushrooms and hitchhikes across the country on a wild ride that ends with her entering a bull-riding competition at the Calgary Stampede as a rider named “the Purple Mask” (216). Self-titled the “best old woman you’re going to find for many years to come,” (111) Naoe and her stories are sensual and excessive. As Mark Libin states in “Befriending the racialized fiction of Hiromi Goto,” this excess is “a central concern in Chorus of Mushrooms” and is reflected in how “Goto punctuates her text with extravagant descriptions of tastes and odours and populates her novel with exorbitant characters” (103). Naoe is the most extreme character in the novel, and her speech, her sexuality, her food, and her ambitions are more than incredible. Mark Libin suggests this excess is a deliberate strategy to “disrupt Western conceptions of the racialized body” (103) and “self-consciously shap[e] the way that difference is articulated, addressed and displayed” (99). Naoe stands in direct contrast to other representations of racialized women (for instance, the especially quiet Naoe of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan[6]) and literally “talks back” to racist discourse on Japanese femininity. It is significant that Naoe’s excessiveness is shown through food and her aged and very sexual body, two things that are strongly connected to abjection. Naoe, with her maternal body, is overtly abject – both fascinating and unsettling – because she recalls the denied birthmark of the abject body. In fact, as Naoe eats, masturbates, and dances her way in and out of situations, she disrupts hegemonic order by drawing attention to her age and her sexuality and forcing readers to confront a grandmother who is supposed to be an example of “death infecting life. Abject” (Kristeva 232), but who is instead both magical and beautiful.

Naoe is a sexual subject who expresses herself sensually and erotically. One of the best instances of this is when she eats in Calgary’s Chinatown. After escaping Keiko’s “pork chops, steak, and macaroni and cheese” (49), she smells her way to Chinatown and states euphorically that it is time to eat. Naoe not only eats, but “drinks … sucks[s] … licking … chew and chew of … flesh” (148), as if consumed by what she tastes. This furious consumption is not only for her pleasure but “for Murasaki … for Keiko” (148) and is one of the more celebratory acts in the novel. This excessive and sexualized stuffing is linked to a sort-of maternal pleasure or jouissance, which fills the novel and is embodied in Naoe. Jouissance, defined by Kristeva as desire that is beyond signification, is the maternal pleasure that threatens to make the mother a subject rather than the object through which the infant becomes a subject; it both spurs abjection and, like abjection, threatens the order of the Symbolic. Since the idea of maternal pleasure is too much to bear in the Symbolic order, which operates through a phallogocentric economy that sees the phallus as the central instance of desire, we deny jouissance and imagine our mothers as sexless and without pleasure. However, jouissance ruptures symbolic language and is the trace left behind when we attempt to incorporate our mothers into the Symbolic through abjection. Naoe, who has supernatural and mythical abilities and who laughs, dances, and loves excessively, represents this rupturing. For instance, her jouissance breaks through the text when she masturbates in the greenhouse amongst the mushrooms:

Unheard yet heard, this echo, this “chorus of mushrooms,” not only refers to the title of the book, but also signifies a type of excessive fleshiness both the mushrooms and Naoe represent. Literally growing in “shit” in a moist darkness, the mushrooms are an abject symbol of the border between life and death, feces and food, yet they also symbolize Naoe’s erotic and earthy pleasure. Words and meaning become tangled and intangible as Naoe finds pleasure amongst the mushrooms and the “murmur murmur” of her body. As the text enters the semiotic realm, which Kristeva defines as the part of language that represents tones and rhythms, conveying the bodily experience of language, Naoe’s masturbation, and her joining the chorus of mushrooms, becomes a poetic example of jouissance and of maternal pleasure that is not only unthreatening, but rather a celebration of what is “unheard.”

The Kappa Child is obvious in the ways it moves towards healing. The nameless protagonist who is pregnant with a kappa child[7] and sees herself as “other” begins to accept both herself and her family and move towards healing as she accepts her pregnancy and her sexuality. As pregnancy is often thought of as one of the most basic models for how one relates to another (and therefore to oneself) in a loving and selfless way, it is no coincidence that as the protagonist begins to believe in her pregnancy she also begins to see herself in a changed way as a capable person. Further, her pregnancy forces her to change the way she relates to others, as she only bonds with her love interest Bernie, for instance, once she admits to her that she is pregnant and trusts Bernie enough to talk with her about motherhood. Kristeva theorizes that the maternal experience is a model of experience that is both bodily and intellectual and resides “beyond the masculine myth of a sociosymbolic world wherein true human connection can only be spoken as a utopic dream or place of origin” (Walsh 107). In fact, Kristeva’s work on pregnancy is a theory of ethics – which, in Tales of Love, she names herethics – based on the relationship between mother and child and the ambiguity between subject and object during pregnancy when one body is part of another. Used as a model of alterity within identity which provides an example of how difference can be embraced without completely breaking down identity, herethics acts as the theoretical counterbalance to abjection’s focus on exclusion. Further, herethics and abjection form a connected theory of both inclusion and exclusion that accounts both for the ways difference leads to oppression and marginalization and for the ways that difference must be reformulated so that it does not lead back to oppression and marginalization. The protagonist’s experience of pregnancy can be seen within this model of ethics, as she is able to use her pregnancy as a way of overcoming her own fear of exclusion and as a means for constantly reconstituting subjectivity. For instance, as she begins to accept her pregnancy she thinks: “every moment in my life has led to this. To normalize the incredible. And really, what other choices are there? (218) … when I stop expecting an answer I am suddenly free” (220). This freedom is shown especially in her changed relationship to others and in her changed relationship to eating. In fact, by the last meal of The Kappa Child the protagonist is ready to accept both her pregnancy and her love for the “alien” inside of her. Where eating previously acted as a catalyst for shame, violence, and confrontation this last meal is a catalyst for positive change as food becomes the means of communicating affection. Eating prompts the protagonist to think “let go” (270) as she eats, and she does. She finally has the nerve to admit her feelings for Bernie and accept that she wants intimacy in her life. As well, she sees the agency of her family members, the agency of her friends, and finally her own. Eating comes full circle, and this last meal accomplishes what the first meal could not in that this meal is an actual “holiday”.

Instead of a last meal, Chorus of Mushrooms has last words about food. In a passage about listening, storytelling and transformation, it is fitting that at the end of the novel Naoe has a chance to address the reader:

The eating and sharing of food, like the listening and telling of stories, is a form of mythical and emotional nourishment in Chorus of Mushrooms. Food is “a point of departure” for Muriel, Naoe, and the reader, as it is through talking about and eating food that Muriel and Naoe tell “a story, maybe two, with words of pain and desire” (201). As Naoe invites the reader to stop and “lean over and listen” (201), to eat, drink and “laugh out loud” (201) she invites the reader to enter a world where it is possible to both “listen and listen” and still “offer a different telling” (201). This invitation is a contract between her and the reader where storytelling, like the “mutual preparation and enjoyment of a meal” (McCullough 197), is a model for how to relate to one another. Based on a relationship with the reader that involves both listening and telling, Naoe, and Chorus of Mushrooms, gesture toward a world where it is possible to transgress taboos, create new ways of imagining, and become “drunk” off both words and food because it “is oh so pleasurable” (201).

Eating is a psychologically transformative act in both Chorus of Mushrooms and The Kappa Child – an act which extends past the consumption of just food. In all of its contexts – physical, psychological, and metaphorical – eating is tightly linked to the character’s explorations of the boundaries of their subjectivities. These explorations lead to an expulsion that is both affirming and healing – the texts themselves. Elspeth Probyn states that “as individuals, we eat into culture, continually oscillating between primary, natural and necessary acts, as, simultaneously, we consume and ingest our identities … in eating we constantly take in and spit out things, people and selves” (15). In other words, what we take in is connected to what we spit out, and the line between what we eat and who we are is often blurry. Goto plays with this line in The Kappa Child and Chorus of Mushrooms as she explores complex ways of belonging and not belonging in a joyful combination of abjection, pain, eating, laughter, and myth.