When you run out of things to throw, you tear off your polka-dotted apron and trample it. You plunge your fists down into the sink full of dishes with all your might, so the water goes splashing about you like great splatters of blood. You take some ice from the freezer, toss it into your mouth, and crunch down on it.
The kitchen’s resources can always keep pace with the blazing fire of your jealousy.
You take up a large daikon and whirl it around you like a baseball bat. When you bring it crashing down on the table, the daikon—which must have been softer than you thought—breaks into pieces, like a slow-motion video. Doubtless you will use some of these in tonight’s dinner—they’re the perfect size for simmering. As you squeeze out every last drop of ink from a raw squid, you even have time to think that you’ll combine the two, make ika-daikon.
Next, your eyes land on the cardboard box of apples that your parents sent over from their garden. You take them out and wrench them apart with your bare hands. Later you can make them into jam, or bake them in a pie, or mix them into macaroni salad—apples are surprisingly varied in their uses. You focus on channeling all your power into your fingers as they tear through the glossy skins.
Having destroyed the kitchen to the best of your ability, you begin to tidy up the mess strewn across the floor. When you tread on the miscellaneous shards, you can hear them screaming out in agony beneath your feet. You can empathize. The feelings of those little fragments are far easier to understand than those of your husband. Just because you’re clearing up doesn’t mean that it’s over, mind. Your jealousy is still blazing wild and free, like the huge pyramid pyres at fire festivals.
You tidy like an incensed person, not missing a single piece. You clear up every last particle, however small. When you pick up your apron, you smooth out every crease. You refill the ice-cube tray so that the water in each hole is at exactly the right level, then put it back in the special compartment in the freezer. You compress the trash bag full of all the mess you created, then look again around the newly cleaned kitchen and breathe a sigh of relief. By this time, the lump of jealousy inside you has finally dissolved. The day you thought would never end has drawn to a close. You glance at your husband, still cowering under the kitchen table, and say with incredulity, “What on earth are you doing down there?” Then you start to hum a little tune.
The roots of your jealousy can be traced all the way back to your time at nursery school. At that early stage of life, your possessive nature was already in bud.
The first person you ever had a crush on was a male teacher, back in the days when it was still a rarity for men to have such a profession. That was a tough time for you. Whenever you saw this teacher picking up another child, a piercing grief would reverberate through your tiny body—the smaller the body, the quicker grief can race through it—and you would scream and cry. Needless to say, the teacher was more or less constantly cuddling other children and holding their hands, so you were more or less constantly in tears. By the end of the day, you were shattered.
When your mother came to pick you up, your teacher would report on the day, explaining that it seemed as if you were still missing your mommy. Hearing this, your mother was not altogether displeased. She’d stroke your hair and say, “Oh dear, oh dear!” As you looked up at the adults and listened to their conversation, the whole thing felt utterly unjust. Why couldn’t they see you were genuinely in love?
At snack time, when your beloved would help other children eat, you would clench your fists so hard that the cookie in your hand was pulverized to a crumby mess. The verdict was that you “still lacked grip control.”
At playtime, when your beloved erected magnificent building-block castles with the other children, you would let out a wail and charge straight into them, knocking them to the ground like a merciless god. As you lay there motionless on the floor, you could feel the scattered blocks lumpy beneath your body. It occurred to you that they were a bit like vegetable chunks, and the image of a bowl of vegetable-laden curry floated to your mind for a second, then disappeared.
At every stage of your development, your jealousy was remarkable. In grade school, you cast endless love spells from a book full of glitter-encrusted illustrations. When it dawned on you that they weren’t working, you ripped the book to shreds. You tried your hand at black magic. You were never without a stock of voodoo dolls in your room. You visited a nearby shrine a hundred times to pray that the boy you were in love with would break up with his girlfriend. You stood naked under a waterfall and prayed with even more fervor.
When you fell for a boy in middle school, you stole his diary and kept it on your person at all times until you graduated. The heat of your body caused its cover to fade. You were assiduous in placing a curse on each and every girl you saw speaking to him. You worked with astonishing
