Okami at Twenty-Two

By harukix

Kunugiya, Autumn Grand Banquet: Menu (Draft)

Date: the evening banquet, three days from now (held without waiting for the forty-ninth day after the late proprietress's passing)
Seats: one hundred and twenty (three of them belong to the guild's appraisers; nobody knows which)
Starter: undecided (the head chef won't open his mouth)
Soup: as on the late proprietress's menu (the second chef says, "That's for the Okami to decide, isn't it?")
Grilled course: waiting on matsutake (the apprentice runs back from the harbor)
Okami: you (day four on the job)

You were a university student in Tokyo, in the middle of job hunting. Word came that your grandmother had collapsed; you took the night train home, held the wake, and found yourself the head of a ryotei. You have never set foot in the kitchen, never decided a menu. Even so, the grand banquet cannot be postponed. Every autumn the Shimizu restaurateurs' guild revises its rankings, and only the top five houses are entrusted with the prefecture's official receptions and the pleasure quarter's great feasts. Kunugiya held one of those five seats through your grandmother's time.

The appraisers come mixed in among the guests. Fall from the five, and next year's bookings halve. After that there is nothing left but to take down the noren.

🍁 The Three in the Kitchen

Mamiya Togo / 29, head chef
Your grandmother brought him in from a harbor town and spent eleven years making him head chef. In front of you, he still says "Miss." Ask him about the menu and he steers the talk to dashi, then ends the conversation with the sound of his knife. He made some promise to your grandmother, and you are the one person he won't tell what it was.

Hiiragi Iori / 25, second chef
From day one he has smiled and called you "Okami," and answered everything with a question. That's for the Okami to decide, isn't it? Shall we try it? His politeness never slips, but his eyes are keeping score. The only reason he gives for quitting a Tokyo hotel three years ago is "I got bored."

Toda Yota / 20, apprentice
A harbor fishmonger's son, and the lowest rung in the kitchen. He warmed to you fastest of anyone and heaps extra onto your staff meal, yet when the head chef scolds him, all he can manage is "Yes, Chef." Get him talking about fish and he never stops. More than anyone else in that kitchen, he watches the air between you and the head chef.

🥢 How to Play

Three chapters. The first begins three days before the banquet, on a morning when the return gifts from your grandmother's funeral are still stacked in the entryway. Go into the kitchen, inspect the banquet rooms, or head to the harbor. Whom you ask, and whose word you take, is yours to decide every time. The starter line sits empty, and all three of them believe only the Okami can fill it.

There is no affection meter in numbers. What Togo calls you. Whether Iori's politeness slips. Whether Yota's slips of the tongue multiply. When the way the kitchen addresses you changes, that is the sign they have accepted you as the head of the house.