“Plate,” Gilligan wheezes to me.

“Huh?”

“I need your plate,” he says again.

“Plate?”

“Yes, your plate.”

There’s nothing on, or under, or beside the desk that remotely resembles a plate. Gilligan suggests I check the shelf to the right window. When I do, I discover a plastic basin and dishtowel under which are hidden a set of plastic chopsticks, and a plate, salmon-colored and featuring three elephants and the message:

Do you like living here?

Yes, it’s great living here.

Let’s be HAPPIEST DAYS.

Good grief.

I feed the HAPPIEST DAYS plate through a narrow opening below the bars, where a guard, an enormous bear of a man, takes it, dumps a ladleful of pinkish cubes on it, and passes the plate back.

Placing a bowl of miso soup and a covered bowl of rice on the ledge, Gilligan and the bear go on to the next cell.

Arranging everything neatly on the desk—rice on the left, soup on the right, the plate set before the two—I kneel down for breakfast, put my hands together and with a slight bow say: “Itadakimasu.” [1]

I take the rice bowl in my hand and try to remove the lid, but no matter how hard I twist it, the damned thing won’t budge. The lid is so firmly attached, I resort to rapping it against the corner of the washbasin a few times until it gives.

You could hang a man from a goalpost with this.

When the lid comes off, I find the bowl has been filled slipshod with mugi gohan, or barley rice. Like mugi cha, I’ve never been crazy about mugi gohan, either.

I take a bite of the barley rice, and wash it down with the soup, a simple miso broth with chopped leek.

I have eaten worse.

The pink cubes on the plate stump me. An exploratory sniff gleans nothing. In all my years in Japan, I’ve never come across anything quite like it. And I have eaten some pretty odd things. Is it some kind of pickled fish or vegetable? Is it canned whale meat? What with the price of whale meat these days, they wouldn’t be dishing out a “delicacy” like that to lawbreakers top of the morning, now would they? I take the plate to the toilet and scrape the cubes into it.

Above the toilet are easy-to-follow instructions:

Flush once, not twice.

Don’t flush anything but toilet paper down the toilet.

And because you should never take things for granted, particularly in jail:

Use sink to wash face.

Gilligan returns about fifteen minutes later to collect the dishes, and, seeing how little I’ve eaten, asks if I need more time. I tell him that I haven’t got much of an appetite. Nodding, he takes the bowls away.

“Keep the plate.”

[1] Itadakimasu (いただきます) is a polite way of say, among other things, “to receive” or “to eat”.

Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.