“Liar.”
“It’s earthy. Subtle. You wouldn’t understand.”
Lex grabbed one and bit into it. It tasted like sweetened clay. “This is soil, Barnaby. You are eating flavoured soil and pretending it’s a delicacy.”
“It’swagashi. It’s a traditional Japanese confection. They’ve been making them for centuries.”
“They’ve been eating dirt for centuries?”
Barnaby’s mouth twitched.
A smile! Lex added it to his running tally. He now had three nights worth of data, hoarding the information like an overinvested research scientist. He noticed the way Barnaby’sleft ear went pink before his right whenever he got huffy. How his jaw tightened when he was about to laugh but didn’t want to. He ate things he hated rather than admit defeat, which meant Lex could track exactly how disgusting something was by how many times he chewed before swallowing. Anything under four chews was tolerable. Anything over ten was an act of defiance against his own palate, performed purely out of spite.
The game show was already on. Tonight’s episode featured a man in a blue bodysuit navigating a corridor of doors that swung open at random intervals, each one releasing either a blast of confetti or a person in an inflatable sumo suit who body-checked the contestant into the wall. The studio audience was in hysterics. A panel of presenters watched from a booth, their faces superimposed in small boxes in the corner of the screen, reacting with theatrical horror at every collision.
“Right,” Lex said, cracking his knuckles. “Blue Suit. What’s his story?”
On the second night, Lex had started narrating, doing voices for the contestants, and ad-libbing dialogue over the Japanese commentary. He gave each body-suited figure a name and a backstory.
“He’s a regional manager,” Barnaby said, not looking away from the screen.”For a mid-sized insurance firm in Osaka. He’s here because his wife signed him up as a birthday present, and he’s too polite to tell her he’d rather have had the golf clubs.”
“Tragic. Devastating. I hope he makes it past the sumo door.”
“He won’t. He’s leading with his left shoulder, which means he’ll over-correct when the door opens and expose his centre of gravity.”
“You can’t analyse a game show contestant’s centre of gravity when you’ve only ever seen him standing still.”
“I can. I do it with horses. The principle is identical.”
Blue Suit hit the sumo door. The inflatable figure erupted from behind it and launched him sideways into the padding. He crumpled to the ground with a theatrical grace that suggested he’d been expecting defeat. Barnaby nodded in satisfaction. “There. Left shoulder.”
Lex laughed and reached into the bowl. His hand closed around a packet of something pink and stamped with a cherry blossom design. He tore it open and held it out to Barnaby.
Barnaby took it, bit into it, and went still. His chewing slowed. He looked down at the cracker in his hand, turned it over, and read the wrapper.
“What is it?” Lex asked.
“Sakura.” Barnaby said it quietly, almost to himself. “Cherry blossom flavour.”
“Any good?”
Barnaby took another bite. He ate it slowly, and when he finished, he folded the wrapper neatly and set it on the arm of the sofa. “That,” he said, “was the first edible thing you’ve brought to this sofa.”
Sakura. Cherry blossom. Buy every single thing that’s this flavour.
He dug back into the bowl and pulled out something with a green packet. The wrapper had Japanese text and a small illustration of a whisk and a tea bowl. Matcha. He’d seen this one everywhere; matcha Kit Kats, matcha Pocky, matcha everything. Tokyo ran on the stuff.
Barnaby took one look at the packet and recoiled as though Lex had produced a severed finger.
“No.”
“You haven’t tried it.”
“I don’t need to try it. I know what matcha tastes like. It tastes like someone has composted a lawn and then strained it through a sock that someone’s worn for a week straight.”
“That’s very specific.”
“Vidal made me drink ceremonial matcha in Cardona. He insisted it was a transcendent spiritual experience. It was not. It tasted like hot lawn water, and I told him so. Then he didn’t speak to me for six hours, which was the most peaceful afternoon I’ve had in that principality.”
