Food, gender, humor, and literature all contain culturally and linguistically specific elements as well as more or less universal, or at least widely shared, elements. Discussions of any of these topics need to be conducted with this in mind, and a suitable balance found for any specific occasion, or for wider, more general purposes. When the language of discussion is different from that of the subject, there are additional issues. To write about food in selected texts by the Japanese modernist writer Osaki Midori (1896–1971), for example, it is necessary to gloss a number of terms: food items, cooking methods, and their cultural significance, and even the name of the author. Food and humor in literature may easily get lost or distorted in translation; annotations and explications may certainly aid our understanding and yet by no means do they guarantee the same degree and kind of amusement, interest, “flavor,” or “taste” as the source text. With all of these issues and limitations, however, we can still focus on the gains rather than the losses and “hope for an afterlife and new life for both the source and the translated texts” and the food and humor in them. This chapter examines food in Dai nana kankai hōkō (Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, 1933) and other works by Osaki Midori. Food in Osaki's texts functions to estrange and subvert social, literary, and gender norms and conventions. It also fuses past with future, nostalgia with science, and urban with rural. Seemingly ordinary food, such as cucumbers, persimmons, and bread, is juxtaposed with, and likened to, something incongruous, inedible, and/or sensuous, thereby creating humor.

Osaki started writing short stories, essays, and poetry for literary magazines in 1914. She moved from her home in Tottori, in the northwestern part of Honshu, to Tokyo to study at the Japan Women's University in 1919, but the publication of her story in a commercial magazine forced her to withdraw from the university, which prohibited students from engaging in such activities. From the late 1920s to the early 1930s she published prolifically in major literary magazines, including the newly established Nyonin geijutsu (Women's Art, 1928–32). However, mental illness triggered by the side effects of migraine medications interrupted her very promising literary career.