The Japanese Cook

Accepted to be apprentices at Mr. Kishimotos famous International Culinary Institute Japanese teenagers Akio Masami Keiko Yuko Nobuko and their American friend Koji will soon leave Shimura Junior High School to compete with each other for a permanent place as a renowned Kishimoto Institute cook. As with much that happens at the Kishimoto Institute the event will be nationally televised part of a familiar company advertising strategy that makes Kishimoto the most famous of culinary institutes in Japan. So far complete unknowns the success or failure of the friends will soon be a national headline. Well-versed in the world of cookery competitions and TV cooking shows having worked together throughout high school offering cooking demonstrations in grocery stores for the ever colorful Kishimoto Food Company The Hot Pots as they are known at school are full of excitement and expectation. However what comes next is not the stuff of high school. What comes next is not only the realization of their ambitions but also surprising revelations. Cookery they soon begin to realize is more than tastes aromas and colors the possibilities in ingredients and the mastering of techniques. The world of cookery has both a bright side and a darker one. Cookery is bold adventures and hidden truths. It is invention and discovery but also the secrets of adulthood where a new kind of uncertainty prevails and a new kind of treachery threatens. The Hot Pots soon will learn far more than they expected.The Japanese Cook is a story of innocence and aspiration friendship commitment curiosity love and cookery!Graeme Harper (writing as Brooke Biaz) is a fiction writer and critic. He is Editor-in-Chief of the international journal New Writing. His awards include the National Book Council Award for New Fiction (Australia) among many others. A member of the Welsh Academi and a former Commonwealth Universities scholar in creative writing he is a Fellow of such organizations as the Royal Society for the Arts the Royal Society of Medicine and the Royal Anthropological Institute. He has held professorships and honorary professorships in a number of universities in the USA Britain and Australia and was the inaugural chair of the Higher Education Committee at Britains National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE). He is founder/director of the annual Great Writing International Creative Writing Conference held each year at Imperial College London. He is Dean of the Honors College at Oakland University Michigan USA. Among his other works are Cinema and Landscape with J.R.Rayner The Invention of Dying and Small Maps of the World.