In Japan, junior high and high school students travel by train if they live outside their school zone. Most of these students would either live with a guardian near the zone or work part-time in an apartment of their own.
In the tale of Gourmet Girl Graffiti or Koufuku Graffiti, they use emotional eating to narrate the everyday life of Ryo Machiko and Kirin Morino, two cousins who promised to keep each other company to fight loneliness in Tokyo.
Ryo Makes Gourmet Girl Graffiti
Ryo Machiko is a junior high art student in Tokyo. One of Ryo’s dreams is to be a good housewife who can cook delicious meals for her future husband. However, in the past year, her grandmother passes away from her old age. Ryo sits alone with a photograph of her across the living room.
She tasted the meal she recently cooked. To her tastebuds, she believed her cooking had gone horrible. Soon, she gets a call from her aunt, Akira Machiko, to pick up her cousin, Kirin Morino. When she arrived in Tokyo, Ryo was stunned to see how short Kirin was and noticed she wore spring clothing.
Ryo offers her a meal of hot pot with salmon, Napa cabbage, carrots, shitake, golden mushrooms, meatballs, and leeks to calm Kirin’s upcoming cold. Kirin takes a couple of bites and sips, then pauses after she realizes she didn’t properly thank Ryo. After thanking her cousin, she mentions how delicious the hot pot is.
Surprised and relieved, Ryo tells Kirin she has been worried about her cooking. Her cousin disagrees and tells her it’s the best meal she ever had. She became unsure why the hot pot was good until the next day. Kirin’s cold worsened, making kitsune udon, matcha tea, and inari sushi (soaked fried tofu wrapped around rice).
She hasn’t felt the joy of eating since her loneliness set in. Ryo is the premise of Gourmet Girl Graffiti. In almost every episode, she usually cooks or uses eating as a coping mechanism.
Koufuku Graffiti Narrates with Emotional Eating
While there’s Akira, she’s mostly busy with her office job. Her parents entrust Ryo with her grandmother to work overseas, sending her gifts to show they love her. Since her passing, Ryo has gone through an entire year where loneliness sent her into emotional eating.
Gourmet Girl Graffiti uses emotional eating to display Ryo’s depression over the loss of Grandma Machiko. In the first episode alone, Ryo’s memories of her grandmother flash into her mind while treating Kirin’s cold. She even tells her cousin the food she made was how Grandma Machiko would treat her on sick days:
“I’m just doing what Grandma did for me.”
After informing Kirin about her passing, Kirin devotes herself to being by her cousin’s side when she visits Tokyo for classes because in her words:
“Food’s never tasty when you are eating alone.”
Ryo’s behavior becomes more apparent in Episode 2. The two girls walked through the Sakura Blossom Festival to buy festival food with Akira’s money. Kirin is a first-time festival goer as her hometown offers school fairs in the summer. Ryo later came to a revelation that she missed a couple of festivals due to the absence of her family.
The viewer later learns how her behavior differs in the classroom when the cousins encounter Ryo’s classmate, Shiina. She describes Ryo as someone who is intensely focused but makes her food with love. She’s later invited to Ryo’s apartment in Episode 3.
After failing her practice exams on sketching still-life of bamboo rice ingredients, Kirin invites Shiina to eat bamboo rice, hoping to lift Ryo’s spirit. As Shiina gives everyone a second bowl in manga portions, Ryo notices she hasn’t invited anyone into her apartment before.
The three of them later watched the movie “From the Eggpennies to the White Peaks” craving for omurice during the movie. However, Ryo drifted off into sleep to soon wake up and see her in a futon alone.
She immediately reacts by thinking Karin and Shiina left to go home for the weekend, only for a minute later they returned exhausted from the store with cartons of eggs. The viewer can sense her insecurity and fear in this scene when Ryo tightly hugs her futon. Then how worried and relieved she is when Kirin unlocked her door.
With heaping bags of rice from Ryo’s mother, Midori, they made omurice in 6 ways. Ryo reads her letter, finding the encouragement endearing:
“Good luck with your exam prep! Eat well, make good friends, and work hard.”
This makes her smile and makes her feel prepared to tackle any obstacle in the future. I’m glad Ryo is recognizing that not only does she need to take care of herself physically, but her emotionally as well.
Gourmet Girl Craving Growth & Connection
My favorite aspect of Gourmet Girl Graffiti’s mini-series progression is showing Ryo’s and Kirin’s emotional growth from each experience while connecting and reconnecting with people. In Episode 1, Kirin wanted to study art in Tokyo but her mother refused her to since Tokyo’s distance is very far from where they live.
Kirin gets emotionally frustrated and responds by yelling at her mother that she would live with someone who cooks meals better than her all-green dishes. After Ryo listened to Kirin describing her situation and her mom’s behavior, she could sense her cousin didn’t hate her mother. It’s confirmed in the show that they reconciled in Episode 2.
Episodes 4, 5, 7, 8, and 10 demonstrate how Ryo’s and Kirin’s emotional growth helped them connect with others and each other.
Gourmet Girl Graffiti Episode 4
The school has declared a two-week break for reconstruction which makes Ryo and Kirin upset that they won’t see each other. Though Ryo offered to make a Chinese-styled menu, Kirin chose to go with her parents to eat out. Kirin wanted to invite her but Ryo refused to get involved with family affairs.
Her emotional state to focus on Kirin’s happiness got the best of her here. The viewer at first is unsure why Ryo reacted this way. They will learn her reason why later in Episode 7.
As much as Ryo wanted to invite Shiina, the harsh rain prevented her due to her allergies to cold water. On her day off, she grew bored at home alone so she decided to study, then realized she was missing a workbook. She heads down to the library near her neighborhood that she hasn’t visited in 5 years.
The librarian, Ms. Watanabe, greets her in a mascot costume to entertain the children. She assists Ryo in searching the workbook, slowly placing beginner cookbook guides on the reading table. Ryo was confused as to why her librarian showed them to her. Ms Watanabe explained that these were the books Grandma Machiko asked for to learn how to cook.
Akira confirms that she and Midori would get awful bento boxes from her grandmother. When Ryo was born, she wanted to learn to improve on cooking just for her. Now she wants to do the same for Kirin.
Ms. Watanabe is an incredible librarian to sense Ryo had an emotional day. While alone in her apartment, Ryo texted Shiina and Kirin to see how their weekend was going. Shiina responded about her frail body but Kirin didn’t as she got held up doing errands with her parents before dinner.
She was kept busy reading the cookbooks Grandma Machiko read, learning about her modifying the recipes to Ryo’s taste. And when Ms. Watanabe heard her stomach, she suggested Ryo eat in the lounge so she wouldn’t be alone.
Gourmet Girl Graffiti Episode 5
Thanks to Kirin’s invitation to Shiina in Episode 3, she invites Ryo and Kirin to her family’s manor for a nice summer day in Episode 5. Shiina shared about her life when the two cousins were spooked by their helper, Tsuyuko who raised her most of her life when her mother was busy with business.
Shiina’s mother explained to the girls that Shiina was usually shy until recently. Now she comes home and talks about Ryo and Kirin. Shiina’s mother is the real reason Shiina invited them over to the manor. She’s relieved to see her daughter made friends on her own.
The news made Ryo and Kirin proud of themselves for being her friends. It shows that a normally quiet girl like Shiina needs a little push to express herself socially outside the classroom. She did freak out on why the two cousins had an emotionally friendly attitude when she returned with more noodles for the somen slide.
Gourmet Girl Graffiti Episode 7/8
Episodes 7 and 8 share a concept in two different scenarios. In Episode 7, Shiina invites Ryo and Kirin over to her manor for a Pike Mackerel cookout on one condition. Kirin and Shiina must cook instead of Ryo. Tsuyuko will be supervising them to make sure the fish is cooked properly.
Worried, Ryo visits the manor early to check on the pair. Despite their clumsiness, Tsuyuko said Kirin and Shiina have followed instructions well. She too did not want Ryo to overwork herself. Apparently, Shiina has told Tsuyuko and her mother how hard Ryo worked for the past two years, wanting her and Kirin to thank her with a meal they made together.
As Kirin and Shiina cook, Ryo remembers she hasn’t had a meal made by anyone else in a long time. Soon, Kirin and Shiina successfully made grilled pike mackerel which Ryo and Tsukuyo enjoyed their meal. The pair did earn some harsh criticism for their culinary skills.
Then in Episode 8, Kirin wanted to make a homemade lunchbox for Ryo while training her for the school’s sports fest. But Ryo did not want her to worry. She tried to plan her lunchbox, only to remind herself of Grandma Machiko.
She threw it in the trash bin where Kirin later found it. One weekend when she returned home, Kirin asked her mother what Ryo’s grandma loved to make for lunches. She tells her about boiled sweet potato with lemon on top which wasn’t on the food list but Kirin wanted to add it.
This made Ryo emotionally happy when she ate every piece of her meal. Kirin was unsure how it came out as she and Shiina ate her failures during the sports fest. Regardless, Ryo tells Kirin that she loves it when she grows emotionally overwhelmed by how her previous attempts tasted.
Both episodes portrayed how Ryo’s hardworking attitude has made her hide her emotional being. It’s amazing how Shiina recognized this during her visits to Ryo’s apartment when she found Kirin loitering instead of helping with chores. Kirin wouldn’t have been energetic to learn to cook from Ryo if it wasn’t for her.
That translates well into Kirin’s emotional drive. She grew determined to create a lunchbox for Ryo based on her cravings and communicate better with her mom.
Gourmet Girl Graffiti 10
I briefly mention Episode 10 in a previous article on the Pizza Quatro Special. The plot revolves around a recurring background character in almost every episode. This woman is Yuki Uchiki, a university graduate who’s extremely shy and can’t speak her mind aloud.
When her colleagues invited her for tea, she frantically responded that her ears were itchy and then ran off. At the same time, Kirin is worried about not making it into the same high school Ryo and Shiina want to attend. Both girls are worried about not making friends.
Then, Ryo and Kirin accidentally eavesdrop on Yuki’s conversation with her mother on the phone while grabbing their dried futons. Her apartment is dark with all the lights off and the window veranda opened.
Yuki is emotionally overwhelmed by her mother’s suggestion to attract people to her. Kirin had gotten a little too nosy and jumped off the upper patio to catch the slipping futon. She managed to land on Yuki’s veranda to break her fall.
The cousins apologized to their neighbor, only for Yuki’s fear to overcome her and think about her embarrassing action. Suddenly, Kirin speaks her mind aloud about her worries, reassuring Yuki. She expressed how happy she felt about Kirin’s determination, but didn’t give the context aloud.
What I adore about this episode is that it shows how loneliness can affect adults. The viewer does learn from the first episode she orders pizza. The Pizza Quatro Special represents Yuki’s emotional eating turning towards comfort on days she can’t properly communicate. The intro of Episode 10 shows her falling through the pizza into a pit of darkness, representing the analogy of her comfort falling apart.
Until she eats dinner with Ryo and Kirin, Yuki opens up and builds the courage for her job interview at the high school the girls will attend soon.
Koufuku Graffiti’s Message
A mini-series anime that tackles the harsh realities is not easy to write in a light-hearted slice-of-life. Instead of using fantasy elements to portray the characters’ emotions, Gourmet Girl Graffiti uses home-cooked meals and the stress of Japan’s growing youth.
It conveyed how loss can affect your daily habits like eating and social interaction. Ryo’s and Kirin’s growth shows the little things we do in life can make a huge difference to someone else’s. The animation is beautiful, the story is paced very well for its short length, and the simple food looks appetizing.
Gourmet Girl Graffiti reminded me of my lonely days in college. Meeting new people, adjusting to my class schedule, and studying were awful leading me to drop out. I turned my emotional drive into eating large meals during cafeteria dinner hours as my source of comfort.
Yet, the experience encourages me to keep pushing forward. Like Ryo, it’s time to make new memories with the people I love and new people I will encounter.
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