Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro's "A Family Supper" is a short story, first published in 1982, about a young man reuniting with his estranged family only to learn that his mother has died from eating poisonous fugu fish.
Likely set in the late 1970s or early 1980s, the story begins with the narrator explaining that fugu—pufferfish served as a potentially lethal delicacy—killed his mother. He learns of her death upon returning to Tokyo after having left to live in California with his non-Japanese girlfriend, with whom he has since broken up. It has been two years since his mother's death. At the large and empty family home, the narrator and his father discuss the suicide of his father's business partner, Watanabe, which happened in response to their business's collapse. When the narrator's sister, Kikuko, arrives, she and the narrator go to the garden and discuss the ghost of an old woman in a white kimono the narrator once saw by the well. Kikuko says she is considering traveling to America when she finishes university. She also says their father's partner killed his wife and children when he killed himself.
Back inside, Kikuko takes over dinner preparations while the father leads his son on a tour of the house's empty rooms. He confides that he believes his wife's death was actually a suicide prompted by the worry and disappointment the narrator caused her. At dinner, the narrator sees a photo of his mother looking exactly like the ghost from the garden, and then his father serves an unidentified fish as the meal's main dish. The story ends with the narrator and his father discussing the possibility of Kikuko and the narrator moving back to the dreary house to keep their father company, although the father seems to understand they would prefer their independence.
Examining the tension between traditional family roles and personal liberty in post-WWII Japan, the story depicts the generational difference between the narrator's conservative parents and the narrator and his sister Kikuko. Because of the outcome of WWII, the children have grown up in a milieu markedly different from their parents'. With the influence of American culture imbuing modern Japanese culture with individualist values, the narrator and his sister do not share their parents' beliefs about family and partnership. Instead of staying close to home, they both seek experiences in the United States as a symbolic move toward lives of their own choosing. Meanwhile, figures like their father, Watanabe, and their mother loom over them as specters of Japan's past.
