Students will explore the place of food in a community's understanding of itself and of others. Using modern Japanese fiction and film as our main texts, we will examine how the discourse of food defines regional and national identities, and how communities are represented through patterns of consumption or deprivation. We will probe the tension between the role of certain foods as markers of cultural authenticity and the reality of cuisine as a historically dynamic, hybrid enterprise. We will investigate the connections of gender and class to food and its preparation, and study how the sharing of food affects human alliances. In short, we will be asking what it means to eat sushi.