Selfishness in the eyes of Yukihira Soma
A spoiler-marked review (limited) of one of my favorite characters.
I’m not a fiction connoisseur; I believe that shows up when I write an explanation describing my thoughts on a character or storyline. Wording things can, and does, end up feeling redundant and excessively overcomplicated or pretentious. For those reasons and some others, I tend to typically refrain from ever answering things that don’t require me to simplify stuff.
That said, there’s one character I’m far too fond of to gloss over entirely. Someone who, in my amateur opinion, represents a grounded figure more so than the majority of protagonists I’ve read: Yukihira Soma, the lead of the eponymous, Shokugeki no Soma. Superficially speaking, there isn’t much that would separate him from a traditional shonen character; as far as protagonists are concerned, most of them try to subvert pre-existing tropes. However, in doing so, they each represent a facet of and a new imprint on the landscape that designed them.
That’s how fiction of a particular genre works: all of its dissonant parts seem to be individually distinct, but they conglomerate to form a stable structure or ethos to define how that genre should be read. In that vein, Luffy and Ichigo’s deep dive into personal selfishness does not signify a counter-trend opposing extant evaluations, rather it reinforces them by giving us a new lens to look at them through.
Soma, as I see him, does similarly and adds a certain deviance on his part, which, instead of manifesting as selfishness for the people around him (at times addressed as the “power of friendship”), appears as self-centric and narcissistic, almost as if acknowledging the fact that the world does indeed revolve around him.
That is rare in shonen mangas, even rarer in those that address personal growth, but it’s fairly common in real life. Most humans live their lives seeing it from their own perspective, treating their vision and judgment as what defines the world, which is not wrong. Religion and popular morality might tell us to look beyond ourselves and develop an eye for others and that is not wrong. That said, we, philosophically speaking, have no reason to treat them as something of value; for all we know when we close our eyes, buried under the ground or cremated into ashes, the world ends.
Our senses, alongside the mind that processes them, are windows with which we see the world and its happenings, through which we know it. If they exist and function, so does the world. Once they don’t, the world does not either. You might retort and say, referring to the deceased people that you’ve seen, that this is not true, however, it is regarding the world those deceased people lived in. Their world, as they saw it, as they knew it, has ended.
My not-so-neat philosophical backdrop aside, it’s imperative that we define what Soma’s selfishness truly is. For those who consider it to be his love for his friends to the point of protecting them, I’d like to point out a concrete reality that the story started with: they’re all rocks with which he’d polish himself. All of them mere stepping stones — that was the speech that kickstarted it all, by both Senzaemon and Yukihira.
His care or attention is more or less superfluous: the culinary world he seeks to protect, for instance, would be kindle to his flame i.e. the goal to span and walk through the endless infinite tastes and textures of cooking.
When he protects it, when he stands for his friends, all he’s doing is making a path that would help further his abilities. Part of it informs his conscious decision to disobey commands, to get into fights that put him at a disadvantage, and to be rebellious to any fixed label. Soma’s idiosyncratic approach is precisely why he doesn’t back down from a challenge — or as Joichiro notes, there’s no limit to his battle lust that continuously overcomes the thought that the other is simply superior — for it, like anything else, is a testimonial to his growth.
Typically, this should qualify as a freakish talent, however, the story tries its best to subvert attention from it and instead redirect it to his upbringing in a family restaurant. This argument, by itself, is flawed; the Aldinis grew up in much the same conditions. In fact, this supplies the initial tension between Takumi and Soma, which later evolves to furnish the latter’s desire to stay at Totsuki. It’s erroneous to consider that a particular setting provided the necessary conditions for the birth of a unique chef.
To establish a contradistinction in order to illustrate this, we should focus on Tsukasa. The former first seat, while marvelous as a chef, was limited in his prowess precisely because, although self-centric like Yukihira, he belonged to a different kind — there was never a time that he denied that he lacked the skills, or that he doubted his cooking. Yet he remained equally as stubborn. We know this because this is the Eishi Tsukasa we’re introduced to during the Festival Arc; as Soma and Megumi note, he’d doubt anything save for himself.
Soma is different. His stubbornness and narcissistic attitude lie in never once doubting his ability to grow and develop, not in his cooking skills.
Let’s take a backseat for a bit.
Despite being a cooking manga, Shokugeki no Soma is still a battle shonen. Insofar as that is concerned, it needs a driving force and motivation to set people forward. This was first the top of the Totsuki Saryo Institute as the First Seat. Later it became the winner of the Blue, the undisputed face of the new generation of cooking. However, the actual obstacle lay in a more personal individualized field, as a storm.
Creating a never-before-seen dish or navigating toward true gourmet was never the goal. It was, as Azami describes, to overcome the disastrous storm that subsumes and devours all who walk that path; the path of art. Cooking, you see, is, in some form, an art, a Platonic Universal that has been here for as long as mankind, yet is infinitely vaster than we are. What we imagine is cooking works in tandem with that which we do not know, to proliferate an untraversable landscape: there exist a countless number of combinations we have yet to reach. We’ll likely go extinct as a species before we get the chance to do so — just as painting and writing are never-ending, culinary fields too are boundless.
Chefs, in spite of that overarching melancholic reality, have tried to pursue this field, only to be met with dismal grief. Humans are tangibly greedy and self-serving. The moment we see someone capable of doing something, we leave it to them to shoulder it all, and, it’s usually common that they’d accept it wholeheartedly. That’s where they died.
Joichiro was consumed by this storm, unable to carry on with his skills. Mana was incapable of eating anything else because she had flown so far into the storm that her curse had stopped paying attention to human creation, forcing her to rely on IVF supplements to live. Shinomiya imposed a limit on himself, after which he could not grow further, relinquishing himself to a wall he could not break.
Grief, despair, pain. These are signs of an artist falling before the cosmic horror of their art in prostration, lying there in complete submission, not willing to move any further. Some, on the contrary, might not offer resistance and freely sacrifice themselves to this horror, without fear, accepting that they weren’t meant to do anything, throwing on false facades to keep faces.
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To Yukihira, this primitive instinct was something he never inherited. It merely represented another challenge to throw himself at, yet another obstacle in his path. His brain was utterly ill-equipped to process what exactly was a stopping point; it remained fixated on that reality.
In order to reach it, to snatch it away, he needed to build a staircase or ladder that could elevate him to those heights. Or, to borrow from his opening speech, stepping stones that could aid him. Rocks that could polish his diamond even further. Once those rocks proved insufficient, he would simply seek something else to work with: other diamonds. If those didn’t work, he’d reach for something higher, and so on ad infinitum.
Thus, he separated himself from Asahi. Whereas the Noir could mash any number of styles to create any number of combinations, all he did was reach for what was theoretically possible if all the best chefs got together. Soma, on the contrary, made his cooking a specific Yukihira-themed dish that aimed at visualizing the impossible. If one thought of the world within the confines of scientific possibility, building scenarios as he goes, the other would ask questions that were absurd to their nature — what is the last number of pi? What’s bigger than a Universal? What’s beyond thinking?
And most importantly, it would pursue intoxicating madness.
Yukihira Tamako, his mother, was a wild card, who, in a stroke of inspiration, might cook a dish far beyond that of her caliber. However, her occasional dishes would be worse than trash, utterly unbeatable. In a similar fashion, his father, Joichiro Saiba, would cook dishes born of the most accursed combinations merely to test himself, and later, as a safety check for his sanity.
What set Soma apart from them, is that he considered those grotesque abominations, those failures, to still be food, no different from his masterpiece. They might not have been to the standards of B-Grade gourmet, much less the ideal true gourmet he was expected to serve, but they were things that only his hands could give life to, products of thoughts only his brain could think of. Each dish, as it is formed, is a new existence, based on the liminalities of who made it, when it was made, how it was made, for whom was it made, and the sort.
In that sense, all dishes that came from his hands or mind were inevitably things the world had never seen before. So, instead of fretting over a game plan, he would mash things up and ad-lib his way through, fully aware of the dire consequences they have. Expulsion, losing his career, and giving up cooking were simply limits he imposed to check himself; they were common routines by the end.
I believe this fully shows when he cooked his last, actually shown, dish for Erina. The entire setting of that particular scene, in my opinion, is one of the best in the overall series, however, the spread page itself was beautiful. It was what he was presented to the woman who had denied him, who had doubted him, and who had begun the ultimate obstacle he had. The one person he could never overcome.
What makes this scene so powerful in retrospect, is Erina’s mental attitude at the time. She was frantically destroying herself to the point that she could not think of anything, could not cook as she used to, and failed even the simplest of tasks. She had to present something greater than what the semi-finals saw. And Soma rejected her.
In his eyes, there was nothing to fear. In fact, his Eggs Benedict wasn’t meant to be a dish for Mana, it was meant for Erina to realize the actual insurmountable reality: cooking is what you call cooking. Art is fundamentally intrinsic to you, unbound by dogmas or doctrines. It lives for you give it life and it is art for you are art. As he saw his greatest whetstone crumble, he patched it up. That was all there was to it; he had decided on his muse.
Rather than vainglory, his rough assessments always forced others to work as he wanted them to, or rather, as they wanted to.
It brought out the best in them, as it did the best in him. This was the effect he had on Tadokoro, who, after spending time with him, grew to take pride in herself and her capacity to grow beyond who she was. One of the best examples that I see in this regard, is how the series never truly took its eyes off him. In contrast to other stories where one protagonist spawns a host of others (viz. Toaru, One Piece, Naruto, and the sort) to form a corpus of stories with a fitting end, Shokugeki no Soma was precisely about Yukihira Soma and used that to move forward.
It began with him and his father, and throughout the manga, that subtle relationship was kept. Joichiro was the root, causing Central, Blue, and most other plot points, while Soma was the fruit the tree bore as well as the shoot that grew from Joichiro in response to the conditions that had been set. All other characters were not so important in regards to the rest of the cast, instead, they were important vis-a-vis the titular protagonists, and as such, the majority of their screentime was in relation to him.
He was part of Polaris, the Finalists, the Elite Ten, the Blue competitors, the wedge to Central, and part of the Diamond Generation. At all times, it was his selfish attitude that got the group and held it together; he was the centerpiece connecting the dots.
And in some form, that story is beautiful.
What we’re seeing is not a tale that requires the fulfillment or conclusions of that of others. It only needs Soma. It just so happens that he chose those specific groups to keep near him, for them to enjoy the realms of cooking, to find the world he saw. A limitless boundless reality where cooking was fun, not a restriction. Instead of being a victim of the storm, he was, in Shinomiya’s words, the storm that shook the world and came to redefine it.
And throughout it all: he was self-centric. That was his core, something that no trace or crossknives could replicate. What drew me to it was how he had others choose the path that would lead to a uniqueness in their works, that would lead to a uniqueness in his. He’d hog people. Act all vile and selfish. But he was never mean to the others; he just really loved doing what he did. Not for his mom’s sake as he first began, nor for the sake of challenging his father and taking over his restaurant. Certainly not to prove himself to Erina.
But to maintain that he was, and forever will be, himself. That he was, happy to serve.
