In Claire Kohda's Woman Eating, A Hungry Vampire Suffers From Existential Crisis

Lydia is hungry. She's always wanted to try sashimi and ramen, onigiri and udon - the food her Japanese father liked to eat - but the only thing she can digest is blood.

Yet Lydia can't bring herself to prey on humans, and sourcing fresh pigs' blood in London - where she is living away from her Malaysian-British mother for the first time and trying to build a career as an artist - is much more difficult than she'd anticipated.

If Lydia is to find a way to exist in the world, she must reconcile the conflicts within her - between her demon and human sides, her mixed ethnic heritage, and her relationship with food, and, in turn, humans. Before any of this, however, she must eat.

Here's an excerpt from Claire Kohda's Woman Eating:

I went back to my mum’s house straight after. I topped up my sunscreen and walked in the shade as much as possible, but my nose and the top of my forehead still got burnt. At home, I put some Neal’s Yard Baby Balm on the red bits of my skin. I swept and hoovered the floors, pulling up the dust from the carpets that had accumulated over all the time we’d lived in this house. All of our DNA, maybe even some of Dad’s DNA from when he was alive.

I held a clump of it – bits of skin and hair with carpet fluff and dead bugs mixed in – up to my nose and inhaled, thinking that I could connect with my dad somehow in the smell, before putting it in the bin. I cleaned the sink, too, which was stained from years of use.

I rolled out my sleeping bag in the living room. Upstairs was a bit too creepy. Though Dad was the one who actually died in this house, it was my mum’s presence I could sense upstairs, as though each moment I’d spent with her here had turned into a separate ghost that haunted her bedroom. I sat up on top of my sleeping bag and tilted my head back onto the sofa that had come with the house. Recently, I’d read a post
on Facebook about rituals to do with moving out of homes.

It said that moving out of a place you’ve lived in for a significant amount of time can leave you with all sorts of spiritual baggage, if you don’t move out in the right way. The post included pictures of a woman with long blonde hair in loose clothes blessing all kinds of different rooms, throwing salt on the carpets and doing some sort of full moon new beginnings ritual. I couldn’t imagine anything like that taking place in
this house. It was, I felt, beyond new beginnings. I let my head slip off the sofa cushions and land with a thud on the floor.

That evening, I’d finished mine and Mum’s last bucket of pigs’ blood from the butcher’s, slightly warmed and from a wine glass to create a sense of ceremony; another bucket had been poured carefully into flasks and stashed in Mum’s fridge at Crimson Orchard, along with some human food – cheese, microwavable meals, milk, sausage rolls, vegetables – that was there to act as a decoy. I’d drunk what blood remained in the house, sitting alone at the kitchen table where for years and years – for my whole life – I’d eaten meals with my mum. I wasn’t allowed to eat upstairs. Because the blood would stain the carpets if I spilled any, Mum had said; but I think the real reason was that she didn’t like eating alone. Before dinner, we always said a prayer.

Our table was a small white-topped one from the 1950s, with metal legs. I sat at one end and my mum sat at the other. Our arms reached towards each other and met in the centre. Our fingers interwove so that our linked hands were standing upright and our wrists were pressing down on the tabletop. Mum would wait until I closed my eyes, and then she would close her eyes too and recite a prayer. It wasn’t directed at a god, like the grace said before food in films and TV programmes. When I asked why our grace was different, when I was around six years old and learning about God and the Nativity at school, she looked at me impatiently.

‘Lydia,’ she said, using my full name, which she only did when she was angry. ‘Do you think God would feed a body like yours?’

I had tentatively shaken my head, but I didn’t really understand. My mum continued: ‘Something else lets us eat, not God. God wouldn’t want to help a demon survive, and that’s what we are, Lyds. We are unnatural, disgusting and ugly. Look at us; we are just sin.’

Mum then had reached across the table for my hands. ‘But it’s okay,’ she said. ‘Because we are the same, so we have each other.’ And then she said our prayer, the version that suited us, which wasn’t to any higher being but just to the pigs whose blood we drank.

Extracted with permission from Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda and published by Hachette India.

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