Tokyo pastry chef Xia Kui resigned from her job and returned to China to take over her grandmother's dilapidated sweet shop. However, when she was making the signature poplar nectar, she discovered that the bottom of the casserole was engraved with the Japanese word "Atonement" - it was the number of the arsenal where her grandfather was forcibly recruited as a prisoner of war during World War II.
When she was replicating her grandmother's secret ginger milk, there was always an old woman in a kimono peering around the street corner. One night, I followed him to the cemetery and found an old woman enshrining a bowl of solidified ginger milk in front of an unnamed monument - it was the recipe my grandfather had improved. The Japanese officer in the photo on the tombstone was exactly the same as the groom in the wedding photos collected by the old woman.
"This bowl should use Okinawa brown sugar," the old woman suddenly said, "your grandpa taught me."
Xia Kui crushed the amber candy she brought back from Japan, and found a formula written in blood on the inside of the candy wrapper: In 1945, her grandfather was forced to deliver the baby to an officer's wife, and secretly exchanged the brown sugar for the prescription to save the baby girl, but he himself was shot.
On the night of the typhoon, Xiakui pushed the dessert cart to the beach and poured the last portion of poplar nectar into the waves. In the morning light, amber sugar melted in the glass jar into the shape of Mount Fuji—a pattern that my grandfather repeatedly traced in letters home that he never sent.
