Matsutake Mushrooms

S1 E5: Covert Operations

The Apothecary Diaries, TOHO animation, 2023.

Maomao has been kidnapped, sold into service at the Imperial Palace, assigned to taste food for poison, and repeatedly drawn into situations involving illness, political intrigue, suspicious deaths, and people considerably more powerful than she is.

And she is very excited about a mushroom.

Early in Episode 5 of The Apothecary Diaries, Maomao is wandering the palace grounds when she spots something she has apparently been looking for. “I knew it was here!” she thinks. Then she finds another. And another. For perhaps the first time since entering palace service, she appears to be experiencing uncomplicated happiness.

The object of this happiness is the first matsutake mushroom of the year.

It is worth remembering that Maomao is an apothecary. She looks at most of the natural world and sees either medicine, poison, or an interesting opportunity to discover which one it is by applying an amount that would make a normal person nervous. A mushroom, therefore, is not merely lunch. It is lunch with professional possibilities.

She takes her find to the palace physician, a man whom she privately refers to as the quack doctor and with whom she has nevertheless developed what appears to be one of the healthier relationships available inside the rear palace. He sees the matsutake and is immediately delighted. Coal is summoned. Soy paste appears. Salt is involved.

The two of them cook it together. This is friendship.

Not the sort where people discuss feelings. The sort where one person arrives carrying a highly prized fungus and the other immediately understands that the afternoon’s priorities have changed.

They grill the mushroom, drizzle it with soy paste, add a little salt, and eat. Maomao declares them “partners in crime,” which is perhaps overly dramatic for preparing seasonal produce without permission but also completely accurate to the emotional stakes involved.

Then someone arrives with a curse.

This is the palace. You rarely get to finish a mushroom in peace.

An attendant has developed a terrible rash on his hands after burning discarded clothing and a wooden tablet. He believes he has been cursed. Maomao examines him and, as usual, approaches the supernatural explanation with the patience of someone who has already encountered chemistry.

She asks what color the fire burned.

The answer matters because different substances can produce different colors in a flame. The rash, she suspects, came from something attached to the wooden tablet rather than from an angry spirit with a highly localized dermatological agenda. She prepares an ointment and explains the basic principle of fireworks.

Problem solved.

Or at least medically solved. Politically, the colored tablets may be a code, which means Maomao has once again brushed against something she would strongly prefer to classify under Not My Business.

This strategy never works.

Jinshi arrives.

Jinshi is beautiful, powerful, mysterious, and deeply interested in Maomao, which Maomao regards as roughly equivalent to developing an unexplained swelling.

He questions her about the colored flames and the substances that might cause them. She answers. She prepares to leave.

Then he stops her.

“I love mushrooms too.”

This is not a request in the traditional grammatical sense.

Maomao understands immediately that the mushroom she worked so hard to find has now entered government service.

“I’m expecting good work, Apothecary,” Jinshi tells her.

So the next day she will have to go look for more.

There are many forms of taxation.

Some are paid in coin.

Some are paid in labor.

Some occur when an extraordinarily beautiful palace official discovers that you know where the matsutake grow.

The mushroom interlude is small, but it is also an unusually tidy example of why Maomao is so much fun to follow. The palace is full of people obsessed with beauty, status, favor, succession, romance, and power. Maomao can certainly understand all of these things intellectually. She simply does not rank them especially high compared with medicine, poison, unusual symptoms, and finding something edible growing out of the ground.

Later in the episode, the women of Lady Gyokuyou’s household prepare for an important garden party. There are dresses. Makeup. Political implications. Four high-ranking concubines will be present. Maomao is dressed, padded, perfumed, and relieved of the fake freckles she normally paints onto her own face.

Jinshi sees her without them and becomes temporarily unable to process information.

Maomao explains that she deliberately makes herself look plainer in order to discourage unwanted male attention. This leads to a conversation about her kidnapping, followed by Jinshi giving her a hairpin whose significance everyone else appears to understand considerably better than she does.

This is the sort of interaction another heroine might spend the evening replaying in her head.

Maomao has other concerns.

There is the garden party.

There is poison to test.

There are suspicious colored tablets.

There is an unresolved rash.

There is cold weather to prepare for, which she addresses by sewing pockets into an undergarment and filling them with heated stones.

And somewhere, presumably, there are still mushrooms.

Episode 5 ends on the threshold of something larger. The garden party is about to begin. Palace politics are gathering in one place. Maomao has been dressed for the occasion whether she likes it or not, and Jinshi has given her something whose meaning she has yet to decipher.

But before all of that, she got her matsutake.

And for one brief, glorious moment inside the rear palace, nothing was poisoned, cursed, coded, politically significant, or trying to marry anyone.

It was just a very good mushroom.

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