Hey, how’s your cheeseburger? Probably feeling generally optimistic about things? Probably a very “go with the flow” kind of cheeseburger. Probably situated on vaguely brownish buns, topped with cheese that’s some shade of waxy yellow, because it’s one of America’s many happy-go-lucky idiots, blithely ignorant of the pain of its ancestors. At Burger King Japan, the cheeseburger is black—all black, from bun to cheese and back again, like the starless night we are doomed to wander in this illusory life. Yours is a sunlit, beige cheeseburger world. You are living a lie.
As Kotaku reports, Burger King’s new, even more despairing spin on the “Kuro Burger” begins rolling out in Japan later this month, and through the irritable bowels of hell thereafter. Its beef, coated in black pepper, sits on buns made of bamboo charcoal. It’s topped with an onion and garlic sauce made of squid ink—spewed from squids who cut their own tentacles sometimes, just to feel alive. Even the cheese is black, made from one of Japan’s mythical “dairy wraiths” that haunt the places where milk is coagulated while in the grips of a powerful rage (and also bamboo charcoal).
The Kuro Burger comes in either Pearl or Diamond versions. The latter comes topped with slices of lettuce, tomato, and onions whose children drowned as they watched, powerless to save them.
For those who hunger for a burger that reflects all the madness and cruelty of our pitiless existence, the Japanese can pick up a Kuro Burger beginning Sept. 19, while Americans still have the Rodeo Burger, at least.