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Editor’s Note: This story was submitted by reader Taiyo Reimers. Want to share your own story or have a story idea you want us to check out? Let us know at japan@stripes.com!
I duck beneath the Japanese noren doorway curtains as the opaque glass of the sliding door rattles on its metal rails. The revving of a bus engine and soft steps of foot traffic flood in behind me. This serene little space is separated from the outside only by four wooden walls and a steel sheet roof. I slide the door back. Silence.
Welcome to a Japanese shokudo. A counter to my right, with only five seats, lines the next few steps ahead. There may be two or three tables with a tatami area to the side, enveloped in a shadow. There’s a voice from behind the counter. One-third of the countertop is lined with condiments and utensils – soy sauce, spices, toothpicks, mustard, and wooden chopsticks. A single tissue box lies at the end of the counter. Slips of shoji paper, peeling and charred at the edges, are nailed on the top rim of the wall, with calligraphic painted characters reading different menu items and prices – rice dishes, noodles, fried sides, orange juice and beer. The chairs are stubby, wooden, with four spindles that meet the seat at a right angle. Oil and smoke are baked into the mortar walls of the small building, leaving some areas black in a grainy pattern above the air vent. The space is dimly lit, and the only source of light are some windows and a row of LEDs. The television set makes a high frequency hum, with scan lines sliding down the screen.
The owner sits on a stool behind the counter, before a metal hot plate, where for half a century he’s made yakisoba and okonomiyaki and prepared little plates of pickles, rice, miso soup, and cups of tea in ceramic cups. He sets a liter bottle of cold water on the counter. A Kirin refrigerator showcase always sits in view, with plastic containers of premade side dishes, as well as a healthy stock of assorted alcoholic beverages. A small cabinet to the back is stuffed with papers and branded calendars from car dealerships and insurance companies, folded folders and laminated A4 sheets written with menu specials and opening hours. Steel pots are piled in the sink and a kettle sits on the gas stove, a cutting board and baskets of half-cut carrots and pink wiping rags are haphazardly placed along the metal counter. A Seiko clock with a jade green border tick-tocks in the corner. What might his eyes have seen from this crowded corner after all these years?
Did he witness the changes of the streets outside from trams to buses, the transitions of neighboring restaurants and stores to the shuttered storefronts I saw on my way in? Has he grown used to the rusted steel signs, the silhouettes of commuting office workers and the smell of cigarette smoke outside his restaurant?
A stove heater in a corner of the concrete floor rumbles as it radiates heat into the room. Each dish is hot. Not warm, not burnt, but hot. The menu items resemble those of other restaurants, but the taste is his own. This is the work of his hands; he’s made it thousands of times before. Perhaps as times have changed over five decades, he too has adopted new methods. Yet, it’s a wholesome flavor that isn’t trying to prove anything, that isn’t trying to be something that it’s not, that you can trust for what it is and only what it is. With my order finished, he returns to his stool, blankly facing the television, but maybe not watching whatever’s on.
I count coins and present my payment. He’s here alone, and his elderly mother is at home. The restaurant will be demolished next month. He doesn’t talk much about it; only matter-of-factly. He’s ready to let go, maybe work as a security guard directing traffic out of construction zones or malls. A restaurant isn’t an option; he’s been doing it for too long, his way, at his Japanese restaurant.
I don’t remember what I ate; only that I was no longer hungry when I left. I walk past the restaurant sometimes. The wooden building was demolished earlier last year, now with a gate and plastic billboard sporting the logo of a real estate agency, awaiting the construction of a new house. How could something so permanent go away so fast, fade away into the shadow of progress. Where commercial marketing hadn’t yet killed memory, reality pressed on those restaurant walls, and rattled at every bus that drove by.
