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Doing Business Behind the Shanty
I’m a noodle fanatic. I love them. Spaghetti, rigatoni, angel hair pasta, ramen, and soon after arriving in Japan I added my personal favorite, somen. More often than not, it is what is added to noodles, to make the contrast, that makes them taste so great, but I still love to say I love noodles. However, I held off on trying one of Japan’s most famous noodles, soba, until my sister visited me, nearly nine months after I arrived. And even then it was probably more to impress her and my Japanese friend, Noriko, a little graceful cutie, than a true desire to taste the gray noodles.
“Sure, I’ve had soba. It’s great!” I said, puffing out my chest and walking into the famous soba restaurant that perches on the edge of the mountain near one of Japan’s five story pagodas in Yamuguchi, all the while staring nervously at the picture of the gray noodle covered with raw egg and natto (fermented soybeans that taste like coffee and how rotten eggs smell). It’s tough for even some Japanese to like soba.
But men have a habit of pretending we are macho, and we deserve every bit of trouble we get ourselves into because of it.
“Oh, really? I didn’t know,” Noriko said. “Then this is perfect.”
“Yes, perfect.” I grinned.
Soba itself isn’t all that bad. It is made of buckwheat, a blackish grain that is ground into flour and then rolled and kneaded with a bit of water until all air pockets have been forced out. It tastes a bit like a dry or starchy potato and leaves all ground together, which isn’t all that bad. However, add the natto, a big no-no in my book, and you’ve just ruined an edible amount of noodles. Add the raw egg and you’re playing with fire. Not in the conventional sense since in the Japan, where there are so many raw foods, you really don’t have to worry about salmonella poisoning. The Japanese irradiate all of their raw food, nuking it with enough radiation to kill any bugs on it with enough radiation left to kill any in your digestive system on the way through. For me, I have always had a delicate digestive system and often too much irradiated food gives me trouble.
Once I had been given a menu, I scanned it quickly and ordered safely. A bowl of soup with noodles in it. Perfectly safe. It’s only soup. But the soup came cold and, much to my distress, it had a raw egg sitting right on top.
In Japan, no one complains. It’s just not done. Relationships are too important and complaining at a restaurant about your food is the worst way to insult your host and ruin those tenuous relationships. I didn’t want to make a fuss, and I wanted to impress, so I dug in and finished it all, even though my stomach protested loudly by knotting itself into a little fist.
The next morning, my sister and I and another Japanese friend, Yukie, left on a two hour drive to Hiroshima and the secluded island of Miyajima. It was early spring and the leaves were coming out on the trees and the rice fields had just been planted and Yukie was the kind of woman that was full of life and very gracious. She was great to be around because anything could be fun.
She was a little awed by me being American, and I didn’t mind that. It felt gratifying to be considered somebody important. And I didn’t want to let her down, just as I didn’t want to let any of my students down. I wanted to live up to any expectations she had, to be the glamorous movie star, and then exceed it. I wanted to be perfect in her eyes.
We were halfway down the mountain and I knew I couldn’t wait any longer. I asked Yukie to pull over and even before the car had stopped I was running back up the mountain into the bamboo and brush. I was sitting there, and all of a sudden Yukie ran around the edge of the car up the mountain toward me. I yanked up my pants and strolled as best I could out of the bushes.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Sure, I’m fine. Just wanted to get a breath of fresh air and see what this mountain had to offer. Nope. No need to go up there. There’s just more bamboo,” I said escorting her back down the mountain like nothing was wrong.
Ten minutes later we pulled over again by some farmer’s rice field and I ran behind his little tool shack, trying to hide from the cars wizzing by while doing my business. I knew I could no longer pretend that nothing was wrong.
Men will be macho. It’s in our blood. When we are lost, we pretend we aren’t. When we stub our toe, we bite our tongue and hobble like nothing was wrong, as if we’re really practicing some little dance. We pull cash out of our wallets and toss it on the table at dinner like we have plenty more of that. Around the boys we talk big, puff out our chests and suck in our bellies, talk about football and trucks. Hey, we’re men, we have to act like it.
Perhaps the more macho we appear, the more we fit the manly mold, the more perfect we are, then the more people will respect us, admire us, want to be around us, love us.
By the third time stop, only a mile or two down the road, I wanted to give up. For the third straight time I asked for her tissue box and went running into the woods. I didn’t care who saw or knew, just as long as it ended. Anything to stop having to stop the fire in my belly and the battling dragons in my intestines.
I could have asked to go home. But I couldn’t, right? My sister had traveled halfway around the world to spend time with her brother, to see his world and what he loved about it. Seven days, and didn’t have the heart to turn this trip around just because I felt like I was giving birth to an elephant on fire.
In my moment of vulnerability, my weakness, Yukie was there.
She sought out a doctor in the small village we passed through and banged on the steel grate door until he opened up. A few furious minutes and several gestures to me lying in the back of the car sweating and I had the medicine I needed.
I was macho no longer. But part of me didn’t mind. I had found someone who had seen what I considered one of the worst sides of me, the most embarrassing and drew closer. I didn’t have to hold up facades and pretend to be more than I was. Here was someone who accepted me just as I was. It felt good and I made sure she was around as much as possible.
© Seth Crossman
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