Tokyo Sobaneer
By B.P.
Lately, all I can bring myself to eat is buckwheat soba. Hot, cold, iced or sauteed, dipped in sauce or submerged in broth, ladled from the communal pot or withdrawn from a plastic bento box, topped with a raw egg or vegetable tempura, a side of boiled seaweed or gyudon beef, eaten crouching, standing, even running–yet always, every meal, those same, spotty gray noodles. It doesn't taste like much, but, when I get hungry, I hear that constant rhythm of slurps in the distance, like footfalls thudding down the endless Tokyo cityscape...
As a cash-strapped college student on exchange in Japan, no place has saved me more than the tachigui soba (standing soba) store. Step into one of these smoky, unassuming stores and, for only 600 or so yen (four US dollars), be given a bowl of broth and noodles, nothing more. Some have lit fronts with wall-height facades, some have digital tickers that automatically register orders on a screen. Others have no signage at all, shoved in a dirty corner by the toilets and hidden behind greasy white flaps. They are often small and a little beat up, with windowless paper facades, and have become so ubiquitous with train station hubs that they have been almost entirely neglected on digital maps—the expectation being that your nearest station will have those signature characters, 立ち食い, shining through the concrete interlace.
Standing shoulder to shoulder with Tokyo's busybodies, I slurped up the sounds and etiquette of this slippery, nonstop world. There, to the intervaled screams of the Yamanote line trains blowing by, I learned how to squish into a booth, to subtly wipe my mouth with my sleeves, to covertly replace my cups and bowl on the counter, and the best way to use the communal cloth to wipe down the table. From grizzly, uncleared throats, I echoed that key phrase, ごちそうさまでした, "Thank you for the meal,” thrown over the shoulder like a coat and uttered halfway out the door.
Here’s how it goes, receiving your platter in sequence: At the counter, add a couple grated spurts of sesame seeds for texture, a toss of chopped spring onion. A knob of wasabi carefully measured and incorporated into the sauce with the tip of one's chopsticks makes the perfect mouthful. In the balance, a light, salty broth smothers the bite, struck through by the fresh crunch of the onions, the cool gumminess of the soba noodles, followed finally by a sharp, pungent sting of artificial wasabi spice, piercing the whole, clearing the palette... Pulled into your mouth with chopsticks, you slurp, swallow, and do it all over again.
For the Sobaneer, (the layperson, the college student, the commuter pass warrior, the men who bow during telephone calls), this is a daily ritual, whittled down to its most discrete and efficient form. For the most seasoned of them, twenty seconds is all it takes. Yes, it is true: Tokyo runs on Tachigui Soba.
I lost 22 pounds that semester. Visiting my family in Vietnam, my parents gawked at my body and the photo I showed them of my daily soba meal. Like prison food! In vain, they tried to grow me out of my newfound scrawniness with homemade meals. But how could I explain that gauntness, if anything, was the way to go in Tokyo? Not just a posture or a number on a scale, but a way of being—of slipping through rush hour crowds to make a transfer, creeping around a man going crazy in the middle of the sidewalk, shoving open space for another person forcing themselves into an already over-capacity train. In that way, my body became something like a soba noodle: Infinitely pliable, if only, in the relentless rush, to avoid snapping. Oh, but that’s a bit silly to say.
—
The tachigui soba store is no new phenomena. Workers living in the outer quarters of Edo (pre-modern Tokyo) would travel in to work along the modern day train lines, and by necessity, food stalls appeared at the densest interchanges to support the inflow of bodies. Some tachigui soba stores stand in the exact same places as their ancestors, right there on the train platforms; on their inner walls, a history of stains paint the ancient orders of ghosts.
From this came a silent tradition of soba eating, emerging from a history of scarcity and starvation in the capital. Some fundamental truths of buckwheat: It’s easy to source, crush, ship, and store. Soba is cheap and quick to make, infinitely customizable, high in fiber and protein, and still, somehow, a low-carb miracle for the layperson. Undeniably sparse, yes, but, supplemented with energy drinks, protein bars, and cigarettes, this meagre meal provides just enough to rebuff exhaustion.
In keeping, the prototypical Tokyo Sobaneer is a businessman. Ageless, featureless, with an undergraduate degree in anything. Backs hunched and craned under heavy backpacks and deadlines, they are defined only by their crinkled uniform suits, dress shoes, and impeccable punctuality. At noon, they seem to appear from nowhere, crowding outside the tachigui soba stores in a wriggling mass of black suits and briefcases, the sun glinting off their worn implements like armor. Squeezing in, they line up to fill their water cups, wait patiently for their number, and check their watches religiously, as if their day can be made in a manner of seconds. Lining up to receive their soba platters, they thrust their snouts deep into their dipping bowls. When one o'clock comes, the men disappear onto departing trains, and the soba stands are deserted. Through the high-rise windows of my university classrooms, I watch this phenomenon repeat itself, at every train station, every day.
Walking around alone, working and living in silence, bowing to the whims of a mechanized life, I began to sense that these men found some comfort in eating together— even if complete strangers, only speaking through exchanged glances, glares and slurps, the residual heat of the previous guy in your seat: Yeah, you get it.
For a long while, it was only behind those curtains that I could finally breathe. This was not Vietnam or America, but a place in which I was unalienably out of place, a “Gaijin” (外人, foreigner). As a Vietnamese American who grew up in Vietnam, my lifelong skill of finagling words and diversions, of proving myself a native, had no such power in Japan. No matter what I did or how well I spoke in Tokyo, I couldn’t hide this principal errancy of myself. Oddly enough, this was the biggest similarity between my experiences in all three nations: The feeling of letting my mask slip for a second, an accent or laugh coming out wrong just once, and the shame of being eclipsed by a label: Viet Kieu (foreigner Vietnamese); FOB (Vietnamese Immigrant); and now, Gaijin.
In this way, I came to find a unique comfort from the tachigui soba: Handing off my pay stub after a day of sideways glances and stammered responses in broken Japanese, I became just one of thousands of mouths to feed, another body hunched at the trough, indeterminate from the mass. I learned, as diligently as I could, the rules to becoming invisible. Yeah, I get it.
In retrospect, I may have become one of those counter intuitive individuals who, more often than not, scans in and out of their local station without taking a single train.
—
There are numerous suicide attempts a day on the Tokyo subway tracks. Officially, these are called "passenger injury events," and, if the attempt is successful, leads to the much detested "passenger injury delay." There is nothing more disparaging to the Tokyo populace than the appearance of that yellow banner on the digital display boards blinking across the station. At this point, all schedules are wiped, rush hour traffic is driven to a complete halt, and a collective groan ripples through the station. Phones come to life—texts to bosses, girlfriends, venues, group chats. Metro police, unable to do much but wait, scurry through the lines with pen and paper, issuing "late train certificates"—one of few pieces of paper that legally excuse tardiness for schoolchildren and business executives alike. But there is little else to do: The overcrowded station, now full to bursting, self-regulates. Neatly organizing ourselves into equal length lines, we stand still, smiling. But we're all thinking the same thing, gently tapping our feet: Some dip in a suit really just had to go and ruin my whole schedule!
In Shibuya and Shinjuku station, there are no guardrails in front of any of the tracks. At rush hour, stepping off the train, every step through those tiny platform walkways is a balancing act, often forcing you to walk against a thick current of bodies, your feet mere inches from the tracks. You try to make yourself smaller just to fit. And yet, despite the impossible density of these platforms, people walk at an intense, confident clip, as if the only thing keeping them from falling over is the belief that it could never happen to them. And, of course, inches from the tracks, tiny tachigui soba stores peer over the crowds.
Once, during one of these passenger injury delays, I stopped in at one and saw something extraordinary. I had been getting shoved around in line for about twenty minutes by then. My phone was dead, and I was sweating like a pig. Five stops away from school, the line growing thicker and pushing me up against the railing, I gave up on waiting. Pushing through the crowds, I made my way to the distant, buzzing veneer of the nearest platform soba stand. Stepping inside, I ordered silently, taking in the chill of a nearby fan. A soft jazz standard, one I recognized, played through the speakers, and, with the hermetic closing of the automatic door behind me, the clamor of the platform disappeared behind the gunk-stained walls.
Through the paper blinds of the platform store, the shadow of commuters crushed together, morphing into a single, uninterrupted creature, undulating with every breath and shift. Despite the rush outside, there was only one other man in the store. I remember I took up the counter space next to him with my order. He looked like any other Sobaneer: an older man with thin, gold frame glasses, eclipsed by his wrinkled black suit. His neck, much like his back, was craned to a slightly off angle, no doubt from years of reading file names in file cabinets.
What struck me at first, however, was a single abnormality: A thin streak of yellow hair cutting across his neat, black hair. I watched the man while I waited for my bowl. He ate slowly. He did not grate in any sesame seeds, and left his bowl of spring onions untouched. He did not slurp, or even use chopsticks—withdrawn from what seemed to be an old glasses case, he ate with a stainless silver fork. Twisting his soba up like pasta, he lifted it gently to his lips. Closing his eyes, with the weight of raising a pail out of a well, he slowly pulled the noodles into his mouth. Savouring the bite, staring off into space, he seemed completely unaware of anything—much less the chaos occurring outside. Coughing loudly, he lowered his head again.
Who knows how long he had been there, playing with his food like a child? Though it was just us two in the store, I suddenly felt an unbearable sense of urgency. I found myself getting almost frustrated with him, as if he were gloating. Weirdo! What the hell was this guy thinking? And how could it be so shocking, so shocking as to pull me into what felt as if my first real breath in ages, to make my pittance of noodles and sauce seem so desolate and sickly? It struck me then that a real man was now dead, gnarled under the teeth of a train car I rode every day, and all I could think about was soba and the correct way to eat it.
I wanted to speak to this strange man, even in my broken Japanese. But by the time he got to approaching his fourth or so bite, I was, by habit, already gone, my meal devoured, my plates neatly stacked and set in the disposal area. Leaving the store, I slipped through the crowd and was once again nobody.
The thought often occurs to me these days: Had the other man on the tracks that day, moments before his "passenger injury," had soba in his stomach, too? Had he, like me, stepped out of a tachigui soba shop, and, unconsciously, took just one more step?
Life in Tokyo goes by with or without you. Like clockwork, lines form and disperse, soba is pulled from the pot, and death is resolved with a small slip of paper. Everything takes seconds, and every thought even less. Like soba, so slippery and quick, so precarious that a single step out of place will send you tumbling…
And yet, though I know better, I still find myself, maybe like every other Sobaneer, drawn to the tracks, if only for the safety of an adjacent soba shop. I crave the familiarity of those hunched, identical shoulders, that comforting bowl of noodles and sauce, just enough to keep numb, the scream of the trains muffled behind the dull sounds of slurping. Here, if only for a moment, one can forget everything.
Generally, if I haven't had soba in a while, I try not to pass through Shibuya station.
****
B.P. served as a Cheuse Center intern and helped organize and curate the inaugural Cheuse Center Busboys and Poets Lecture, delivered by Azar Nafisi in April 2023, at the Sherwood Community Center in Fairfax, Virginia.