Speaking of Food

Four hapless Australians are dragging themselves through the streets of Tokyo, bedraggled, jetlagged and spaced out. They got off their plane less than 36 hours ago, and have no clue where they are or what they're doing there. First timers in the Land Of The Rising Sun, they have been gobsmacked by the sights and lights of Tokyo City: the traffic is quiet, almost inaudible, the people are polite, respectful and line up to wait their turn, and the streets are immaculately clean and tidy. You could sit down on the ground and eat your dinner off the pavement, provided you use chopsticks.

   All this immaculate organisation, efficiency and polished civilisation has evidently gotten too much for them to handle, and, in the total absence of any good old Australian road rage, rubbish chucked out of windows, or random and pointless vandalism, they have, as inexorably as flies are drawn to a turd, gravitated towards the red light district of Shinjuku, the seedy part of town which even here seems to exist. Four corners turned and five alleyways followed away from the glitzy main thoroughfare with skyscrapers, five-star hotels and banks, they find themselves cruising through little back alleys that get narrower and more suspicious looking with every step. Here they are surrounded by brothels, massage parlours, porn cinemas and dodgy looking bars, and, paradoxically, as they've gotten further away from the main drag and from the flow of traffic, it's gotten noisier.

   The conversation turns towards food. They are starving.

   'Let's get something to eat,' says one of them, a woman known as Ninja. A ninja was a Japanese peasant who operated as a silent and secretive assassin in the days of the samurai, a few hundred years ago. They would crawl into people's houses at night and cut their throats while they were sleeping. The word nin-ja is derived from "nin", a different way of reading the kanji (pictogram of Chinese derivation, incorporated into the Japanese writing system) of the verb "shinobu", which means "to sneak", and -ja, which refers to "people". Therefore the word ninja means "sneaky people". People who are, differently put, silent and deadly. This last qualification is exceptonally well suited to the woman currently bearing the name Ninja, who is reowned far and wide for her propensity of letting go of silent and deadly farts of such lethal force that they have been known to cause koalas to drop dead from trees fifty metres away.

   'Hmm,' mutters a girl known as Inari, "The Fox", on account of her long bouncy ponytail. She bends a bit closer over a menu stuck on a board outside of an eating place and peers at it myopically. 'This is all pork. I hate pork. I want vegetarian.'

   'Huh,' says the Ninja, 'I really need a short-black-stiff-flat-white-soy-latte, or I'm gonna kill someone.'

   'There's a burger joint over there,' says a bloke, pointing over his shoulder. 'They have cheese toasties. That would do me.' He is known as Katana, a term which refers to the curved one-sided samurai blade, because he is tall and lanky, and, depending on which way the wind is blowing, tends to slouch and lean at precarious angles to the perpendicular.

   'No, I can't eat any of that!' protests a fourth character, a dodgy-looking bloke with a headband and a ponytail. He is known as Kikko, "The Turtle", because he's slow on his feet and slow on the uptake, and, after all, if you've got a Ninja then you're gonna have to have a Turtle. 'That's all full of gluten and dairy! I need gluten-free and dairy-free!'

   'I wouldn't mind some chicken,' offers Inari helpfully. The last time they saw chicken on a menu was two hours ago and three suburbs away. 'I like chicken.'

   'Right.' Kikko glares at her. Then he looks around a bit more and spies another eating place on the other side of the road. 'Hey, look! There's a curry place! We could have a curry, that would be all right!'

   The group turn to look at the curry place. The sign reads "Indian Curry".

   'Fuck that,' growls Katana, for whom the expression "a hungry man is an angry man" clearly carries personal significance, 'I didn't come to Japan to eat curry!'

   'Fuckin 'ell.' Kikko rolls his eyes in exasperation, and casts around for alternatives. His eye falls on a place they hadn't considered yet. 'How 'bout this joint?'

   The group bend themselves carefully over the menu. It's in Japanese. They cough, hum, clear their throats and pull their earlobes. Then they look at the pictures and the prices. Chicken appears to be an option, and no mention is made of gluten or, the gods forbid, dairy. It looks like they're onto a winner.

   'Allright,' says Kikko, The Turtle, hoisting up his sagging pants. 'I'll go inside and check it out. Yous just wait out here.'

   The others mumble of chorus of mixed consent, resentment and protest: 'Yes but no but yeah nah rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb ...'

   Kikko ignores them, bravely pushes open the door and steps through it.

   Inside he has just enough time to take in the setting: middle-aged Japanese men in suits sitting around in corners, smoking. Then, almost immediately, a waiter comes steering straight at him under full sail, hands waving in the air and shirt tails flapping in the wind.

   ‘No, no!’ the waiter shouts at him, whilst making shooing-away movements with his hands. The message is clear, and, indeed, is hard to misunderstand.

   However, Kikko The Turtle is ready for this. He’s been  

preparing, studying the Japanese language at every opportunity for the last six months. He takes a deep breath and addresses the waiter in his best Japanese.

   ‘Sora wa ao kedo komori des!’ he states, with the supreme confidence usually only found in the completely ignorant. [The sky is blue but cloudy].

   ‘No, n ... ?’ The waiter stops dead in his tracks, leaving small black skidmarks behind him on the floor. Small wisps of black smoke curl up to the ceiling from them. The waiter’s mouth stops at mid-gape.

   ‘Watashi no nami wa mecha í des,’ Kikko continues happily, nodding enthusiastically at the same time. [My wave is very big].

   The waiter stares at him, speechless. Several heads of the blokes seated around the dining area turn and watch the exchange. Conversation dies down. Cigarette smoke hangs heavily in the air.

   Kikko doesn’t need any further encouragement. Clearly his linguistics efforts are being put to very effective use here.

   ‘Kyo minami kaze wa samuí des!’ he exclaims proudly. [Today the south wind is cold!].

   The waiter’s mouth snaps shut with an audible smack. His powers of movement and speech return to him, and he moves forwards again towards Kikko, lifting up his hands like before.

   ‘Menu no English! No, no!’ he shouts. He looks agitated, and a nerve twitches below his left eye. All eyes in the restaurant are now on Kikko and the waiter.

   Kikko is puzzled. Was his eloquent use of the Japanese language not having the desired effect? He clears his throat, eyes off the waiter worriedly, and tries one more time to establish positive and productive cross-cultural international gastronomic negotiations.

   ‘Watashi wa kuro iruka yama de mirimasta!’ he ventures politely, extending the metaphorical olive branch to the waiter. [I have seen a black dolphin on a mountain].

   The waiter has gone purple in the face. A small vein has popped in his right eyeball, and he looks like he’s about to have an apoplectic fit. In the room behind him all activity has ceased, and several pins can be heard dropping to the ground, in slow motion. He raises his right arm, straightens it and points directly at the door behind Kikko, on whom it is now slowly starting to dawn that perhaps his conversational Japanese For Beginners And Five Year-Olds is not entirely having the desired effect.

   ‘Menu no English!! No English!! Out, out!!!’ the waiter screams, spittle flying out of his mouth and shampooing, rinsing and blowdrying Kikko’s hair. Behind the waiter several of the more dodgy looking blokes stub out their cigarettes in teacups and rise from behind their tables. Some of them start to roll up their sleeves, while others start to retrieve things from their pockets.

   ‘Oh’. Kikko is taken aback. He is, however, capable of taking a subtle hint. ‘Tadashí.’ [Right]. He points over his shoulder at the door, wags his head in its direction, lifts up one eyebrow interrogatively, then nods.

   ‘Watashi wa tsuoi kuragé suki janai,’ he offers as parting greeting. [I don’t like strong jellyfish].

   Kikko steps out, back onto the street. The door gets smashed shut behind him. Little bells strung above it on the inside tinkle, cling, clang and fall off their string. The glass pane of the door shudders and rattles, then smashes and falls to the ground in small pieces. The waiter’s face, frozen in fury, can be seen through the gap.

   Kikko turns to the waiter, inclines his head, bends formally at the waist towards him and says ‘Arigato gozeimas.’ [Thank you very much Honourable One].

   As Kikko steps back down towards the street level where the others are waiting in hungry anticipation, the waiter can be seen on the other side of the door brandishing a steak knife and being violently restrained by three customers.

   ‘Right,’ says Kikko, and scraches his head. ‘That didn’t work. I think they’re full, probably. Let’s go somewhere else.’

   The others mutter their discontent, resentment and disagreement. They turn around and start back down the street.

   Across the road on the other side they see an ambulance. There’s two blokes standing outside it, with a trolley-stretcher between them. On the stretcher is a full body bag, hermetically zipped up around the head. There is no movement inside. As the bloke closest to the ambulance lifts up his side of the stretcher, his mate on the other side pushes forward. The edge of the stretcher makes it onto the back threshold of the ambulance, then falls back down again, hitting the first bloke in the shin. He drops his side and starts hopping around on one foot while clutching his leg. The bloke on the back side of the trolley gets hit in the guts by the trolley coming back his way and falls over. The bodybag slips sideways a bit. It doesn’t move.

   The four stand there and watch the spectacle. Then they turn to each other.

   ‘Yeah,’ says Kikko. He looks over his shoulder at the broken glass of the restaurant door behind him, and then back at the bodybag on the stretcher.

   ‘Yeah,’ he says again, pensively. ‘Let’s go somewhere else, maybe, ey?’