Thin and Long: The Bowl We Slurp at Year's End

The way I see it, people are creatures who cannot help but lay wishes even upon the things they eat. Filling the belly ought to be enough, and yet they go out of their way to heap meaning onto it. This one brings good fortune; that one cuts a bond, they say.

Soba is a good example of it.

In the beginning it was no more than a coarse flour kneaded up with hot water and eaten in lumps, like dumplings. Then someone kneaded it with cold water instead, rolled it out thin, and cut it fine — thin and thinner — and boiled it off in a moment. Soba-kiri, cut soba, they called it. Its turning into a noodle is no such old story. And once it rode out onto the food stalls of Edo, where a man could slurp it up in a single pull, the hasty folk of Edo lost their hearts to it entirely.

More than anything, I loved that steam. On a cold night, a lantern glowing all at once at a dark crossroads, and the white steam rising up off it. As though, just in that one spot, the warmth of people had come softly floating up.

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It was the year's end in Edo, in 1793 (Kansei 5).

Those were the days when I walked the provinces plying a little trade. That year's end, I was drifting about the streets of the city.

Edo at the close of the year is a great uproar, a proper commotion. The dust of the soot-sweeping whirls out into the streets; the sound of pounding mochi comes from every side. Head clerks out collecting debts scurry along with their ledgers hugged to their chests. Men paying back what they had borrowed, men who could not pay and dodged this way and that, the cries of the sellers of shime-kazari — the twists of straw and paper hung up to welcome the new year — the press and heat of bodies at the year-end market. Debts and dues and every obligation of the whole year, to be squared away clean before the day was out, so as to greet the new year fresh: the whole town was in a fidget with it.

It was the night of ōmisoka, New Year's Eve, with the cold striking up from the ground. The breath I let out froze white. When I ducked my neck down and came out through an alley, from a stall at the corner of the crossroads a smell of steam and of dashi — the stock drawn from kelp and dried fish — came flooding out at me.

By the light of the lantern, a good few men stood cradling bowls and slurping. Zuru, zuru — the sound of soba being pulled up rang out, oddly lively, into the cold sky. One sniffing at his nose, one huffing to warm his fingers. Every one of them hunched at the shoulder, and yet their faces, only their faces, had softened open there before the steam.

"Give us a bowl too, pop."

The master of the stall was a well-fleshed man of about forty, Tsunekichi by name. Instead of an answer he pitched a portion of soba, quick, into the fiercely boiling pot. A moment's boil, the water shaken off through a zaru — a woven bamboo strainer — the soba turned into a bowl, and the hot broth poured over it in a sweep. A scatter of chopped scallion, and here you are, held out to me. Not a hitch in the whole run of his hands.

"Piping hot. Mind yourself."

Taking it, I felt my palms warm through the bowl. One sip of the broth, and the smell of soy sauce and of katsuo — dried bonito — dropped clean down from the back of my nose to the pit of my belly. It soaked, tingling, into my frozen body. I pulled up the soba with my chopsticks and gave it a slurp. Thin as it was, it had a firmness to it, and slid smooth down the throat. Good. Why is it, I wonder, that soba on a cold night sinks so deep into a man, into the very organs of him.

A man beside me, an artisan by the look of him, lifted his soba high on his chopsticks and said, with feeling:

"Without a bowl of this, a man can't cross over into the new year."

"Oh? Is that how it is," I said, and the man put on a face that said it was plain as day.

"Thin, and long — that's it. So you'll live thin and long and hale. If I don't get this pulled down on ōmisoka, somehow I can't settle."

Tsunekichi put in from the far side of the pot.

"A good many of my regulars are the masters of merchant houses, see. That lot pull down soba at the end of every month to begin with. Misoka-soba, month's-end soba, they call it. The last days of the month it's all collecting debts and taking stock — busy right to the finish. Can't sit down to a proper meal. So they take a breath over a bowl of soba that slips down easy into the gut. And that month's-end soba, come the very last month's-end of the year, turns into an uncommonly lucky bowl of soba. That's the way of it."

Ah, I see, I thought. A bowl that soothed the bustle of month's end had turned, at the year's close, into a very wish laid upon a whole life.

"But see here, pop," another customer threw in, to tease. "Soba breaks easy, doesn't it. There's folk who won't touch it for that — the bond breaks with it, they say."

Tsunekichi gave a snort of a laugh.

"There's them that say it the other way round, too. It's good precisely because it breaks easy. This year's bad bonds and hardships — you cut them clean through and go into the new year free of them. The same soba, and one man prays over it for thin and long, and another gives thanks that it snaps off short. Which of them's the truth, I couldn't tell you myself. Well — take it the lucky way, and you'll not go wrong."

Round the stall the men burst out laughing.

Just then a well-dressed old man, taking his bowl, held forth with his own piece of lore. A craftsman who worked in kinpaku — gold leaf — so he said.

"Soba, now — soba gathers gold. In our workshop, to collect up the gold dust scattered on the floor, we use a wad of kneaded soba flour. Press it down flat, and the gold sticks to it, and up it comes. So — eat soba, and gold gathers to you, your fortune swells. A lucky charm, you see."

Gathering gold with soba, is it. I listened half with a wetted brow — half taking it for a tall tale — but there, with this sort of embroidery the one who adds it wins. True or made up, a lucky story does a man good on a cold night.

All of them craned in over the one stall, slurped from their several bowls, and each chanted his own wish as it pleased him. One praying for thin and long, one insisting on the cutting of bad bonds, one reckoning up the gold that would gather to him. Their wishes were every one at odds, and yet before the steam they all laughed with the same face. That people should go to such trouble to dress up one breakable bowl of soba into this many lucky charms — people are strange creatures. And yet, thanks to that wishing, the year's-end bowl tasted far warmer than any mere midnight supper.

"Do you pull the stall out like this every night, pop," I asked, and Tsunekichi answered without lifting his eyes from the pot.

"Aye. Come dusk I shoulder the tenbin — the carrying-pole balanced at both ends — and work my round of the same crossroads. Set the water boiling, warm the broth, and when a customer comes I let him pull down a bowl. Yonaki-soba, night-crier's soba, they call it. The colder it is, the more they come. A night of snow, now — that's a thing to be thankful for."

As he spoke, Tsunekichi wiped the sweat from his brow with a tenugui — a cotton hand-cloth. For all it was a frozen night, the master's face, bathed the whole while in the steam of the pot, shone slick with sweat. Steam and sweat and the smell of dashi. Round that one stall alone, it was for all the world like a little pocket of summer.

I asked for another and slurped down a second bowl. It seemed to me better even than the first. My belly filled out, and the blood ran warm to the very tips of my feet. The artisan beside me, the old man across the way, all of them called for seconds and buried their faces in the steam of their bowls. Not a soul hurried for home. Another hour or so and the year would turn over, and it was as though we were all lingering, loath to let go, round the stall on that night at the seam of things.

Far off, gooon, the joya-no-kane — the temple bells that toll out the old year — began to ring. Tsunekichi did not stay his hands, but pitched a fresh portion of soba into the pot. The steam rose up whiter than ever.

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Even now, when ōmisoka comes round, people pull down their soba.

Some eat it out at a shop, some boil it up at home. Listening to the joya-no-kane, watching the bright television, still they lift something thin and long on their chopsticks and carry it to their mouths. "Thin, and long," someone murmurs. Ask why they do it, and surprisingly few can say for certain. The bowl that soothed the bustle of month's end, the stall-master's smooth patter of lore — no one remembers any of it now.

And yet the wish, only the wish, has ridden the steam off the bowl and stayed, whole and entire. That "thin, and long" I heard at a stall in the Kansei years lives on, exactly as it was, at the year's-end table even now.

I too, when the year draws to its close, find myself wanting a bowl of it after all. Remembering, as I pull it down, those men on that cold night, huddled shoulder to shoulder on the far side of the steam.

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