On the Flavor of Things After They Have Been Removed

Murakami had chosen the place — a small ramen shop near Ebisu station with eight stools at a counter and a kitchen visible through a rectangle of steam. It was not the kind of place you would expect to hold a conversation about literature. The counter was narrow, the stools were fixed in place, and the old man behind the counter moved with the unhurried precision of someone performing a task he had performed forty thousand times. Murakami sat at the far end, already eating. He did not look up when I arrived.

Esquivel was late. She came in smelling of something I could not place — not perfume, something botanical and sharp, like epazote or ruda — and she looked at the menu written in chalk on the wall with the complete attention of someone reading a treaty. She ordered the miso ramen without asking what was in it, which I would later understand was an act of extraordinary trust from a woman who considers food preparation a moral question.

“I did not know you ate ramen,” she said to Murakami.

“I eat ramen constantly,” he said. “It is the most honest food. A bowl of ramen does not pretend to be anything other than what it is. Broth, noodles, an egg, some pork. It declares itself completely in the first spoonful.”

“That is not honesty,” Esquivel said. “That is simplicity. They are not the same thing. A mole negro takes three days to prepare and contains thirty-seven ingredients, and it is more honest than your ramen because every ingredient has argued with every other ingredient and what you taste at the end is the record of that argument.”

Murakami lifted his chopsticks and extracted a single noodle, which he held up to the fluorescent light as though examining it for flaws. “I am not interested in argument. I am interested in what remains after the argument is over. After the thirty-seven ingredients have finished fighting, what is left? A dark sauce. The argument has become something else. Something quieter than the ingredients that made it.”

I was sitting between them, which felt geographically appropriate and emotionally precarious. The old man behind the counter set down Esquivel’s bowl, and the steam rose between her face and mine like a curtain being drawn.

“I want to talk about erasure,” I said.

Neither of them responded immediately. Esquivel tasted her broth. Her expression underwent a series of microadjustments that I recognized from watching her in the Paloma meeting — she was reading the soup the way a translator reads a sentence, locating the verbs, the nouns, the subordinate clauses of flavor. She set down the spoon.

“The dashi is good,” she said. “There is kombu in it, and katsuobushi, and something else. Something dried. Shiitake, maybe.” She looked at Murakami. “Your ramen is not as simple as you claim.”

“I did not make it.”

“Everything you choose to eat is something you have made a decision about. The choice is the preparation.”

I tried again. “Erasure. Things disappearing from the world. Not violently — bureaucratically. One day a thing exists and the next day it does not, and everyone complies with the absence. Burns what needs to be burned. Continues.”

Murakami set down his chopsticks. He had finished his ramen and the bowl sat empty in front of him with the clean precision of a period at the end of a sentence. “I know what you are describing. It is the most Japanese form of loss. Not grief — compliance. Something disappears and you file the paperwork and go to work the next morning. The space where the thing was becomes part of the architecture. You organize your life around the gap.”

“In Mexico,” Esquivel said, “we do not comply with loss. We cook it. When my grandmother died, my mother spent three days in the kitchen making her recipes. Every dish my grandmother had ever made. She filled the house with the smell of someone who was no longer in the house. The food was the refusal to let the erasure stand.”

“But the grandmother was still dead,” Murakami said.

“Of course she was dead. The food did not bring her back. The food said: you cannot erase her from this kitchen. Her hands shaped this masa. The heat of her body is in this mole. You can take her body but you cannot take the flavor she left in these walls.”

Murakami was quiet. The old man behind the counter was washing a pot with the same circular motion he probably used to wash every pot, and the sound of the water was steady and constant, the kind of white noise that makes a small room feel smaller.

“What if you could?” Murakami said. “Take the flavor.”

Esquivel looked at him.

“What if one day the flavor of mole disappeared. Not the recipe — you still have the recipe. Not the ingredients — the chiles are still in the market. But the flavor itself. The thing that happens when those ingredients combine. What if that particular alchemy simply stopped working. You follow the recipe perfectly and what comes out tastes of nothing.”

“That is not possible.”

“Of course it is not possible. That is why it is interesting.”

I felt something shift in the conversation — the same tectonic quality I’d felt in other meetings when two writers stop circling each other and begin digging in the same direction, not in cooperation exactly but in parallel, like two people tunneling from opposite sides of a mountain.

“I have been thinking about a convenience store,” I said. “A konbini. One of those places with the fluorescent lights and the perfectly arranged onigiri and the chime that sounds when the door opens. A woman who works there. She has worked there for years. She finds peace in the routine — stocking the shelves, greeting the customers, rotating the sandwiches so the earliest sell-by dates face front. The regularity of it is not deadening to her. It is a form of prayer.”

“Prayer to what?” Esquivel asked.

“To order. To the principle that if you perform the same actions in the same sequence every day, the world holds together. She is not religious. She does not believe in God. She believes in the planogram — the diagram that tells her where every product goes on every shelf.”

Murakami nodded. It was a slow nod, the nod of recognition. “I have written people like this. People who find the structure of daily life sufficient. Who do not need the extraordinary. For whom a well-made cup of coffee and a well-ironed shirt constitute a complete philosophy.”

“And that is where we disagree,” Esquivel said. She had abandoned her ramen halfway through, which felt like a statement. “A life organized around routine is a life that has been emptied of something essential. The woman in the convenience store — she is not at peace. She is numb. There is a difference between tranquility and the absence of sensation, and your characters, Murakami, sometimes cannot tell the difference.”

“Sometimes the character does not need to tell the difference. Sometimes the reader tells the difference for them.”

“That is lazy.”

“That is restraint.”

I intervened, not because I had the authority to but because the ramen shop was too small for the argument to expand further without displacing the other customers, of whom there were three, all eating with the focused indifference of people who came here to eat and not to overhear literary disputes.

“What if both things are happening at once,” I said. “What if the woman in the konbini is at peace — genuinely, not numbly — and at the same time things are being erased from the world around her. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But slowly, the way a photograph fades. One day the onigiri comes in its usual packaging but the umeboshi filling tastes different. Not bad. Just — less. The tartness that used to make your mouth pucker has softened to something merely sour. And the woman notices, because her entire life is organized around noticing the exact state of every product on every shelf. But she adjusts. She rotates the new onigiri into the display and continues.”

“She complies,” Murakami said.

“She complies. Because that is what the job requires. The planogram does not have a category for ‘the flavor of this thing has diminished.’ There is no incident report for something becoming less itself.”

Esquivel picked up her spoon again, then put it down. She was looking at the steam rising from her bowl with an expression I could not read — not anger, not sadness, something more structural, like watching a load-bearing wall develop a crack.

“You are describing the death of taste,” she said. “Not individual taste — the capacity of things to taste of themselves. The umeboshi loses its tartness. Then what? The soy sauce loses its salt? The wasabi loses its heat? The miso — ” She stopped. She touched the rim of her bowl. “The miso loses its fermentation? Do you understand what you are saying? Fermentation is time made edible. Miso is soybeans that have been colonized by koji and left to change for months, sometimes years. The flavor of miso is the flavor of patience. If miso stops tasting of itself, patience has been erased from the world.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You say ‘yes’ as if this is a premise. This is an atrocity.”

“It is a quiet atrocity,” Murakami said. “The kind that does not announce itself. No one marches in the street because the umeboshi is slightly less tart. No one files a complaint because the dashi has lost a dimension. These are losses so incremental that the only people who notice are the people whose lives are organized around noticing. The ramen chef who has been making the same broth for forty years. The woman in the convenience store who has been rotating the same products for a decade. These are the seismographs. And no one is reading the seismograph.”

“My seismograph is my tongue,” Esquivel said. “Every cook’s is. I taste a tomato and I can tell you whether it grew in good soil or in hydroponic nutrient solution. I taste bread and I know whether the baker was patient or rushed. These are not metaphors. These are literalities. The tongue knows.”

“But what if the tongue forgets?” I said. “What if the erasure is not just the flavor leaving the food but the capacity to recognize the loss leaving the person? The woman in the konbini notices the umeboshi. She adjusts. A week later, the miso changes. She notices. She adjusts. A month later — does she still notice? Or has her palate recalibrated to the diminished world? Has the new normal become normal?”

Murakami was watching the old man behind the counter. The old man was now slicing spring onions with a knife that moved so fast the blade was a sound rather than a sight — a steady, rapid tapping that was almost musical. Murakami listened to it the way he listens to jazz, with his whole body tilted slightly toward the source.

“The old man would notice,” Murakami said. “A man who has been cutting spring onions for forty years would notice if the spring onions changed. He would not be able to articulate it. He would not say ‘the cellular structure has been altered’ or ‘the sulfur compounds have diminished.’ He would say: these are not right. And he would continue cutting them, because the lunch rush is coming and there is no time to mourn a spring onion.”

“There is always time to mourn a spring onion,” Esquivel said. “If you do not mourn the spring onion, you have agreed to its erasure. Silence is compliance. In my country, the women who lost children — the mothers of the disappeared — they did not adjust. They did not recalibrate. They stood in the plaza every Thursday with photographs. They refused to let the normal become normal.”

The conversation went quiet. The comparison — spring onions and the disappeared — should have been absurd, but in the steam of that ramen shop, with Esquivel’s half-eaten bowl cooling between us, it did not feel absurd. It felt like two different scales of the same instrument measuring the same frequency.

“I do not write protest fiction,” Murakami said. “My characters do not stand in plazas with photographs. They sit in rooms and listen to records and wait for something to change. I know this makes me — I know how this looks, from the outside. But I believe that the act of sitting with loss, of not converting it immediately into action or narrative or meaning, is itself a form of attention. Perhaps the most honest form.”

“It is the most comfortable form,” Esquivel said. “Which is not the same thing.”

“No. It is not.”

I wanted to ask about the story’s shape — whether the konbini woman resists or complies, whether the erasure accelerates or plateaus, whether there is a moment of confrontation or whether the story simply continues until the reader realizes that everything in it has been hollowed out. But the conversation had reached a place where craft questions felt insufficient, where the disagreement between them was not about technique but about what a person owes the world when the world is being quietly subtracted.

“What does she eat?” Esquivel asked. “The woman. At home, alone, after her shift. What does she eat?”

“Instant noodles,” Murakami said, without hesitation.

“Of course. And does she enjoy them?”

“She finds them satisfying in the way that completing a task is satisfying. The water boils. The noodles soften. The flavor packet dissolves. The meal is accomplished.”

“A flavor packet,” Esquivel said. She pronounced the words as though they were evidence in a trial. “Dehydrated powder designed to approximate the memory of a flavor. This is your character’s dinner. And you do not find that devastating?”

“I find it precise.”

“It is the most precise devastation I have ever heard described.”

The old man brought Murakami a cup of tea without being asked. Green tea, the cheap kind, the kind that comes free at the end of a meal. Murakami held it in both hands and the steam crossed his face and for a moment he looked like someone sitting at the bottom of something, looking up.

“Here is what interests me,” he said. “The woman in the convenience store has organized her life around products. Packaged foods. Manufactured items. Everything she touches has already been processed, sealed, labeled, given a sell-by date. She does not cook. She does not grow anything. Her relationship to food is entirely mediated by packaging. And when the flavors begin to diminish, she notices because she is meticulous — but she does not grieve. She cannot grieve because she has no memory of the original. She has never tasted an umeboshi that someone’s grandmother packed in salt and shiso and left in a clay pot for three years. She has only tasted the umeboshi that arrives in a factory-sealed triangle of rice on a Tuesday delivery truck.”

Esquivel set down her spoon. Something in her face had changed — not softened, exactly, but opened, the way a window opens when you realize the room needs different air.

“She has never tasted the real thing,” Esquivel said.

“She has never tasted the real thing. So when the real thing diminishes, she does not know what has been lost. She only knows that the number has changed — this product was a 7 and is now a 6. She adjusts the display. She does not weep.”

“And the people who do know? The old ramen chef. The grandmother with the clay pot.”

“They are dying,” Murakami said. “Or they have already died. Or they are in rooms that no one visits, tasting things and knowing that the things have changed but having no one to tell.”

“That is the loneliest sentence you have said tonight.”

“I write lonely sentences. It is what I do.”

I looked down at the counter. My own ramen had gone cold while I listened, the fat congealing on the surface into a thin, opaque skin. Underneath, the broth was still warm — I could feel the heat rising through the layer of fat — but the surface had sealed itself, the way surfaces do when you stop paying attention.

“There is a story here,” I said, “about a woman who maintains the inventory of a world that is losing its flavors, and who finds that maintenance sufficient, and who is not wrong to find it sufficient, and who is also — ”

“Also complicit,” Esquivel said.

“Also free,” Murakami said.

They said it at the same time, which meant they said different things simultaneously, and the ramen shop held both words in its steam and its fluorescent light and did not choose between them. I thought about writing that down. Instead I picked up my chopsticks and ate a cold noodle and tried to determine whether it tasted like what it was supposed to taste like, and realized I had no way of knowing, because I had no memory of the original, because I had never had the original, because the original might already be gone.

The old man was cleaning the counter now, moving his cloth in the same circles, and the spring onions he had cut were piled in a small white bowl, and they were green and pungent and entirely themselves, and I wanted to believe that they would stay that way, and I was not sure, and neither Murakami nor Esquivel was willing to promise me that they would.