The ramen man

Mr. Matsumoto, a travelling ramen vendor, figures he's found his niche. For the last five years he's been selling noodles from the back of his tiny white van. Mr. Matsumoto hails from Matsudo, far across Tokyo in Chiba. He begins his nightly rounds from there about 6 p.m. and makes his slow way to the quiet neighborhood around Higashi Koganei, one of the western bedroom stops on the Chuo train line just outside of metropolitan Tokyo. Around 11 p.m., he parks next to the darkened doors of Queen Pachinko Parlor at Higashi Koganei station. He usually calls it quits around 2 or 3 a.m. and heads homeward. He's in bed by 5 a.m. Mr. Matsumoto is 62 with short-cropped grey hair, a ruddy complexion, and a ready smile. He's behind the wheel every day but Sunday when, he says, he can sleep in late.

When he's in a neigborhood, Mr. Matsumoto toodles along at a pace that even a staggering drunk could catch up with. He times his speed so that when the recorded horn call issuing from the dented loudspeaker mounted on the van passes through windows, paper shoji screens, and television noise, if you're hungry and ambulatory, you can be out your front door to order a bowl of noodles before Mr. Matsumoto passes by.

The plaintive horn wail, with its thin wavering melody and rhythm sounds almost Indian-snake-charmer-like, but Mr. Matsumoto says it's an old Japanese song, the traditional call of the travelling ramen man. Everyone who hears it knows he's coming. The tune is distinct from the yaki-imo man's, the old rags-and-paper man's, the tofu man's, and the laundry pole man's. And the ramen call can be heard from several hundred meters away.

On a busy day before the New Year's holidays or during the cherry-viewing season, Matsumoto-san will sell 120 to 130 bowls of ramen. On his slowest days, he'll sell only 20 or thirty. Mr. Matsumoto used to run a stationary ramen shop in a building with walls. He was also the proprietor of a yakiniku shop, but luckily he got out of that line of work well before the mad cow disease scare. He now prefers the open road and the flexible hours. Winter is not that bad, he says. The propane-heated cauldrons keep the van warm. Summer is the worst -- the heat, the humidity -- taihen taihen, he says. He rarely has trouble with unruly customers. Drunks don't bother him much. They eat, he says, then leave pretty quickly.

The rear door of the van lifts up to expose a small stainless steel counter. The door, which is most always lifted, provides shelter from the elements for the customer or two who can fit under it. (I've got to stoop.) Hanging from a corner is a glowing red lantern stenciled with the three bold black katakana letters "ra me n."

Inside the truck, the bulb in a small white paper lantern dangling from the ceiling has burned out or maybe there's a short in the wire, because Mr. Matsumoto fiddles with it, muttering under his breath that this thing was on a bit earlier. Working in the red glow of the outside lantern and the dashboard lights, he builds my bowl of ramen.

When Matsumoto-san is in the miniscule "kitchen" behind the driver's seat, he sits on a 10-liter cooking oil can. With his knees up to his chest, he fills up the space behind the "counters." It's extra cold tonight, so he's got on a navy blue nylon coat over his apron. The kitchen has two large stainless steel cauldrons -- one for warming the noodles and the other for hot broth. The condiments -- menma (pickled bamboo shoots), hard-boiled eggs, nori sheets, sliced scallions, and chashu pork slices are in stacked, lidded Tupperware-like storage boxes. The ramen bowls are disposable plastic and the chopsticks throwaway. When he lifts the lid off the noodle-boiling cauldron, steam fills the cabin like a sauna, billowing out the back of the van to warm the top of my bare head.

Parked next to the station entrance, Mr. Matsumoto has the horn volume turned down, but one can still hear it when the trains are not passing by. It's Shinnenkai season, and the parties celebrating the start of a new year are in full swing, as are other sentiments. Two suicides have delayed all the trains tonight.

An inebriated businessman squeezes in at the counter between my elbow and the box of scallions. He orders a shoyu ramen and asks Matsumoto where the taxi stand is, though he just passed it as he walked down the station steps toward the van. The man explains he lives in Shinyurigaoka, southwest of Shinjuku, which from Shinjuku would have cost about 350 yen for train fare. Trouble is, he's been at a Shinnenkai and the last Odakyu line train from Shinjuku had shut down. Using Euclidian logic, he explains that he took the Chuo line straight west figuring to take the hypotenus in a taxi down to his home. The taxi ride will probably cost him 8,000 yen, but a taxi from Shinjuku, he states, would have cost over 10,000 yen.

Matsumoto, preparing the man's ramen, chuckles at this story. The man's logic, such as it is, has brought him a sale. He opens the hot noodle cauldron again immediately filling the van with a cloud of steam. My head is warmed again. Matsumoto sets down the man's bowl of ramen.

The businessman snaps apart a pair of chopsticks and pours pepper onto his ramen from the large blue condiment can. A torrent of pepper streams out onto his noodles. He puts the can back on the counter and we all three stare a moment in silence at the mound of pepper. With his chopsticks, the man calmly stirs the pepper into his soup. Matsumoto-san apologizes saying the pepper seems to be running out faster tonight and that he ought to get a finer grind.

The last train hasn't yet come through. When it does around three a.m., the station lights will darken; Matsumoto-san will turn up his horn and start the long slow journey home across Tokyo. There's a chance he still might sell a bowl or two more of noodles before he sleeps.

-- michael kleindl