Rice, Noodle, Fish (25 page)

Friday lunch at Okonomiyaki Lopez is one of the busiest shifts of the week, a time for a final splurge for the professional set before the weekend begins. I've been watching Lopez make
okonomiyaki
all week now, and occasionally I've grabbed a spatula and made a mess of his
teppan
, but the pace of today's business allows little time for gaijin high jinks; I take up a chair at the end of the bar and watch the great feast unfold.

Two female pharmacists in lab coats are the first to arrive, followed by a pair of older salarymen with impeccable suits and polished briefcases. Then a mother and her young son. By 11:20 every seat is taken, and the
teppan
crackles with the sound of sizzling pork belly and wilting cabbage.

The restaurant is small, even by
okonomiyaki
standards, with a narrow
prep kitchen, a sixteen-seat counter, and a U-shaped
teppan
that stretches nearly the entire width of the shop. From appearances alone, it's tough to tell where the fantasy of Lopez Southwest ends and the reality of Okonomiyaki Lopez begins. The chairs are covered in poncho patterns, the shop logo shines bright with yellow, red, and green, and the menu contains a few tastes of a dream deferred, including a Guatemalan tongue stew and chicken fajitas, which sit warming in green and red enamel pots at the edge of the
teppan
.

It's clear a lot has changed since the years of goosing the neighborhood with free samples. Lopez looks comfortable behind his stainless steel perch, with a white flower-studded bandanna wrapped tight around his head and a denim Otafuku apron covering his chest that reads: “Eat
Okonomiyaki
All Together a Happy Happy Home!!”

Lopez makes his
okonomiyaki
with a mixture of repetitive precision and intense personal interest. As soon as a customer walks in the door, before she can even sit down, he drops a ladle of batter onto the griddle and begins to build. The precise layering of ingredients, the way he cups the cabbage between two spatulas, the little beads of water he splashes on the
teppan
to take and adjust its temperature: all point to a man who knows that the difference between commodity and craft is razor thin.

Unlike many of the
okonomiyaki
cooks I see around town, who look as if they changed their suits and ties for aprons and bandannas in a phone booth, Lopez works the griddle like a guy who has filleted a few fish, reduced a few sauces, ruined a few soufflés in his life. For someone with his rolling-stone résumé, you might think a single savory concoction would be a death sentence, but he exudes a deep sense of calm behind the sizzle and the steam.

“People ask if I ever get bored of making the same thing. Are you kidding me? They have no idea what goes on in my head just to make this one
okonomiyaki
.”

To illustrate his point, Lopez gives me a primer on cabbage. Cabbage evolves throughout the course of the year, coming from different prefectures across Japan—from the wintry mountains of Nagano to the dry flats of Fukuoka—and as the seasons change, so too does the cabbage's behavior on the
teppan
. In spring, it wilts fast and burns quickly, in the fall it retains liquid and requires a longer, slower cook. “It took me a full year just to figure out how to manage my cabbage.”

Multiply that by noodles, eggs, crepes, proteins, and the capricious nature of the griddle, and you begin to understand why he doesn't seem eager to add items to his menu or build more restaurants or do anything else besides make
okonomiyaki
exactly where he's been making it for fifteen years. That might be the most Japanese thing about Lopez: his ability to accept tiny details like a vegetable's water content and griddle heat distribution as challenges worthy of a life's dedication.

Behind Lopez, tracking his every move, are two apprentices. Futoshi Mitsumura, thirty-one, left behind a moderately successful stint as a punk rock drummer in Tokyo to return to Hiroshima and learn to cook the soul food of his hometown. He's been here for one year, and still does most of his work behind the scenes, boiling noodles, chopping cabbage, refilling bottles of Otafuku sauce.

Hidenori Takemoto, thirty, could be the poster child for the salaryman convert, an uninspired mechanic at Toyota who found his true muse in the leafy layers of this Hiroshima specialty. “At Toyota, I did what I was told and there was no praise for a job well done. With
okonomiyaki
, I get immediate response.” He's been working behind Lopez for over a year now, and he shadows his master with quiet confidence, cracking eggs, flipping crepes, splashing noodles with helpful doses of hot water. He already has a space picked out for his restaurant, where he will bring Lopez-style
okonomiyaki
, jalapeños and all, to the people of Shikoku.

The line of people waiting for a seat at the counter continues to grow, until a small group—a pair of parking attendants, a young guy with huge headphones and a bubble jacket—forms outside. Makiko suddenly appears, apron-clad and spatula-ready, and takes her place beside Lopez at the
teppan
. She still works the griddle but mostly during the restaurant's busiest moments (the Lopez family—husband and wife, two boys, in-laws—all live in a house attached to the restaurant). She shakes spices and fries eggs and efficiently begins to finish the
okonomiyaki
her husband starts, then slides them across the griddle to waiting customers.
Okonomiyaki
, in the best places, at least, is eaten with a
hera
, a thin metal spatula, directly off the
teppan
—a dish, as Lopez likes to say, that continues to evolve down to the last bite.

These days Okonomiyaki Lopez shows up on the top-ten lists of many local experts, including a perennial slot as one of Hiroshima's best
okonomiyaki
shops on Tablelog, Japan's massive restaurant review website. But a certain contingent of Japan's food cognoscenti still have a hard time believing that
okonomiyaki
could come from a Guatemalan. Lopez remembers a few years back when a local journalist wrote a book dedicated to Hiroshima-style
okonomiyaki
and its many purveyors. He ate at Okonomiyaki Lopez a few times, and politely returned months later to give Lopez a finished copy of the book. Only, Lopez wasn't listed with the other
okonomiyaki
shops; he was written up in the “Other” section. (Two of his students, however, had made the real shop list.)

“Some people say I've Westernized
okonomiyaki
just because I'm Western,” Lopez says, with the affectless delivery of someone who appears constitutionally incapable of getting worked up over anything, a walking Venn diagram of Latin American humility and Japanese restraint. He can talk openly about the most extraordinary things—an abusive
father, a transcontinental romance, the challenges of being an immigrant in Japan—with the same shoulder shrugs and steady monotone he saves for discussions about vegetables. It's tough to say if this temperament came with his Japanese citizenship or if he's been carrying it around with him since he left Guatemala, but it plays well at the
teppan
. With the right set of eyes, you might even mistake Lopez for a local.

Today's customers look comfortable at Okonomiyaki Lopez. They drink beer and take pictures and talk up the man behind the griddle—a sharp contrast to the studied silence of many Japanese restaurants. He chats with old women and young couples as they place their orders, asking regulars about family members, telling stories about mutual friends.

“Out there in the streets of Hiroshima, you don't talk with people. You live in your own world,” he says. “But here, you pull up a stool, watch the cooking, and you get to know your neighbor.”

米 麺 魚

One afternoon, as I sit scraping my way through a Lopez jalapeño
okonomiyaki
at the restaurant counter, an old woman takes a seat next to me and places a large to-go order. She looks surprised to see a foreigner in the restaurant and tells me as much in near-perfect English. We get to talking about the types of things strangers talk about until she, unprompted, tells me that she is a
hibakusha
, a bomb survivor.

“I was two years old when it happened. We lived a kilometer and a half from the center. Some people survived the initial blast in this neighborhood, but the heat was so intense that it burned for three days and many eventually died. My three older brothers died in the rubble when our building collapsed. My mother and I were the only ones from my family to survive.”

We both sit quietly, staring at the little waves of heat rising off the surface of the
teppan
. After a few minutes, she breaks the silence.

“I've spent my whole life thinking about how amazing it is that in the same apartment four people died and two people lived. Life is full of mysteries.”

Is it possible to write about Hiroshima without writing about the splitting of atoms? Is it possible to walk its streets and visit its markets and eat in its restaurants without thinking about oblivion? I think about it constantly, wonder why I can't get past it, wonder if I lived here if I would ever get past it. Even as I type these words, I feel a current of guilt coursing through my digits, as if I owe it to the people of Hiroshima to leave it alone, to let them get on with living.

The earth this city is built on was ready to move on before its surface had cooled. They say that after the bomb dropped and nearly blasted Hiroshima out of existence, the grass and flowers grew back almost immediately. Not months or years after the bodies had been burned and the radiation dissipated; by August 12, 1945, just a week after the
Enola Gay
gave birth to the nuclear age, the city was blanketed in green. “Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city's bones,” John Hersey wrote in
Hiroshima
, his wrenching minute-by-minute account of the aftermath of the first atomic bomb. “The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them.”

A modern city was transposed onto the ruined one with remarkable speed: skyscrapers were erected, a new system of streets and avenues laid out, and a sprawling memorial dedicated to peace took shape along the water. When Emperor Hirohito came in 1947 to visit the orphans of Hiroshima, he didn't find a city mourning; he found a city rising.

“This was no beaten people who welcomed the Emperor to their city,” Allen Raymond, a correspondent for the
Herald Tribune
, wrote at the time. “I have seen most of the war-damaged sections of the world, and one could not find a healthier, stronger, more cheerful population anywhere than that of Hiroshima. The city is simply crawling with new life and energy.” American correspondents were known for dispensing self-serving boosterism in the wake of the war, but so many I meet in Hiroshima tell me various versions of the same story:
We were looking forward, not backward.

(Nathan Thornburgh)

Every morning I walk from the city center to Okonomiyaki Lopez, crossing the wide boulevards designed by the Americans, cutting through generous parks, where local women hunt wild vegetables in the bushes, getting swallowed by the shadows of buildings electric with the energy of an animated workforce. Men slurp noodles; women sell shoes; kids ride bikes: Hiroshima is nothing but a city being a city.

But every night I walk home along the Motoyasu River, seven murky fingers that splinter the city into a small archipelago, and all I can see is the past. The looming mountains, where people fled that first morning to higher ground, away from the smoldering remains. The T-shaped Aioi Bridge, the original target for Little Boy, until the bomb drifted west and detonated above a hospital instead. The river, where survivors trapped in the center submerged themselves to escape the incendiary temperatures of the burning city. The river, where the skeleton of the Atomic Bomb Dome casts a pale light on the water, a spectral reminder of Hiroshima's haunted past.

Once known as the Industrial Promotional Hall, the building was located just 160 meters from where the bomb detonated. Everyone inside was killed instantly, but besides a few scars across its facade, the structure survived intact. Many people, frightened by the eerie bones of the building in the city center, wanted to see it flattened and forgotten, but the government elected to keep it, and now it shimmers across the water like an optical illusion—a reminder of either the senselessness or the resilience of man, depending on how you squint your eyes.

Every night I think: How can the walls possibly be so smooth? How can those windows be so square? How can that dome up top still be so round? I think: After all it's been through, how does it still have the strength to stand? It begins to follow me into my dreams, just one of the many ghosts that chase me around the city.

Those ghosts show up in the form of impromptu tales told at the Lopez counter. Most are stories of impossible survival. One old man, between bites of a squid
okonomiyaki
, recounts to the entire restaurant how he walked behind a building just as the bomb blew, unknowingly saving himself from its incinerating temperatures. Another day, with a full counter of diners around us, Makiko tells me the story of her mother, ten years old and working in a factory, building plane parts for the war, who survived when two pieces of machinery collapsed onto each other, creating a protective A-frame above her tiny body. “My mom always says, ‘No wonder we lost the war, we had little girls building the weapons.'”