Soup for One

There was no school lunch to eat while I was working at the town office a couple weeks ago, and mostly I’d go to the Circle K on the corner and get some sushi or onigiri and maybe a sandwich, and either I’d take them back to the office or, if I could find any kids around I’d eat outside and hang out with them until break was over. But because it was rainy one day and I felt like sitting somewhere and actually having a meal, I went out to the Udon shop across the street. As far as I can tell, it is one of a slim three locations where you can get food of any kind in the town of Tamagawa, and this includes the Circle K, but still, I’ve never been there before. For one thing, I live closer to the city Imabari than to the town-let Tamagawa, so I end up doing most of my hunting and gathering down there. And anyway, whenever I’m in Tamagawa it’s because I’m working, ergo I’ve got a lukewarm and protein-rich lunch full of fish heads and kelp waiting for me at school. Neither of these are the real reason I’ve never gone into the place; really, it’s just because it’s scary to go into new places.

Maybe not scary. Well, sometimes scary. More like difficult though. It’s difficult to go into a new place. There are certain obvious reasons why: sometimes it’s that you know you just can’t read whatever they’re going to show you, and this can be rather dissuasive by itself. Sometimes the menu is indecipherable and sometimes there aren’t menus, just rows of identical looking vertical signs tacked ceiling height onto the walls around the counter. In these cases, even when you can read some of the signs, you feel like a bit of an idiot standing on your tiptoes and squinting real hard for ten minutes straight at a sign that says something like, EGGS, TWO DOLLARS. And then you don’t even want the eggs! But maybe it says something like, LIVE SQUID FEET, TWO DOLLARS. In that case you should go with the eggs.