It was on a Saturday morning that I was initiated into the art of making soba by Yoshinori-san. The appointment was set for 7 am. As I waited in front of the restaurant, birds chirped from the trees and the first glimmer of daylight was beginning to infuse the sky above the Azabu High Street. I studied the display case with idealized plastic replicas of sushi rolls and soba noodles – the same kind of pristine display of culinary perfection that served to advertise the offerings of Japanese restaurants the world over. Even the little dabs of green wasabi mustard and the tiny clippings of green onion stems had been faithfully replicated. Suddenly the door of the restaurant popped open and Yoshinori-san emerged.
"Ohayo gozaimasu!" he exclaimed. Then in English: “Good morning. I hope it is not too early for you?”
Not at all, I told him. I was often out on my bike at this time of the morning, to beat the rush hour traffic.
"So desu ne!" he said – is that so. “My morning exercise is walking to the restaurant – and making soba noodles!”
We walked through the darkened interior towards the back of the restaurant, past tables that I had usually seen bustling with customers slurping noodles but which now sat silently in the shadows. We passed through a curtain into the kitchen area. It was to be the final time during my journey along the Azabu High Street when, thanks to the graciousness of one of my hosts and guides, I would be allowed to penetrate into the world behind the façade.
Yoshinori-san stopped in front of a wooden door with a window looking into a brightly illuminated room. He slipped off his shoes and I followed suit. When he slid the door open and we stepped in, I saw that we were in a cramped closet-like space with a couple of pieces of unfamiliar-looking machinery. One of them emitted a steady hum as a heavy stone wheel turned and a small spout sprinkled freshly ground flour into a wooden bowl. The other sat inactive in the corner; out of context, if I’d been forced to guess, I might have thought it was a machine for making taffy or for weaving yarn. As I discovered later, it was actually the machine that was used to knead and cut the Sarashina soba.
The presence of these machines aside, the demonstration of craft that Yoshinori-san was to share with me over the following hour was more about brute strength and highly refined skill than it was about reliance on mechanical convenience. In fact, making soba the traditional way – the way his ancestor Nunoya Tahei had done some two hundred years earlier – was to prove to be both a highly physical and an incredibly precise endeavor.
Yoshinori-san took a step forward to a large wooden bowl with a vibrant red lacquered interior that sat on a low wooden stand. “Here is where we make the dough,” he proclaimed, as he proceeded to scoop flour from one wooden bowl into the other. “First 1200 grams of buckwheat flour” – scoop, scoop, scoop, then he leaned over and scooped a different kind of flour out of an open sack on the floor – “then 300 grams of wheat flour.” He threw the final scoop into the bowl and clapped his hands, sending a small cloud of our dust into the air. It had only taken seconds, a series of fluid gestures that seemed both effortless and precise.
“The proportions are exactly 20 to 80, twenty per cent wheat flour to eighty per cent buckwheat flour,” he explained. “This is why we call this 'ni-hachi soba' [two-eight soba]. This is the traditional Edo style soba.”
If names had been one of the dominant themes in my conversation with his father the previous Saturday, numbers were to characterize Yoshinori-san’s magisterial lesson in soba making. To that point, he sloshed some water onto the flour from a small plastic pitcher, saying “You put in 70% of the water first, then two more times, 15% each.” His hands and arms, as they performed these movements, seemed to know instinctively when the quantities were right.
“Three eggs.” With one hand, he cracked the eggs on the edge of the bowl and began to knead the dough.
For a couple of minutes, Yoshinori-san stopped talking as he leaned over the lacquered wooden bowl, his shoulders moving back and forth like two pistons, his muscular forearms beating the dough into submission. The air in the small room was warm and powdery with flour dust; the space was intimate and mysterious, almost crypt-like although brightly lit. The silence was punctuated by the rhythmic breathing and occasional grunts of Yoshinori-san as he kneaded the dough.
I asked about the water.
Still kneading, his entire body engaged in laborious effort above the wooden bowl, Yoshinori-san panted, “Excellent question! To make perfect soba, the water is very important. Very important. Must be 100% pure. Here we have water purifiers that treat all the water coming into the restaurant. Even the water in the toilets is purified!”
“Yoshinori-san, did your father teach you the art of making soba when you were a boy?”
Promptly, he answered, “No, not as a boy. It was not until after university. I never thought about making soba before then – you see, I was studying Descartes!”
I wanted to ask whether the mind that had come up with the dictum, "I think, therefore I am" had any lessons to provide to the maker of soba noodles. “I knead, therefore I am?” I decided it was too early in the morning for feeble attempts at humor; besides, Yoshinori-san’s English was limited and it was unlikely he would appreciate the joke. Instead I watched, took pictures, listened. There was in fact a great deal of unspoken philosophy, and poetry, in the precisely calibrated movements and fluid movements of the 50-year-old soba noodle master.
As he worked, the dough became progressively less granular, its clumps eventually coming together into a smooth ball that grew darker as he rolled it around the glistening red surface of the wooden bowl. Yoshiniori-san seemed to sense my interest in the bowl. “It is more than twenty years old,” he said. “It takes a while before a bowl becomes perfect for making soba.”
“And how long does it take to learn how to make soba perfectly?” I asked.
Yoshinori-san grunted as he rolled the ball. “To learn the first 80% doesn’t take long – maybe only four months or so. But it takes years to master the other 20%. To learn how to make the noodles very smooth, and very thin. A very long time.” There were those percentages again.
Yoshinori-san had gradually shaped the dough into a cone that he then shifted onto a wooden cutting board on a counter next to the bowl.
He then immediately started flattening the cone and with a rod-like rolling pin made it progressively thinner. It was very reminiscent of the preparation of a pizza crust, a fact that I commented on. Yoshinori-san simply nodded, but clearly thought what he was doing had nothing to do with pizza crust.
“You’ve been doing these same gestures for what, 25 years?” I asked. “Don’t you ever get bored, Yoshinori-san?”
“No, not really. I don’t hate making soba,” he said simply.
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