The strangely addictive Japanese series is set in a small, all-night joint, run by a chef whose dishes helps strangers tap into something deep and universal.
began in Hollywood, the usual torrent of new shows has slowed to a trickle. People keep asking me what older shows they should watch. Was there anything great that they might have missed along the way? You know, something they would love as much as they loved, the strangely addictive Japanese series whose 24-minute episodes unfold with the lazy looseness of happy hour. Now, the show is anything but hot or zeitgeisty.
Happily, the show is now back on Netflix in its entirety, and like millions of others, I haven't been able to resist re-watching. The show's setting is a dimly lit alleyway in the teeming Tokyo neighborhood of Shinjuku. There you find the Midnight Diner, a small, all-night joint run by the chef known only as Master, played by a quietly charismatic Kobayashi Kaoru, whose stony countenance is broken by flickers of amusement and compassion.
The episodes have the simplicity of folk tales or dinner party anecdotes. In each, we meet new characters — cartoonists, con women, cops,, old married couples and lovestruck youngsters — who ask the Master to cook them a particular off-the-menu dish: wieners cut in the shape of octopi, say, or potato salad like their mom's.
Although modest, each dish means something big to the person who orders it. And these meals anchor the action as we, like Master and his regulars, follow the newcomers' fortunes — failed careers and overnight successes, romances found and lost, old wounds opened and transcended.was a purely Japanese concoction that ran for three seasons, starting in 2009. By American standards, those episodes were shambling, low-budget and uncynical.
If anything links the characters, it's nostalgia — for family, for high school, for a lost love or an old-time pop idol. And as Marcel Proust taught us a century ago, nothing triggers memories better than food. It's one of the comical sides of the show that 95% of the customers declare the Master's down-home cooking"delicious" — a success rate that would make him the envy of the world's greatest chefs.
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