Matji & Co.Series 1 · Episode 13
The tofu maker's morning
Kobayashi-san has standards older than the street. The Matji recognise a colleague.
Kobayashi-san opens his shop at four in the morning, as his father did, and his grandfather before that. He is the grumpiest man on our street, and everyone knows the grumpiness is armour, worn over the softest heart in the neighbourhood. Much, I have always thought, like his tofu.
The Matji discover him at dawn through the café window: a man alone, working quietly, holding each block of silken tofu up to the light like a jeweller. They press their faces to the glass. Standards. The man has standards.
A trade arranges itself, wordlessly, over a week: a bowl of matcha on his step each morning; a block of tofu on the café counter each afternoon. Neither party acknowledges the arrangement. Both parties adjust their craft slightly, competitively, upward.
On Friday, Kobayashi-san appears in the café for the first time in nine years, drinks his matcha standing up, and pronounces the foam “acceptable”. Mutjo frames the word invisibly. The Matji understand completely: from that man, it was a medal.
