Woman Waiting for the Last Bowl of Noodles at a Late Night Ramen Shop

Thirty-six-year-old Natsuko Yuzuki works as a planner in a small travel agency. Working late into the night, eating convenience store lunch boxes, and returning to an empty apartment—this is her daily routine. The seven-year relationship ended with the other party cheating on her, and now she no longer expects anything. One rainy night, the convenience store ran out of bento boxes. She walked into Fukuchi, a ramen shop deep in the alley, for the first time and ordered a bowl of salt ramen. The young apprentice Ando Beidou glanced at her when he was serving the noodles: "If you don't have enough noodles, you can add more for free." Natsuko said, "I'm losing weight," and Ando said, "You don't need it." That bowl of noodles and those words were like a beam of light shining into her gray life. Since then, Natsuko has become a frequent visitor to "Fuji", sitting in the corner at one o'clock in the morning two or three times a week. Ando talks very little and is as focused as doing a sacred thing when cooking noodles. He didn't ask her why she came, but every time he saw her, he would put an extra half of barbecued pork in his noodles. Two people, fourteen years apart, were in a ramen shop late at night, one cooking noodles and the other eating noodles, each digesting their own fatigue and loneliness. When Ando decided to quit his job at "Fukuchi" and open his own late-night ramen shop "Natsumi", Natsuko found that her concern for him had gone beyond being a "regular customer". She experienced company layoffs, salary reductions, and resignations, and finally joined "Natsu Hai"'s kitchen and became Ando's only helper. From serving plates to cooking noodles, from making soup base to cutting barbecued pork, she used a clumsy but determined way to approach step by step the person who could only express his feelings with noodles.