If you are looking for good ramen in Osaka, I recommend going to Kirakira Place. It’s a little hard to get to, but I can help you out.

Past the underbrush, past the sea-smoke where Osaka-maids flip their elongated scales, pillow sacks, out (fluffing the dirt, watching the brown flecks blow), there are large pampas archways, huge ones, with feathery heads that loom over the small. The stars, when they are purple and brown, will click above your temple like some gorgeous halo. 

And if you choose to continue on, in between the silky chaffs and the mulch, gorges will envelop your steps. Your boots will slick uneasily in yellow mud. 

And looking outwards, fireflies might float unevenly, wobbling upwards from half-alive mussel shells. The smell of the beach should refuse to cease its melody, wafting around you like fulsome currents, waiting for the final repose. 

Kirakira Place is just across the street then. If you keep walking, you will hit a small asphalt road, and you have to maneuver around the bike racks. It’s a little hard to get to, I’m sorry, but it is well worth it.

I go to Kirakira Place at least once a week. It is easy on my budget, and the food is delicious. They serve a pork bone broth, infused with rare notes of chili oil and ginger. I like their thin wheat noodles and the char-siu pork slices, fat clumps of bean sprouts and sesame paste lingering in the blurry reflection. 

And it’s a small stall, with a few bamboo seats stoppered in the cold night. You can see boats with their multi-colored eyes, glittering on that black Pacifica.

I usually like to take a book, sit down, and breathe in the quiet. The world lacks a sort of quiet, nowadays. People are always going, going, going, to innumerable places. 

I don’t want to go anywhere. I just want to sit.

And I was sitting and thinking and eating one night, when a yokai came to visit. It didn’t look like the yokai of my memories. It was a tall, beautiful woman, with a geisha-bright face and thin, crescent-shaped eyebrows.

Her kimono jacket was elegant, lined with stripes of pink flowers and white brocade. I remember her hair, almond-black and unbound, unfluttering by her knees. It was an ungodly woman; one I remembered quite well.

She had cocked her crimson-face at me, shifted the opal of her chin like how a child moves rigid blocks with uncut hands. 

“You know me,” the consonants of her English were florid: imprecise.

And I shrugged, and I turned to my tea. I did know her; I did. We had met once in a crumbling industrial building of Jeju, the land where my father lived. Encircling vines had domed the area like a throne. 

She had bared her teeth: I admired the fangs. And maybe that yokai was not her necessarily, but they are all the same: the similar, singly, dark branches of an other; that entity; thorns. 

And I had seen her once again in the land of Buan, where my grandmother lived. In the wash tub, where the sides were caked with de, the Hangul word for skin-dirt, I saw it peek into my house window, curious. But she was not there for me; later, my neighbor died of the flu. 

“Well,” and it rested her knuckles on a pearl-sharp chin. Her eyes were lightless; they were the clarity of black stones. 

“You know I’m not here for you. So what’s the point?”

A winter wind whistled by. 

It occurred to me that she was here for the ramen shop owners, hard-working and malicious people. The matron of the house was quite evil, she liked to hit young children with her cane, and every September she had a new little dog. Her pets liked to die like highway flies, hitting sleet-lashed wind panes. 

The cook was her associate, her lover, her facilitator. So of course it would be here for both of them.

And I thought of how hard Japan is, not as hard as Korea, but still hard. Biting into these East Asian cities was like nipping into a diamond, diagonal bones, a tang of metal on metal. It was so hard, unable to pronounce here or there. And if the shopkeepers were mean and pathetic and evil, then there was sort of a gratuity to their behavior, as if it wasn’t because of me that they were so mad. 

In my ladle, golden soup crumbs glowed. 

And I flexed my thumby fingers, the nail paint chipping away, poorly-applied lacquers of black and red fading. I thought of how like a box things were, bento, Imperial age. Golden carnelias and herons in leaf trace. Seondeok said that the peony would be a useless flower, that it had no scent, no trace, no sense of unearthly ornamentation beyond

and I am twelve and I am clipping my nails in an Oakland bedroom. Plastic peony petals are falling all around me, on the table, on the floor. I cannot bring them up or back golden.

“Well,” the yokai intervened, musing. Like a poem, it began:

“I could tell you that these people do not like you, but it is not enough. 

I could tell you that the ramen, while adequate, is better at other stalls. But it is not enough. 

I could tell you that this shop sees very little customers; that you are it’s only current. But that is not enough.

You like this place. You like very few places. So here is what I will do,”

and with metallic flourish, the yokai made me a deal. If I can get five steady customers, five good people, to love this ramen shop as I do, then she will not claim them.

“Until September,” the demon said, waving an alabaster hand. 

Until September. I have until September. 

So I implore you to try Kirakira Place in Osaka. It is my favorite noodle stand, and I think once you try it, you will find it amenable as well. 

Please. 

Yuna Kang is a queer, Korean-American writer based in Northern California. She has been published in journals such as Strange Horizons, Sinister Wisdom, and many more. They were also nominated for the 2022 Dwarf Stars Award, as well as the 2024 Best New Poets Award. Their website link is: https://kangyunak.wixsite.com/website