The Karate Kid with Noodles is how the wife described this quirky little film. The Ramen Girl is the story of a harebrained woman who follows her boyfriend to Japan, only to have him dump her as he heads off to greener pastures. The Fates intervene and guide her from her boring job as an office drone to take up the noble task of learning how to make soup.
In standard When the Student is Ready the Master will Appear fashion our hero has a hard time working in the Ramen shop across the street from her apartment. Like all Apprentice Stories, Abby has to learn the business from the ground up-which means washing windows, sweeping floors, and scrubbing toilets. Add to the mix the fact that Abby doesn’t speak Japanese and the Great Chef doesn’t speak English and we have a film with just enough subtitles that you have to pay attention.
One of the reasons I love this kind of story is that we don’t really have apprenticeships in America. You want to be a chef-you go to school, or get a job cooking somewhere. And pretty much no one makes anything in America any more, so there’s no possibility of become an apprentice and learning from a Master-there are no Masters to learn from.
The Sensai spends a lot of time making Abby humble and worthy of the act of making Broth. She never does learn more than a word or two of Japanese and The Master never learns more than one or two words of English. Still, they do manage to communicate and by doing exactly as the Master does, she learns to make The Broth with technical perfection. This, of course, is not good enough.
Along the way we met a few other people, mostly minor characters added for comic effect. A couple of women that seem to live in the Ramen shop, the humble wife of the Master, and a poor sap who seems destined to be alone. The worst characters in the story are a couple of sort of shady people our hero meets in a bar with old boyfriend-they have no reason for existing.
The Ramen Girl was a fun movie, but I would have liked a few more details. Why is there a Guild for soup cooks? There’s a parade at a couple of points and we are never told what it is about. There are a number of points where the supernatural touches Abby’s life, but no one seems surprised that Ramen has magical properties.
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