Starring: Yosuke Santamaria, Katsumi Kiba, Suzuki Kyoka,
Tortoise Matsumoto, Manami Konishi
Director: Katsuyuki Motohiro
Scheduled release: 20 September

There is a good chance you will be dreaming noodles after watching this film. Fat ones, thin ones, firm ones all overlaid with toppings from squid to onions, submerged in a steaming fragrant broth. Noodles – of the Udon type specifically – are everywhere and there is more slurping in this film than at an all-night sex party. This noodle orgy is brought to us from the makers of the Bayside Shakedown films – producer Fuji TV and director Katsuyuki Motohiro – and they hit many of the same soft, comic, touching spots those films did. Tradition, family, friends, home and, of course, food are all mixed together in an ode to an almost idyllic picture of modern-day small-town Japan. There are no villains in this film – just good noodles and bad noodles.

Udon begins not in Japan but New York City. As the song goes, “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere”, but Kyosuke Matsui (Bayside alumnus Yosuke Santamaria) isn’t coming close to making it. He moved to the Big Apple six years previously to be a stand-up comedian (the most famous Matsui in NYC he claims – a reference to the New York Yankees baseball team’s outfielder Hideo Matsui) but his comedy is pretty bad and his heavy Japanese accent is even worse, leading him to finally give up his dream and return home.

Home is Sanuki in Kagawa, the smallest prefecture in Japan and not known for much of anything besides Udon noodles. It has more Udon eateries per person than any place in Japan – some 900 in total. Kyosuke’s father runs one of these and always wanted his son to take it over someday but Kyosuke had gone as far as he could from Sanuki and noodles. Now he is home and his father (Katsumi Kiba) grudgingly notes his presence, but his sister Mari (the very recognizable Suzuki Kyoka – Samurai Commando 1549, Blood and Bones, Zebraman) and her husband welcome the sheepish fellow back into the family fold.

Kyosuke gets a job at a local magazine along with his old friend Shosuke (Tortoise Matsumoto) and the adorable Kyoko (Manami Konishi – Bayside Shakedown 2), a self-confessed bookworm with no sense of direction who can get lost in a single-aisle store. Trying to increase circulation, Kyosuke hits on the idea of featuring the many Udon restaurants in Sanuki and, as the three friends madly dash around trying to find them all – often the Udon eateries are known only to locals and have no identifying signs – they become obsessed with Udon noodles. Each place distinguishes its noodles from the others with loving care according to its own particular long-held family secret recipe – no faceless always-the-same-taste chains here. The magazine starts a Udon noodle craze that goes countrywide with thousands of people pouring into the area to try the various places.

In an odd way, though, one senses that all this merely delays the real story and finally Kyosuke acknowledges the need to reconcile himself with his father and decide what to do with his life. For me there was too much focus on noodles and not enough on relationships – with an expected romance never taking off – but the film is full of low-key humour, touching moments and an overall feeling of warmth and goodness – kind of like Campbell’s soup or, maybe, Udon noodles.

Brian Naas