When we think of teachable stories, we often reach deep into the rucksack of the literary past, pulling out classroom-tested stories that have worked their way into the canon. While there is obviously a ton to learn from these pieces, contemporary short story writers are also completing strong work built upon teachable literary foundations, while also finding fascinating ways to advance the form. In this space, we’ll highlight some of these more modern stories and explore a bit of what they have to teach us as we continue to do our part to push literature forward.
Introduction
In “Omakase,” by Weike Wang (originally published in The New Yorker in June 2018; republished at Literary Hub in May of 2019 after winning an O. Henry Prize), we meet a couple who decide to go out for omakase. The woman is a financial analyst deep in her own thoughts at all times; the man is an extrovert potter, flush with the desire to talk to everyone and certain in his ability to talk through anything. During the meal, the man flirts with the waitress and attempts to convince the chef to explain why he was fired from his last cooking job; the woman watches the conversation and meal and attempts to figure out where she lands on every moment. Eventually, this comes to a head as the chef finally tells his story, laying the blame for his firing on a Chinese boss attempting to take advantage of him. The woman announces herself to be Chinese, and in the awkward conclusion the man and woman leave the restaurant while the man lectures her on taking things too personally and her apparent lack of self-awareness.
The Basics
This story is written in a close third-person, tied tightly to the woman. We’re given no names—and indeed, the story points this out to us in a semi-meta moment near the end: “Come on. We’re all friends here. Though neither he nor the woman knew the chef’s name, and vice versa”; even the characters don’t know each other’s names—and refer throughout the piece simply to “the man” and “the woman” and “the chef” and “the waitress.” Those four are our only characters in the current moment of the piece, although there are brief mentions in backstory of parents and friends. The plot is spare: On an external level, the man is trying to fit into this space, flirting with the waitress and trying to convince the chef to tell him the secret of why the chef was fired from his previous omakase job; once he does so, the tension underpinning the woman’s thought process about race takes center stage. On an internal level, the plot of the piece is focused on the woman attempting to figure out why she’s so disquieted and out of sorts with herself and the restaurant and the man as he draws out the story that then allows him to somehow blame her for not going more easily with the flow of the evening. Our setting is equally spare: This is a hole-in-the-wall place, with few seats, and the rest of our setting details are spent on the food as it comes out. In other words, this is a character-first piece; all of our elements tie back to the woman, to her thoughts and to our understanding of what’s roiling under the surface.
Two other basic techniques to note: In a story titled “Omakase,” we are only given a single scene in the present moment, which naturally is the scene of the man and woman going to the restaurant and then eating their omakase. Also, there are no quotations on our dialogue; here, it bleeds into the woman’s thoughts and the narrator’s descriptions.
Scenework
So then, let’s start with perhaps the most striking technique discussed above: The present moment of the piece is a single scene. Our narrative begins as our characters enter the room, they eat and talk, and the story concludes as they are standing outside finishing a conversation about what just happened inside. Everything that matters is in that meal.
The interesting thing about staying in a single scene for this long is that the story doesn’t stay fully in scene. Because of the nature of omakase—a multi-course meal, with each course prepared while you wait—staying there fully would take up a significant amount of time, and while there are plenty of things happening, the essential conflict takes up just a few minutes of that lengthy dinner. While there are absolutely moments that complicate the tension throughout the piece, almost all of the external conflict is held in the final section, as the chef unveils his story and his frustration with the boss.
Wang rightly floats us fairly through less-important moments. And what determines which moments are less important, which deserve to be seen fully versus told in narrative summary versus ignored entirely? The classic answer, which this story exemplifies perfectly, is that the moments shown in scene are the moments where there is some sort of conflict or power struggle. For instance, when the man talks about the mugs in which their tea is presented, and the chef isn’t sure how to take the conversation, whether he’s being made fun of or what, exactly, so the woman speaks up and the man is frustrated with her for doing so. In such a moment, we stop and watch closely, as all our characters struggle to understand what is happening, why it’s happening, and who holds the power. Zooming in here gives us a clear dose of complexity, of uncertainty, of struggle; as the other courses are served, as the couple eat, as no conversation flows, we can stay further out and let time pass more quickly.
Jumping in and out of scene can at times be awkward, but Wang gives us multiple tools for doing so that we can toss in our own toolkit. First, because we’re in a close third person, our narrator can jump into the woman’s mind at any point, allowing us to zoom out from the exact moment and sit instead in the swirl of considerations that may or may not be real-time. With such a technique, we can step away from a tepid moment and return only once we reach the next moment that explores some problem or conflict.
Additionally, the story utilizes section breaks to cut into the scene with backstory or with more general explanatory sections. Moments of backstory/memory are provided to us with an exploration of the couple’s first date and of her introducing him to her parents, and the second section of the story sets up the general history of their relationship and how they’ve come to be in New York as well as their jobs and passions and the kind of people they are.
Distribution of information
I am fascinated by the way this story distributes information. So much is told outright, but then there are fairly large details that are withheld and then given as counterweights to other pieces of information, most specifically in regard to race. An example: As we’re discussing the waitress, we are told, “The woman was also Asian (Chinese).” Of course our main character wouldn’t need to sit down and describe her nationality in the opening paragraph, but as I’ve said many times we’re in a third-person POV that easily could have done so, and so the choice to reveal it for certain in this yes-also format is clearly intentional. It’s a great technique to hold onto for writers, in a myriad of ways; trying to shoehorn basic physical details into a story right from the top can often look awkward, so this is a wonderful way to do that. But also, presenting information in this counterfactual sort of manner allows for a clear view into character mindset and what that character values.
While using that technique of narrative withholding around certain information, the story also uses other details to dive extremely deep. We’ve talked occasionally about the talisman, the single item that can come to represent large ideas. We see an excellent use in this story with the lip ring: It presents an awareness of different generations between the two women, different upbringings and ideas around what it is to be Asian in America, and it also allows the story to introduce the woman’s parents with some clear choice details (the Marilyn Manson shout-out jumps to mind immediately), then brings us back to the moment and finally is used to characterize the man when he ignores the lip ring entirely and instead focused on her uniform. Three full paragraphs of focus, and multiple ideas presented, all from a single detail.
The Complexity of Consideration
A subtle gradation that this story uses so incredibly well is the part-awkwardness, part-uncertainty that our main character constantly feels in relation to the man. We see this in most of their interactions, and just as much when she is observing him: thinking of their first Skype date, his knowledge of Wuxia and the Tang dynasty immediately sets her on edge to the point of asking her friends whether she should be concerned about the man having “yellow fever”; watching him flirt with the waitress and talk with the chef, she is reminded of how easily he slips into these situations, and her discomfort and over-thinking immediately breaks the immersion he’s able to create, to such an extent that she is forced into an outsider position that separates her from him in such a way as to provoke something like exasperation in him each time he remembers she exists.
But Wang handles this incredibly deftly, always leaving a possible explanation to keep the main character, and us readers, a bit uncertain. Maybe he’s a bit creepy, interested in her because of her nationality rather than because of her self, but…maybe he knows this information because of his pottery. Maybe he’s flirting with the waitress because she’s Chinse, like the main character, but also he’s an extrovert who feeds off of these interactions. And besides, the woman sees clear value in his interactions: “It made her feel good that the man was desired.” She is gaining something, whether status or comfort, from this as well, from something she can describe but is loathe to name, from this man who “could have just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting.”
While it’s most obvious in relation to the man, we see a similar uncertainty play out in the woman’s interactions with the chef, the waitress, and with herself as well. We’re told constantly that she is an overthinker, and then we watch her effectively analyze her way into awkwardness in each of these interactions: With the chef, when her date blunders into misidentifying the chef in a clearly racially-tinged manner and then doubles down (in a way that she goes out of her way to justify as “he had just wanted to be right”), the woman is prepared to step in to defuse the situation but avoids the chef’s gaze and only feels a quick moment of kinship with him—she recognizes what is happening but can’t allow herself “to be one of those women who noted every teeny tiny thing and racialized it,” regardless of the truth of the moment.
In the very next moment, she sets herself similarly against the waitress, who comes in with an explanation about tasting notes of the tea that the woman dismisses and then happily proves false, if only to herself, by reading the label rather than listening to the waitress. The competition here, such as it is, isn’t simple: This isn’t jealousy, and it’s not exactly racially based, although it is at least partly both of those things. The woman, who spends so much of her time considering and reconsidering, can’t even quite explain what brings her to this moment of silent one-upmanship from which she neither gains nor takes anything.
In all of these tiny situations, stacked so effectively beside each other, Wang manages to build complexity onto each moment—from a third-person narrator who is only closely following one character, which would traditionally lead to us being entirely on that character’s side—by challenging our main character with her most basic character trait: the unending cycle of reconsideration. She lands one way, then shows alternate possibilities, then gets stuck in that thought loop until there is no easy place to land.
In Conclusion
Especially in comparison to many of the other stories we’ve explored in this series, “Omakase” is straightforward. This is a fixed camera—yes, with some diversions into backstory or narrative summary, fine—watching a moment disintegrate, and letting us build our assumptions onto what that means for all of the moments we’re not going to see. A single scene, encapsulating an entire life. A single, tightly held point of view, allowing us to explore a character within that pressure-cooker moment so that we come away knowing her complexities deeply. We at The Masters Review work from a simple dictum: story is made of interesting people doing interesting things for interesting reasons. As this story proves, all of those elements can be satisfied in just about any situation.
Addendum: I managed to write all this, and didn’t say much at all about the food. So let’s do it in one sentence: If you’re looking for a primer on how to use small details without taking a ton of space, if you want to think about how to pace a story, go look at how the meal is presented throughout this piece.
by Brandon Williams