Dr Matthew Tan
The Netflix series Midnight Diner focuses on the owner of a tiny street alley diner in Tokyo.
The Netflix series, Midnight Diner, focusses on the owner of a tiny street alley diner in Tokyo.
The owner, known to his patrons as “The Master”, has the hallmark of having a very limited fixed menu, but is also willing to make anything his patrons ask, so long as he has the ingredients. Because the diner opens from midnight, it does not serve what we might call a conventional clientele of office workers or shoppers.
Instead, the diner’s clientele consists of the various subcultures housed within the vast city of Tokyo: there are some office workers, retirees, mob bosses, newspaper delivery boys, drag queens, taxi drivers, stand-up comedians, former pop music or movie starlets, food critics, and the odd retired porn star.
Each episode begins with the favourite dish of a particular patron. As each episode unfolds, the dish becomes a window into the biography of that patron.
The story gives viewers a biography of not only the individual patron, but also a fragment of the city of Tokyo and its subcultures, which have become imprinted onto the patron. Many of these representatives of these subcultures end up becoming regulars of the diner. As the series unfurls, the diner has become a refuge from the brutal demands of the stories told by the lights and sounds of this city, as each patron goes to the Master not just for food, but also for advice from or from the other patrons. Bit by bit, the fragmented threads of Tokyo’s stories become woven into a common story of solace at the diner, and a communion emerges out of the dim lights of that tiny alley.
Episode after episode, the series sets a rhythm as the viewer is taken into the ragtag community of regulars gathered at the Master’s table, fortified with the Master’s food, advice and a new common narrative thread sewn amongst the diverse stories of patrons that enter the diner.
Each patron’s story is then taken out into the byways of Tokyo, now a paragraph of a new narrative of the communion at the diner.
Shows like Midnight Diner demonstrate the important link between human dignity stories and community.
As Alasdair MacIntyre wrote in After Virtue, we are not mere entities taking up space, or are we simply moral beings who follow moral dictums. Instead, MacIntyre states that we are a “story-telling animal” (pg 216), who derive meaning in our lives because we have a story, embedded into wider stories told and lived by others. It is our being bracketed by stories that enable us to meaningfully live lives of virtue, framed by an origin, trajectory and destination. As Christians, we live not as followers of rules, but as “witnesses to these things” (Acts 5:32), living fragments of a story bound together by the biography of Jesus of Nazareth. His biography of incarnation, passion, death, resurrection, ascension and return forms the grammar of a story which gives meaning to my actions. At the heart of my faith is a story of an encounter with one that knows me and wants to weave his biography into mine, such that, in the words of St Paul, “it is not I that live, but Christ that lives in me” (Gal 2:20). What is more, because the biography of Jesus is a narrative thread shared in common with others who also have encountered the Master, to be a human person means that I am also meant to be in communion with others. The proof of this being storied into communion is enacted in the celebration of the Eucharist. We not only hear the biographies of Jesus, but that biography is sacramentally made present to us by the Master at his table and consumed by us, a common sharing in the biography of the body of Christ.
“we live not as followers of rules, but as “witnesses to these things”, living fragments of a story bound together by the biography of Jesus of Nazareth.”
What is more, as bread binds together the scattered grains, our consumption of the Eucharist binds us together into the common Body of the Church. What this means is that when I go to Mass, I am not an individual fulfilling my own sacramental duties.
My common participation in the narrative of Christ should draw me out of my isolation into the lives of others. What is more, this makes my communion more than a mere friendship, but a constituent element of my personhood, with the person of Jesus Christ as its centre.
Dr Matthew Tan is a senior lecturer in theology at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney Campus.
From pages 4 to 5 of Issue 27: Community of The Record Magazine