A Restaurant with Many Problems, and the People Made Into the Problem

The first episode of A Restaurant with Many Problems begins in the back seat of a police car. It is winter, the Christmas lights are up along Omotesando, and the woman in handcuffs is Tanaka Tamako. Over the pictures her own voice explains what she has always wanted, which is only to do good work: the kind that makes your heart pound, the kind that makes you forget to breathe. Then the series leaves her in the car and climbs onto a roof.

The roof belongs to a run-down building in the back streets behind Omotesando, and it is covered in junk. People arrive one at a time, carrying bags. A housewife in the middle of divorce mediation, who has never had a job. A proud young graduate of the University of Tokyo, dressed entirely in black, who cannot get one. A woman in her forties who has drifted from one job to the next. A pastry chef trained in Paris, whose manner and clothes have cost one kitchen after another. A young cook in a hooded top who will talk to strangers only through her phone. Tamako invited them all, and Tamako is not there. While they wait they tell one another how they know her, and slowly it comes out why she is late. At the company she worked for, she threw iced water over the men responsible for what had been done to her closest friend, and the police were called.

When Tamako finally arrives she spreads a cloth over a table in the cold, serves a pot-au-feu made from her friend’s recipe, and asks them to open a restaurant with her: here, on this roof, directly across the street from the glossy bistro her old company is about to open.

So the restaurant of the title is the one on the roof, and it earns the name. It has no roof of its own, and on rainy days it cannot open. The flag hung over it was meant to say feu, French for fire, and says fou, French for mad, and the chef across the street looks up at it and laughs. On the first night it turns a profit, the profit is 110 yen. When the series was announced, the broadcaster’s description explained that because the women gathered at this restaurant all had problems, problems kept breaking out.

This essay reads the series as a long argument about where that word lands. In the company across the street, humiliation is ordinary business, and the business runs smoothly, because whoever objects to it, or cannot smile it off, or simply does not fit, becomes the problem, while the arrangement that did the harm carries on without a mark. The roof is where the people who were made into problems end up. Over ten episodes the series moves the word back to where it belongs, one person at a time. At the very end, honestly and a little painfully, it lets the word land on the roof as well.

None of this means the people on the roof are easy. They are not, and the series never pretends they are. It means that the heaviest problem any of them carries was handed to them in a room across the street, by people who went back to work the next morning.

The facts, once. A Restaurant with Many Problems is an original drama in ten episodes, written by Sakamoto Yuji and broadcast by Fuji TV in its Thursday ten o’clock drama slot from 15 January to 19 March 2015. It was directed by Namiki Michiko and Kato Hiromasa and produced by Shimizu Kazuyuki; Sakamoto and Namiki had made The Best Divorce in the same slot two years before. Maki Yoko plays Tamako. Around her are Nikaido Fumi as Yumi, the graduate in black; Matsuoka Mayu as Chika, the cook in the hood; Usuda Asami as Kyoko, the housewife; Yasuda Ken as Haiji, the pastry chef; Takahata Mitsuki as Airi, a young woman still working at the company; Higashide Masahiro as Monji, the chef across the street and Tamako’s former boyfriend; Suda Masaki as his apprentice, Hoshino; and Sugimoto Tetta as Amaki Taro, the company’s president.

Its ratings were modest, an average of 9.3 per cent of households in the Kanto region by Video Research’s count, and its standing has grown anyway. Takahata won the supporting-actress prize at the Television Drama Academy Awards for that season, with Matsuoka a close second, and the drama received an encouragement award in the television division of the 52nd Galaxy Awards, given by Japan’s association of broadcast critics. Ten years after it first aired it was streaming again for free, and the television magazine that recapped its last episodes asked whether the world had got any better in the meantime.

This essay discusses the whole series, including its ending. It states what is done to Tamako’s friend once, plainly, and does not describe it again. Dialogue is paraphrased rather than quoted.

Tamako’s friend is Fujimura Satsuki. They have known each other since high school, and they work for the same company, Like Dining Service, a large restaurant group run by a charismatic president, Amaki Taro, who is regularly profiled in magazines and on television. The broadcaster’s own synopsis of the first episode does not soften the company: weighted towards men to an extreme degree, the credit for everything going to men, sexual harassment and power harassment an everyday occurrence.

Satsuki has been moved out to one of the company’s subsidiaries. When a food-poisoning scandal breaks there, the company puts the whole of the blame on her. Then, in front of the senior staff, the president orders her to take off her clothes and apologise. She does. It is sexual abuse, committed at work, in the open, with her colleagues looking on.

That is all this essay will say about the scene itself, because what matters for everything that follows is its shape. Nothing was done to Satsuki in secret. It was done in a meeting, by the man at the top, in front of the people whose job it was to run the company, and nobody in the room stopped it. Even the broadcaster’s own episode summaries cannot settle on a word: one says sexual harassment, a later one power harassment, as though neither were big enough. The plain word used above is the right one.

The question people tend to reach for is why she complied. It is the wrong question. Complying with an order is not agreeing to it. Satsuki had been made to carry a scandal that was not hers, in front of the men who would decide what became of her, at a company whose ordinary business was humiliation; whatever she did in that room, she did under those conditions, and the conditions are the story. This Library has argued, in “The Souvenir, and the Question That Should Never Be Asked of Her”, that the question a woman is asked afterwards, how she could not have known, is wrong in its very structure: it is asked from the end of the story, and it mostly reassures the person asking. The question is not why she complied. It is why a room full of adults sat and watched.

Satsuki leaves the company for her family home in Fukui, and before she goes she gives Tamako the recipes of her late father, a bistro chef. When the series later shows us her mother, the lesson the mother has drawn is not that the company was dangerous but that women should not go out to work at all, and her daughter should marry and stay home. Harm done at work does not stay at work. It narrows the lives around it.

Tamako’s answer is the iced water. It is not offered here as a method, and the series hardly offers it as one: it puts her in a police car and ends her career in an afternoon. What it shows is simpler. Of everyone who knew what had happened in that room, she was the one who would not go on sitting in it.

Sakamoto gives Tamako a parable for this, and she tells it to Monji, the chef across the street, in the sixth episode. Picture an umbrella stand full of identical plastic umbrellas on a wet day. The first person to leave is a thief, and takes an umbrella that is not his. The next, without noticing, takes somebody else’s, since they all look alike, and so does the next, and the next. The last person brought an umbrella, finds none, and walks home in the rain. The people in the middle never meant to steal anything, and you could hardly ask them to apologise. But they took part in the theft all the same, and somebody got wet.

Monji is a gifted cook who cares about little else: when his apprentice is being beaten by senior staff out of sight, and a colleague is being stalked, it has nothing to do with him. That is the answer every room gives.

The parable is the best account the series offers of how the room across the street works. One man gave the order; everyone else took an umbrella. The senior staff watched. Tamako’s former boss, a department head called Tsuchida, sneers at every complaint as an overreaction. None of them gave the order in the meeting room. Each of them made it easier to give, and easier to give the next one.

It is worth being exact about why so many people stay seated. It is seldom because they approve. Staying seated is simply the cheapest thing to do in such a room: it costs nothing today, while standing up can cost a job, a promotion, a place among colleagues. That is where the anger this series earns belongs, with an arrangement in which silence is always the least expensive choice, and the bill for everyone’s silence goes to the one person who got wet.

The series is unusually fair to one of the umbrella-takers. Tsuchida is humiliated by the president too, in front of his own family, and taken off the new restaurant. Asked by Tamako to be a witness for Satsuki, he refuses, saying only that if it had been his own daughter he would kill the president. It is the most exact thing the series says about bystanders: a man who sees the wrong perfectly well once he imagines it done to someone of his own, and still will not stand up for the woman it was done to. When the case does reach the public, it is through him.

A detail in the third episode is easy to miss and says a great deal. The company’s new bistro across the street has been using the same stock as Tamako’s roof, made to the same recipe: Satsuki’s. Monji, who runs that kitchen, tells Tamako he never wanted a stock made by her school friend in the first place. The company that humiliated Satsuki and moved her out had kept her recipe.

That is the difference between an asset and a gift. At the flagship, Satsuki’s work was something the company could keep after it had got rid of her. On the roof the same recipe arrives as a present from a friend, and the pot-au-feu made from it is served on the first night, in the cold, as a way of asking people to stay. When the president himself turns up on the roof in the fifth episode, speaks slightingly of Satsuki and asks Tamako to become his mistress, she tells him she opened the restaurant for Satsuki’s sake and puts him out. Two restaurants face each other across one street, and both are cooking from the notebook of the woman one of them drove out.

It matters, too, what kind of person Tamako is. The broadcaster describes her as serious and in love with working. She is not a rebel by temperament. She wanted to be good at her job, at a company where being good at your job meant putting up with what was done to you and to the person at the next desk. The harm the series is angry about is not only to dignity. It is to the love of work itself, which, until the meeting room, was what she and Satsuki had most in common.

Her cheerful motto, whenever someone points out what is wrong with the roof, is that a shortcoming is only another name for charm. It is a joke, and it is also the series’ quiet creed. On the roof, the things that made these people problems elsewhere are allowed to be what they also are: a cook who cannot bear to be looked at, and can cook anything; a graduate who alienates every interviewer, and can cost a menu in her head before anyone else has found a pencil; a pastry chef no kitchen in Tokyo would keep, trained in Paris.

Kawana Airi is the character many viewers found hardest to like, and the one the series trusts most. She still works for the company, and has survived there by being delightful. When a superior tells her that her clothes do not appeal to men, she apologises and promises to be more careful. She believes a woman’s worth is set by the man she goes out with, and she tells Tamako that putting up with sexual and power harassment is simply part of a woman’s role. For the first half of the series she is a rival, and a nuisance.

Then a colleague, Ikebe, decides that the two of them are going out together. She has agreed to nothing of the kind. He follows her, turns up at her home, and she is too frightened to go back there; it is Tamako who comes to her rescue. On Valentine’s night he calls her to a park he has hung with lights and declares himself. She finally tells him, in so many words, that it is creepy and asks him to stop. He punches her. The company covers it up, and he is moved to Kyushu. Airi quits and turns up on the roof, where the charm she had spent on surviving turns out to be a real gift with customers.

Two things need saying plainly. Being pleasant is not consent. A smile the workplace requires of a woman as the price of being allowed to work cannot then be read as permission, and Ikebe’s conviction that they were a couple was built from nothing but her politeness. And what finally brought violence down on her was the one sentence she had trained herself never to say. Every tolerance she had learned protected her only for as long as she never said no.

Airi’s great scene comes when she stops pretending. In front of the others she describes her way of surviving as licences from driving schools: the school where you learn to apologise when a man criticises your clothes, the one where you learn to laugh it off when you are told to lose weight or to sleep with someone. Her wallet, she says, is stuffed with them. Then she turns the image on a girl from one of Japan’s best-loved children’s cartoons, who is only ever friends with the useless boy, the arrogant one and the one who hits, and has no friends who are girls: she too, Airi suggests, must be carrying a full wallet. Takahata Mitsuki, who won her award for the part, said afterwards that the speech was very painful to perform, and that Airi’s refusal to complain, right to the end, had come to seem almost heroic.

Tamako gives no advice. She tells Airi that her body is hers to look after. It is almost nothing, and it is what nobody at the company had ever said: not that she should have fought, not that she should have known better, only that what had been taken was hers. This Library has written about the cost of that training in “The More You Perform Lovability, the Harder It Is to Hear Yourself”: when every response is tuned to keep the room pleasant, the part of you that wants something loses its voice. Airi is what that looks like at work, where pleasantness is not a way of being loved but a condition of being employed.

Yumi and Airi spend much of the series at each other’s throats, and the series gives them the same childhood: in little girls’ games of Sailor Moon, both always ended up with the colour nobody wanted, the green. Yumi armoured herself in pride and a degree from the University of Tokyo, and tells everyone exactly what is wrong with their plans. Airi learned to be adorable. Both roads ended in the same place: out of work, and on the roof.

Yumi’s worst night comes through a young man she likes. Hoshino, the apprentice across the street, asks her to be his partner in a business and takes her to meet a man who might lend them money. The flat, high in a tower block, is full of women in swimsuits and bunny costumes, waiting to entertain the men there. Hoshino takes about a hundred thousand yen from the man and leaves without her. The series says what the place is and does not linger. What it lingers on is afterwards: Tamako spotting Yumi hovering in the street one day and dragging her, more or less by force, up to the roof, where the others welcome her warmly. That is the series’ definition of what a table is for, a place where you are not asked to account for what was done to you before you are allowed to sit down.

The quieter harms in this series happen in kitchens, and it is as exact about them as about the meeting room. Chika, the cook in the hood, is the president’s daughter. After her parents divorced, her mother shut herself away in her room for seven years, and Chika, a child, cooked every day so that her mother would eat; then her mother left her. When the mother finds her again, it is to tell her she is starting a new family, and Chika wishes her well and writes to a friend that her loneliness is now complete. She can cook anything Tamako can imagine, and is not sure she even likes cooking. The skill is real, learned for the saddest reason a child can learn anything, so that someone else would eat. When her mother later asks her to come to Hokkaido with her new partner, Chika stays: the roof is the first kitchen where her cooking is for people who come back.

Kyoko, Tamako’s friend from the high-school kendo club, has been a housewife all her married life. Her husband left her to care for his mother with no help, calls her housework a mess, and is fighting her for their son. She describes herself to the others as a defective product: she has never worked, and cannot even cook. Tamako asks her who, and what life, and which words taught her to think so, and tells her it is wrong. To her husband Kyoko says something the series plainly means for more than him: that a lovely story can kill a person, and that the tale of the wife who gives her life to her husband had only ever been a curse to her.

On the roof Kyoko turns out to be a good cook, and becomes the sous-chef. On Valentine’s night, when the bistro across the street turns away parents with small children, it is Kyoko who suggests the roof take them in and mind the children so the couples can eat. That night the restaurant makes its first profit: 110 yen. It rests on the skill Kyoko had been told for years was worth nothing, looking after children and feeding people. The roof earned its first profit from the very ability that had been counted, at home, as her failure.

Haiji, the pastry chef, has lost one job after another in Japan over a manner and a way of dressing no workplace would tolerate, and has been shunned by relatives. The broadcaster’s own materials describe Haiji as gay. The series itself never has Haiji put a name to any of it, and leaves Haiji to speak for Haiji; this essay follows the series. When Haiji’s younger brother is to be married, Haiji, knowing how the relatives feel, sends back the invitation marked absent; the brother, who wants Haiji there, moves the party after the ceremony to the roof, and Haiji makes the wedding cake. It has the shape of every episode: a person pushed out of one room, and another room made for them.

Men are harmed here too, and it matters what the arrangement lets them do with the harm. Hoshino, the apprentice, is beaten and sworn at by senior staff where nobody can see; what he does to Yumi is sell her trust for a hundred thousand yen, though he later apologises to her face and quits, by which time she has stopped caring for him. Tsuchida, humiliated in front of his family, turns his humiliation into a leak. The series lets both men be more than their worst act, and lets neither act off.

Satsuki comes back in the eighth episode. In Fukui she has met Takamura Arata, who works for a travel agency in Tokyo and had come to scout tours for the new Hokuriku bullet train, and he has asked her to marry him. She has not told him what happened to her. She is ashamed of it, as though it were hers to be ashamed of, and has decided to end things rather than tell him. When he does learn everything, he tells her they will fight it together. They register their marriage, and Satsuki decides to take Amaki on, with Nanami, who turns out to have been a lawyer until ten years earlier, acting for her.

Arata does not rescue her; he stands beside her. And Monji, who had cared about nothing but his kitchen, goes to the president when he learns what was done and asks him to apologise to her properly. The president tells him not to worry: the company is handling it, and his restaurant will not go under. Even a man who took an umbrella can bring one back.

Nanami sends a formal demand for an apology and compensation, with five days to answer. Tamako goes looking for witnesses, and Tsuchida, the one she asks, says no. Then the case reaches the public anyway, in the worst form it could take: through Tsuchida’s leak to a weekly magazine, as a blur of fact and speculation that takes in Satsuki’s side as well as the president’s, spiced with gossip about the president’s famous father. Amaki resigns. The flagship closes. When his apology turns out to be for show, and he insults Monji into the bargain, Monji hits him and is fired.

The series never shows a courtroom. What it shows is how many wrongs actually become public: not as a finding but as a story, carried by someone with a grievance of his own, in a form the person harmed cannot control. This Library drew the distinction in “A Girl Missing, and a Life Dismantled by Association”: an accusation can be answered, and a story cannot. Satsuki’s case did bring the president down. It also turned what was done to her into something strangers read over breakfast, mixed with things that were not true, about her as well as about him. The series lets both be so, and does not pretend the first makes the second worth it.

Then the series does something many viewers found baffling, and that is, for this essay, its bravest move. Just as the roof is finally full every night, a customer drops a coffee spoon, and it falls past the railing to the street below. The police become involved. Someone complains that the restaurant should not be operating at all. Talks with the building’s owner break down, though a loyal customer tries to broker a way through. The person who complained is never shown. On the last night, every table taken, the restaurant closes with a profit of 840 yen, and Yumi, adding up the takings, cries and asks why they have to stop just when it is working.

One could read this as a failure of nerve, or as a sign that the series ran out of episodes. A better reading was made by a woman writing about the finale a few days after it aired, and this essay borrows it. For nine episodes the harm has run one way, from the company to the roof. At the end the roof becomes the source of a harm, a small one, a spoon that could have hit someone on the pavement, and the complaint comes from a person the audience never sees and has no reason to like. The heroines, who have spent the series insisting that complaints be heard, find this one very hard to hear. The series, she argued, had quietly put its audience in the president’s chair: accused by a faceless someone over a thing nobody meant, and sure the complaint was unreasonable.

It is the most honest thing the series does with its own title. The word problem does not belong for ever to the company, any more than it belonged to the people on the roof. It lands wherever someone refuses to hear that they have caused harm. A place built by people who were harmed is not thereby a place that cannot harm, and its test is the one the company failed: whether it can hear a complaint without deciding that the person making it is the problem.

The last episode also gives Tamako a dream of her old company as a workplace where everyone helps everyone else: the only glimpse the series offers of what she wanted all along, not a roof, not a war with the building opposite, only a place to do good work beside people who would not look away. Three hundred days later she summons everyone to a derelict house by the sea, where she means to start again. Monji, cooking now with Hoshino at a hotel along the shore, says he has no doubt he will win. Tamako says she has none either, and they raise their fists at each other. It is a rivalry between equals now, and it is the happiest ending the series allows itself.

Some of this is television exaggeration. A critic writing while the series was on air doubted that any real workplace was quite as extreme as Like Dining Service, while granting that smaller versions of its contempt were real enough. But the everyday mechanism the series cares about, harm swallowed in silence because silence is cheaper, can be measured, and in Japan it has been.

The most recent workplace harassment survey by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, carried out online in January 2024 among 8,000 employees aged twenty to sixty-four, found that 6.3 per cent had experienced sexual harassment at work in the previous three years: 8.9 per cent of women and 3.9 per cent of men, and 10.5 per cent in accommodation and food service, the industry this series is set in. After being sexually harassed, the most common thing people did was nothing, 51.7 per cent of them, and the most common reason, given by 52.7 per cent of those, was that they thought nothing they did would solve it. Where the employer knew, the most common response employees reported was that it did nothing in particular, and the most common outcome was that the matter was left ambiguous, with no finding either way; those two figures rest on only 120 people and describe what employees said.

None of these figures explains any particular person’s choices, and none describes a fictional one. One limit of the survey is almost too apt: it counted only people in work. Anyone out of work, whether they had left a job or never found one, was outside it, which is to say everyone Tamako gathered on that roof in the first episode.

The rules have moved since 2015, and this essay claims only what the ministry’s own pages say. Employers must take measures against sexual harassment at work under a guideline dating from 2006, so that duty already existed when the series went out; a duty covering power harassment followed in June 2020 for large employers and April 2022 for smaller ones. The measures include establishing the facts quickly and accurately and making sure nobody is treated worse for having complained. On its page for workers the ministry puts it in a sentence the company in this series would not have recognised: harassment is not an individual’s problem but the company’s. How the power-harassment guideline measures a superior relationship, by whether the person on the receiving end can refuse, is set out in “Babygirl, and the Difference Between Surrender and Leverage”.

For a reader to whom some of this is not a story, there is no need to decide first whether it counts. The Comprehensive Labour Consultation Corners, run through the prefectural labour bureaus, take questions about harassment free of charge and without an appointment, in a range of languages; for sexual violence, the national number #8891 connects, free, to the nearest one-stop support centre.

There are at least four ways this essay could be wrong, and two of them are about the series.

First, the series was sold, and in its opening episodes largely built, as women against men. Its announcement promised a comedy in which women with problems declare war on the men who had made their lives a misery. In the first episode almost every man at the company is a harasser, a bully or a bystander, and the woman who wrote so well about the spoon admitted she was not sure she could have watched the mirror image, a story that opened by presenting every woman as a tormentor of men. That objection should stand. The later episodes widen the picture; in the last, even the two company men who sneered at every complaint secretly carry families’ prams up the stairs to the roof, still grumbling that nobody should bring children to a restaurant. This essay has read the series by its mechanism rather than its slogan. But reading a work by its best episodes is a kindness, and the first episodes are what many viewers saw before they stopped watching.

Second, the roof is a fantasy of leaving, and leaving is a privilege. Tamako’s answer to the room ended with her in a police car and out of a career. The ministry’s survey suggests what most people actually do, which is nothing, most often because they have concluded nothing would help. A story that makes leaving look brave can make staying look like cowardice. It is not. A woman who keeps her head down in a job because she has rent, children and no roof to go to is failing no test this series sets. She is living inside the arrangement the series is angry about, and carrying it.

Third, the series steps around the law. It builds to a demand letter and a search for witnesses, then cuts to a scandal, a resignation and a punch. That can be read as realism, and the survey’s finding that complaints are most often left ambiguous supports it. It can also be read as a failure of nerve, or of running time, that reaches the satisfaction of the president’s fall without showing what a legal process would have asked of Satsuki. Both readings are fair, and this essay cannot choose between them.

Fourth, aimed at this essay. The claim that whoever objects is made into the problem can flatter anyone who has ever objected to anything. Some complaints are problems; some difficult colleagues are simply difficult. The series says so itself, with the spoon: a restaurant on a roof above a public street can hurt someone, and the person who complained may have been entirely right. By never showing that person, the series spares its heroines the full test, and an essay that praises the spoon as honesty has to admit the honesty went only so far.

And the plainest limit: this is a reading of fiction. The characters are invented, no figure here describes any of them, and nothing in this essay is a statement about the actors who played them.

Here is where this Library stands. Harm at work is seldom one person’s act. It is usually a group activity: one person does it, and a roomful of people make it cheap. The most useful thing a colleague can do is to stop it being cheap, and that rarely takes a bucket of iced water. Often it takes no more than the sentence Airi finally said, or the question Tamako put to Kyoko: who taught you to think that?

A table at which each person is taken seriously is not a luxury added to a good workplace. It is the condition of good work, the thing Tamako wanted all along, even in the back of that police car. And the people a workplace calls its problems are very often the ones carrying its problems for it.

And here is the part that runs against us. This house sells private companionship. The people who work for it are workers, and the question the series leaves, how many workplaces run on people agreeing not to make a fuss, applies to this one as much as to Like Dining Service. Whether the people who work here can refuse, complain and be believed without becoming the problem is a standard this essay can state and cannot certify. Nothing in the series argues for what this house sells. What the roof gave its people, colleagues who would not look away, is not for sale anywhere.

Who, in your working life, became the problem for saying something, and was it ever you? Which umbrellas have you taken without noticing, in meetings where you said nothing because saying nothing was free? What have you learned to smile through, and what would it cost you to stop? Is there a table anywhere at which you are taken seriously without first having to explain yourself? If there is not, who else is missing one?

If you were ever told that you were overreacting, or that it was a private matter, or that it was simply part of the job, then the trouble did not begin with you. It began in a room where blaming you was the easiest thing on offer. You owe that room neither your silence nor your shame. The series ends on a beach, beside a derelict house, with a flag pushed into the sand and a woman insisting that food eaten here will taste wonderful. She is right, and it solves nothing. It is only a place to begin again among people who did not look away. Most of us need one at some point, and some of us have to build it ourselves.