Noodlemagazun -

It was the summer of 2004, and Leo’s older brother, Dante, had just returned from a semester abroad in Tokyo with a cardboard box full of things that made no sense to their suburban Chicago parents. Inside: a half-empty bottle of yuzu vinegar, a DVD of a game show where people ran obstacle courses in inflatable sumo suits, and seven issues of a magazine called .

Leo was thirteen, lanky, and bored. He picked up the top issue. The cover was electric pink, featuring a bowl of ramen that looked more like a neon constellation than food, steam curling into the shapes of kanji he couldn’t read. The logo was a tangle of noodles forming the letters N-O-O-D-L-E-M-A-G-A-Z-U-N . noodlemagazun

“What is this?” Leo asked.

The first issue had no table of contents. Instead, a pull-out poster unfolded into a map of a fictional Tokyo subway system where each station was a different genre: Shōwa City Pop Platform , Kaiju Horror Loop , Vending Machine Haiku Line . Leo traced the routes with his finger, landing on a station called Fermented Dream . The article there was a step-by-step photo essay on making natto from scratch, but every third step was a surrealist poem about a salaryman who turned into a soybean. It was the summer of 2004, and Leo’s