Cat-o’-Two-Tales

One summer when I was 10 or 11, I read “The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” and became addicted to raisins, a staple for the fictitious shipwrecked sailor, along with roasted turtle’s eggs.

Of course, it was Daniel Defoe’s descriptive writing that made raisins such a sudden passion: “I found grapes upon the trees; the vines had spread indeed over the trees, and the clusters of grapes were just now in their prime, very ripe and rich. This was a surprising discovery, and I was exceeding glad of them. I found an excellent use for these grapes, and that was to cure them in the sun and keep them as dried grapes or raisins are kept, which I thought would be, as indeed they were, as wholesome and agreeable to eat when no grapes might be had.”

On and on he goes about the joys of raisins. And suddenly I was begging my mom to go to the store and bring home boxes of Sun-Maid, which I ate one right after the other while waiting for Crusoe to discover his man Friday.

I told this story to my daughter, Paige, the other day, when she came home from school and told me she had a sudden desire for Japanese noodles. I was not surprised. All week she’d been reading passages to me from Arthur Golden’s “Memoirs of a Geisha.” The beautiful but wicked Hatsumomo, the older nemesis of the novel’s heroine, has a boyfriend who is a chef in a noodle restaurant, which isn’t particularly important in the story but had somehow caught Paige’s imagination. She badly wanted to go to a Japanese noodle restaurant.

So I took her to Mitae Ramen, the sort of small, unassuming noodle restaurant that the conniving Hatsumomo’s boyfriend might have worked at. Though Mitae is hidden in a little industrial pocket near Costa Mesa’s Lab center and surrounded by neighbors like A & B Towing and Majestic Marble & Tile, she found it almost as exotic as anything in Kyoto.

There are the dragons atop the refrigerator and the stack of cheap Japanese novels, their covers pastel pinks and blues, to pass the time while waiting for your order (if you can read Japanese).

But most of all she was fascinated by the collection of porcelain cats--nine in all--lined up on a shelf behind the lunch counter. When our waitress, a very serious-looking young girl with coal-black hair pulled back, brought our ice teas and cabbage salads, which come with all meals, Paige asked her about the cats.

The waitress smiled.

“You don’t know Maneki Neko?” she asked. “Maneki bring good fortune.” Then she rubbed her fingers together. “Maneki bring the money.”

She told us that hundreds of years ago there was a run-down temple in Tokyo where a priest, despite his poverty, kept a cat named Maneki.

“One day a samurai warlord was on his way home when he got caught in a rainstorm, so he took shelter under a big tree in front of the temple. While he was waiting for the rain to let up, he noticed a white cat under the temple gate raising a paw and beckoning him to come forward. So the warlord left the tree and as soon as he did, the tree was struck by lightning.

“Because the cat had saved the warlord’s life, he gave a lot of money to the run-down temple, and it became prosperous and famous in Japan. After the cat died, it was buried in the temple’s cemetery and a porcelain cast made of its image. That is Maneki Neko.”

Paige loved that tale. She used chopsticks to pick out the little pink shrimp in her giant bowl of ramen while staring at the collection of porcelain cats and talking to me about the story.

“Do you think it’s true?” she asked.

“It’s a good story either way,” I told her, and she nodded in agreement.

It was late in the afternoon, yet all of the tables at Mitae Ramen as well as the four stools at the counter were full, so I told Paige the lucky charm cat certainly seemed to be working its spell here. What I did not tell her was a different version of the history of the Maneki Neko cat I’d heard many years ago, and one that certainly would have fit in better with her fascination for the fictional life of a geisha.

The story I’d heard was that Japanese geishas were often represented in art as cats and that in almost all geisha houses it was common to have a good-luck shelf facing the street that was full of the “beckoning cats,” their little paws raised, palms showing, mimicking the peculiar way in which the Japanese gesture, to lure men inside the geisha houses.

Like everyone else in the restaurant, we slowly picked at our steamy bowls of baby bok choy, bean sprouts and shrimp floating in a rich, spicy broth, and though we took our time and chatted endlessly about the people eating there, the porcelain cats and the story of the geishas, we could not come close to finishing our meal. We took the rest home.

And as I write this, many hours later, Paige sits at the dining-room table, her book splayed out in front of her, reading about the wicked Hatsumomo while deftly picking out curled shrimp with her chopsticks from her leftover lunch.

11:30-3 and 5-9:30 Monday-Saturday.

David Lansing’s column is published on Saturdays in Orange County Calendar. His e-mail address is occalendar@latimes.com.