ONE man’s kitchen is another man’s nightmare. This saying, describing how a delicacy for one person is distasteful to another person brought up in a different culture, is perhaps a little hyperbolic. But it seems to be a fitting illustration of the recent controversy surrounding a TV soap opera.

Entitled “Late-night Eatery,” the series is being broadcast on TV or streamed on some video-sharing websites. Despite an all-Chinese cast, and the fact that many dishes depicted are authentically Chinese, its storyline and setting are unmistakably a knockoff from the original Japanese version of “Late-night Eatery.”

If possible acts of plagiarism are one big reason the drama is castigated, what makes things worse is that, except for the foods served, none of the elements in the original Japanese version are adapted for a Chinese context. The result, as it were, is a bad cultural mixture, a fiasco of a crudely-made TV knockoff — neither fish nor fowl, you might say.

When the eatery owner, dressed in a blue yukata (light kimono) outfit, speaks Chinese while taking orders from customers, and when diners sit around the wooden counter, quietly slurping on spicy-hot Hunan-flavored instant noodles, this can only be hilarious. As someone who has seen two seasons of the Japanese series, starring the character actor Kaoru Kobayashi, I can attest that this drama is a true reflection of a cross-section of urban Japanese society and life.

Since many Japanese are workaholics, keeping themselves busy until midnight, or even into the wee hours of the next morning, the countless tiny bars, or Izakaya, and eateries tucked away in dimly-lit back alleys of metropolises like Tokyo or Osaka, provide a refuge for these Japanese economic warriors. Here they can wind down with an iced Asahi beer or wolf down a bowl of steaming hot ramen to appease their grumbling, protesting stomachs.

The cramped place is often teeming with people from every conceivable occupation. Among frequenters to chef Kobayashi’s eatery are a strip-teaser, a gangster boss and his underling, a transvestite, a haiku poet, typical Japanese salary men and three unmarried young women who indulge in their collective contempt of men, while tucking into chazukeya, a Japanese dish made of cooked rice soaked in green tea and topped with plums, seaweed and salmon.

In the Chinese version, the so-called chazukeya trio is replaced with, rather awkwardly, the instant noodles trio who are too often contrived and histrionic in their mannerisms.

In this smaller society, free from the tyranny of Japanese workplace strictures, the diners find a rare outlet for suppressed feelings, and they become so loquacious that they even confide in strangers’ tales of their own infidelity, unrequited love and thwarted ambitions that they would otherwise keep to themselves.

Fried potato cakes, rice slathered with butter and tenpura, deep-fried vegetables or seafood, these simple Japanese dishes may not qualify as fine delicacies, but thanks to the Japanese attention to detail and their fondness of infusing everything with a sense of ritual, these dishes are peculiarly mouth-watering.

What makes them more appetizing, of course, is the colorful life stories told by diners who consume them.

The Japanese series reminds me of Ozu Yasujiro’s films, occasionally gay and light-hearted, but most of the time just placid and filled with what the Japanese call monono aware, or pathos of things. Just as my favorite writer and renowned Japan hand Ian Buruma observed in his 1984 magnum opus “A Japanese Mirror,” “Every night thousands of Japanese businessmen find refuge from the Economic Miracle in tiny bars, sometimes with names like ‘Mother’s Taste’ or just ‘Mother.’ There, aided by whisky and water, they retreat into early childhood, seeking the ever-attentive ears of the ladies they call ‘mama-san,’ who, with the practiced patience of psychiatrists, listen to their problems...”

Plucked from roots

These words, written in the early 1980s, still ring true. As such, one can only imagine what will happen when a symbol of urban Japan is arbitrarily plucked from its roots and shown, without any alteration, on the Chinese TV screen. No wonder it has only garnered criticisms.

True, the Chinese version of “Late-night Eatery” has a star-studded cast, and it also tells heart-wrenching tales at times, but the actors and actresses feel like a bunch of misfits thrown at random into a totally alien world. There are even episodes, replete with kitsch, that make a bleak mockery of the real thing. Hence the low ratings.

The Chinese series should have fared better. Life in some major Chinese cities is increasingly Japan-ized in that the hustle and bustle, the oppressiveness of corporate “bird cages,” the social/peer pressure to conform are all driving people to work and sleep late.

It’s not unusual to see well-dressed men and women filing out of high-rise office buildings in the areas adjacent to my workplace late at night, sometimes waiting on the roadside for taxi, huddling themselves against the night chills.

Nonetheless, China’s late-night eateries should look quite different from the cozy and small Japanese-style establishments. Comments posted by Chinese viewers suggest that China’s equivalent of the Japanese eatery is da pai dang, or streetside food stalls, where diners sit at a round table, eat kebab, drink beer and talk loudly.

Their faces appear in and out of view, obscured by the flames dancing above charcoal stoves and vapor rising up from cauldrons. Delivered from the strictures of office cubicles, they crow how they have excelled at work and aced a business deal; they comment, a bit lasciviously, on the sexy new hires in the office; they curse their bosses for being difficult and mean-spirited. This, for me, appears to be the right recipe for a late-night Chinese eatery story. Less refined, organized and ritualized? Yes, but at least closer to reality.

Therefore, it really eludes me what was on the mind of the director and screenwriter when they contemplated the plot of the Chinese series. They successfully evaded all the familiar culinary icons and patterns to come up with something simply out of touch with everyday life in China.

All of this could be my prejudices, though. Above all, Chinese restaurants are not always greasy, smoke-filled or rowdy from people chatting at the top of their lungs irrespective of the feelings of others. And Chinese cuisine can be made to look as exquisite as their Japanese cousin. In fact, far more so.

The popular food documentaries “A Bite of China” aired years ago is a paean to the history of Chinese yearnings for what they call “heaven” in a sense of awe as well as to the thousands of years of evolution in how Chinese relate to their beloved “heaven.”

You are what you eat.

When fragments of a highly stylized culture are clumsily inserted into a completely alien (and more earthy) culture, it sort of resembles a cherry blossom being grafted onto the stem of a peony flower — it inevitably withers.