He glanced over at Naruto. “Don’t tell Dad though,” he added and slurped his ramen. For all his talk about hamburgers tasting better, he looked pretty happy with his ramen.
Chihare stared at the profile of the man seated next to her.
Naruto was laughing out loud, guilelessly, at Teuchi’s cringey dad jokes, and the corners of his mouth turned up on his face with each slurp of his noodles, like he was in heaven. Every time the master next to him said something, he responded happily with laughter or anger or some other emotion.
Naruto almost certainly loved this ramen because of the nostalgia from his visits to this ramen shop with his teacher. They came here together after class, talked about all kinds of things, and had a good time, and he ended up associating all that with the ramen itself.
Now that she was thinking about it, Mitsuki had said something the other day about Boruto stopping off at the hamburger shop. She was sure that in Boruto’s case, it wasn’t a ramen shop, but a hamburger place. He killed time there with his friends, making fun memories, and so he liked burgers more than ramen.
I don’t have a favorite food.
Chihare poked at the naruto-style kamaboko slice on top of her noodles. The fish loaf had a swirl in the center.
There were always so many people around Naruto.
“It’s the perfect name for you. Uzumaki Naruto. Whirlpool,” she murmured, and Naruto turned a happy face her way.
“Yeah! I like it too. Naruto kamaboko’s delicious, after all.”
“Not that part, your surname,” she said. “There are whirlpool galaxies in space, you know. The theory is they have black holes at their centers that suck in all the material in the area. When water gets pulled into a gutter, it swirls around and around, right?”
Iruka stopped moving his chopsticks and looked at Chihare as she started lecturing about space.
“The center of the whirlpool never fails to pull in the things around it. It’s all drawn in, creating a single large swirling movement. That really is you to a T. You seduce people with your overwhelming power of attraction.”
“S-seduce? I feel like that’s not really a compliment,” Naruto scratched his cheek, troubled, and then shook it off and said, “But thanks. Uzumaki’s my mom’s surname. I only talked to her a little, but she was quite loud and strong and really like a black hole. Although her hair was red, not black.”
“Kushina was a powerful person, I guess. They say she was always at the center of some sort of commotion, just like you,” Iruka said with a faraway look in his eyes while he picked up the naruto kamaboko slice in his own bowl of ramen. “The ‘uzumaki’ whirlpool mark is also a symbol of Konoha. It honestly is the perfect last name for you.”
Now that Iruka mentioned it, the whirlpool mark was also on the headbands the shinobi wore. Chihare looked at the one on Boruto sitting next to her and asked, “Why is the mark of Konoha a glyph like this? Also, it doesn’t look much like a leaf.”
“They say it comes from how ninja put a leaf on their forehead and trained to concentrate their chakra there,” Iruka explained. “And the whirlpool imagery is from following its swirl from its edge until you eventually end up at the one point in the center.”
“It does have that image of pulling together scattered things to a single place, doesn’t it?” Chihare remarked.
“Mm hmm. But if you change the vector, it can also hold the opposite idea.”
“Vector?” Naruto looked at Iruka curiously.
“If you come at it from the outside, you go to the central point,” he replied. “But what happens if you do the opposite and trace it from the central point? You head toward the outside and continue endlessly. It changes into something that not only doesn’t come together in one place, but scatters out eternally. The whirlpool is one of the few glyphs that expresses movement from inside to outside, and outside to inside at the same time. That’s why in some of the country, it’s a symbol of bonds. You could also put it like ‘inside’ is yourself and ‘outside’ is your friends.”
As she listened to Iruka’s instructional explanation, Chihare dropped her gaze to her bowl and the pink whirlpool on the slice of kamaboko.
“But the spinning has all kinds of different meanings, y’know!” Boruto interjected smugly. “If you look real close at sunflower seeds or cactus spines, they’re in this pattern like a whirlpool. I guess it’s so they can all get the same amount of sunlight.”
“It’s also a shape that’s efficient for storing long things,” Mitsuki noted. “My parent also sometimes coils up. When he’s in snake mode and stuff.”
“In some regions, they carve whirlpools into gravestones,” Sarada said. “The constantly turning whirlpool is a symbol of eternity, so it’s supposed to represent the hope that the dead person will come back at some point.”
This was all new information to Naruto, and he was still for a moment, chopsticks in hand. “You kids really do study hard, huh?” he said finally.
“Did you learn all this, Dad?” Boruto asked. “At the academy?”
“I feel like we didn’t really learn all these details back in my day,” Naruto tried to deflect the question, and Iruka slapped him jocularly on the back.
“You dodo, I definitely taught them to you,” he said firmly. “You just weren’t listening because you were playing tic-tac-toe in the margins of your notebook with Kiba and Shikamaru.”
“I can’t believe you remember that,” Naruto said, stunned.
Teuchi lifted his face as he put the plastic-wrapped chashu pork into the fridge. “Hey, hey. Sorry to interrupt your lively conversation, but you need to eat those noodles before they get gluey.”