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On Sunday, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani invited members of the public to meet with him, one-on-one, for three minutes at a time, in a sparely appointed room at the Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria. His transition team titled the twelve-hour event “The Mayor Is Listening,” in homage to “The Artist Is Present,” the iconic work of performance art by Marina Abramović. Every day for nearly two and a half months, in 2010, Abramović sat at a table in the MOMA atrium and invited visitors to sit across from her. She made eye contact but otherwise said nothing, sitting still for hours on end. Taking in Mamdani’s œuvre over the past few years—the pre-primary walk down the length of Manhattan, the New Year’s Day polar plunge, and the multiple times he’s trotted the course of the New York City Marathon—I’ve thought less of Abramović and more of the magician David Blaine, who shares Mamdani’s taste for slightly masochistic public displays of fortitude. The job of mayor, after all, is usually less like a silent encounter at MOMA, and more like being encased in ice in Times Square for sixty-three hours.

The energy in the room was part D.M.V., part papal antechamber. (The sweet Adeni chai on offer as a refreshment surely didn’t help all the nervous fidgeting.) A few participants were museum staffers and venders who had been invited to join in, but most had heard about the event on Instagram the day before, when Mamdani’s team had posted a call for people to apply to attend. In an attempt to attract people beyond the superfans, they had asked some large local unions and community groups to spread the word. A biotech venture capitalist named Faizzan Syed Ahmad got a spot thanks to his cousin, an N.Y.P.D. officer who is on the Mayor-elect’s security detail. Ahmad brought his eight-year-old daughter and his father, who emigrated from India in 1978, and planned to pitch Mamdani on the idea of a Doha-New York biotech corridor.

Visitor No. 1 was Vinny Corletta, a former teacher of English and language arts, also from Astoria, who had lined up in the snow before the museum opened. Mamdani’s rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment is just a few blocks away, and Corletta wanted to talk to him, before he moves into Gracie Mansion, about building more family housing. “I want to know that these two-bedroom, three-bedroom apartments or condos are being built,” he said, as opposed to big buildings crammed with studios and one-bedrooms, like the one Mamdani lives in. “I want to see, like, where it’s earmarked and located, that schools are going to be in those places, how many seats they’re expecting.” He added, “Something that’s real, that I can follow up on and track and trace.” When Corletta emerged from his three-minute meeting, he pronounced himself satisfied. “It was amazing,” he said. “He was really taking notes.”

To reach Mamdani, attendees took a left after entering the museum and went into a staging room set up in the Ann R. and Andrew H. Tisch Education Center, named after an uncle and aunt of the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, whom Mamdani has asked to stay on in his administration. (Visitor No. 2, a young activist who’d left the Democratic Socialists of America because they thought the organization’s posture on Israel was inadequately aggressive, had come to take Mamdani to task about Tisch. “I’m interested in seeing if he can back himself out of what he seems to be becoming,” the activist said.) Each attendee was given a nametag and a visitor number, and was eventually summoned to an adjoining room, where they waited in a single-file line of chairs. Several people told me that when they finally got their turn with Mamdani, they were so flustered that their three minutes flew by before they’d gotten to say their piece. Visitor No. 97, wearing moon-pendant earrings and a black leather jacket, asked Mamdani a question her mother had wanted her to ask, and another her brother wanted her to ask, and ran out of time before she was able to ask the question that had been on her own mind, about Mamdani’s proposed Department of Community Safety. She also wanted to complain about digital advertising screens on the subway. “So dystopian,” she said.

Despite the team’s effort to diversify the turnout, the general makeup of the crowd suggested a certain amount of self-selection. Most were in their thirties and forties, and many readily professed to being Mamdani devotees. Of the hundred and forty-two people who ended up meeting with him, there were only a few who didn’t want to talk to a reporter, and no trolls or obvious haters. (A hundred and forty-two New Yorkers and no haters doesn’t happen without some pretty good screening.) Still, there were surprises. Visitor No. 108, a filmmaker, musician, and production-company operator from Bushwick, had come to tell Mamdani to beware of d.j.s. “In my opinion, one of the biggest recession indicators in New York City right now is the d.j. epidemic, because people don’t have time to learn instruments; people don’t have space to practice,” she said. Visitor No. 61, who asked that I withhold his name, was twenty-five years old and Jewish, and had voted for Trump twice, and then Mamdani this year. “I’ll vote for the populist candidate, Democrat, Republican, whatever they are,” he said. He was wearing a gray sweater and a gold chain, and he lived on the Upper East Side. In part, he wanted to make sure Mamdani knew that just because he’d voted for him didn’t mean he agreed with him on everything.

Visitor No. 53, Gabriella Gonjon, who was raised by Dominican immigrants in South Jersey (“between Princeton and Six Flags”), said she was terrified of how Donald Trump is targeting immigrants. “Hearing Trump say he doesn’t want people from third-world countries here,” she said, “that really scared me, and it just makes me feel like, even though I’m born here and I’m a hundred per cent a citizen here, I don’t know when that line is going to change.” But that’s not what she wanted to talk to Mamdani about. Gonjon, who is twenty-six, and a trained architect who works for a city agency that oversees school construction, had a complaint about the new OMNY contactless-payment system in the city’s subway stations and buses. “I don’t feel like our identity should be tied to every stop that we go to,” she said. MetroCards had afforded riders some measure of privacy. “Especially with this immigrant thing—like, I don’t want to be targeted in any way.”

Joynal Abedin, a Bangladeshi immigrant in his sixties, from Woodside, came to the museum dressed in a blue suit and a green shirt and tie. He wanted to talk to Mamdani about the plight of the small landlord. “All homeowners are not billionaires like Donald Trump,” he said. Despite Mamdani’s championing of the city’s renters, Abedin was determined to make him see that mom-and-pop landlords such as him deserved empathy, too. But when he got into the room, the Mayor-elect, whom he had met before, disarmed him by reciting the names of his children. “Asked me about the kids by name,” Abedin said. “What can I do?”

As the afternoon wore on, snow accumulated in the museum’s back garden, and Mamdani’s visitors kept coming, shaking ice off their boots. One man recited what he wanted to tell Mamdani over and over again under his breath, his eyes gauzy and lost in the middle distance. Another attendee had written notes in pen on the back of her hand, which read, from top to bottom: “Rent Iftar Glitter com. Red Hook + Gowanus Knitting Small Biz Bus Idling.” In the afternoon, Lina Khan, the former head of the Federal Trade Commission, who is one of the leaders of the transition team, arrived in the staging room to talk with the visitors, along with other top advisers, including Elle Bisgaard-Church, Mamdani’s chief of staff, and Dean Fuleihan, a soft-spoken seventy-four-year-old veteran of state and city government, who will be serving as Mamdani’s first deputy mayor. Visitor No. 97, the woman with the moon earrings, emerged from her meeting around 5:30, saying she sensed Mamdani flagging. “He was exhausted, you could see it on his face,” she said. “But you couldn’t tell by the way he talked.”

Mamdani first began discussing the idea for “The Mayor Is Listening” back in September, with Julian Gerson, the speechwriter who came up with the idea for the walk down the length of Manhattan. Sunday’s event was designed to be a sequel, another big swing that signalled Mamdani’s ongoing belief that holding public attention will be crucial to enacting the ambitious changes he hopes to bring about in the city. I asked Fuleihan, who helped Bill de Blasio implement universal pre-K, how much of the job of mayor involved public performance. “A complete agenda of affordability—that requires constant communication,” he said. “No one in the past—and this isn’t a criticism—would have had me doing this,” he added, smiling wryly.

Mamdani emerged just after 9 P.M., a smile pasted across his face. “I’ve been in that room for fifteen hours!” he said. (He took a five-minute break every hour, plus lunch.) He reported that one attendee had come dressed as a hamburger, that more than one had revealed that they were undocumented, and that several people had cried during the sessions, including him. One person had said their No. 1 issue was changing the time of construction on the Van Wyck Expressway. “It’s currently 8 A.M. to 4 P.M., and that makes no sense,” Mamdani said. “They would like for it to be reverted to what it was before that, which was nighttime construction. Which makes a lot of sense.”

When Mamdani was coming up in New York politics, he and others affiliated with the D.S.A. were preoccupied by the ways that holding office can change people. “I think there is every pressure, once governing, to make the process insular,” Bisgaard-Church told me on Sunday afternoon. Even when Mamdani was a little-known State Assembly member, in Albany, Bisgaard-Church said that the two of them had thought hard about how to maintain “deep connections” with constituents. “We have a real duty also to uphold people’s hope and faith that we can do things differently, and that starts by actually having some direct time with the Mayor-elect,” she said.

On the cusp of his inauguration, Mamdani seemed only more conscious of the risks of being trapped in a bubble.“It cannot be that the only New Yorker you see is the reflection of yourself in the tinted window of that car,” he told me, as the museum emptied out. “It cannot be that every meeting you have is one you agreed to, or that you set up.” Like any insurgent politician, he hopes to retain some of the magic of his campaign, even as his day to day fills with the unmagical realities of governing. During his victory speech last month, Mamdani referenced a line once delivered by Mario Cuomo, the father of his vanquished opponent Andrew Cuomo, that campaigns are written in poetry, while governing is done in prose. His win had suggested that politics had gone post-text. Now everything is performance. ♦

To hear about a mass shooting in another city is to feel one is at the periphery of ongoing history; but perversely, to live near the site of a shooting is to feel nothing has changed except that unreality has come closer.

This was my experience on Saturday afternoon, in Providence, when an unidentified man in his twenties or thirties, dressed in black, opened fire in a classroom in the Barus and Holley engineering-and-physics building at Brown, the university where I teach. I was at home, just eight blocks away, at 4:22 P.M., when I received an automated call telling me that there was an active shooter in the vicinity. A text followed:

BrownUAlert: 1st, Urgent: There’s an active shooter near Barus & Holley Engineering. Lock doors, silence phones and stay stay (sic) hidden until further notice. Remember: RUN, if you are in the affected location, evacuate safely if you can; HIDE, if evacuation is not possible, take cover; FIGHT, as a last resort, take action to protect yourself. Stay tuned for further safety information.

There was something video-game-like, I thought, about the capitalized exhortations to RUN and FIGHT, and I took it in with a curious, possibly deranged, calm. Just the day before, the university had sent an e-mail alert informing us that a “Brown University community member” had been “approached by a male who identified themselves as a Federal agent, displayed a firearm, and used handcuffs to detain the reporting party.” Fortunately, the alert went on, “the reporting party was allowed to leave the location without further incident.” (The federal agent was later revealed to have been a legitimate officer with the fugitive task force.) I assumed that this was a similar incident; perhaps a man with a gun had been seen prowling around campus, and that was all. I was so blasé, in fact, that, ten minutes later, I drove my four-year-old daughter to a friend’s home, in the opposite direction to campus, where she would stay that evening while my wife and I threw a holiday party.

Still, out of caution, I took a winding route away from campus, down Providence’s steep College Hill, which is crowned with Brown at the top, and the Rhode Island School of Design a block below. As sirens yelped in the distance, I made the mistake of processing the situation out loud to my daughter, V., who was strapped in a car seat in the back. “We’ve got to go a different way because there’s a problem at Brown University,” I told her.

“What’s the problem, Papa?” V. asked.

“There’s a man with a gun there.”

“What does he do?”

“Well, a gun can hurt people, so we want to be far away from that.”

“Can you think why he would do that?” V. asked.

I said, “Well, sometimes people aren’t O.K. in the head, and they want to hurt other people.”

“So he’ll hurt other people because he’s not O.K. in the head and then his head will feel better,” V. said.

I tried to change the subject.

When I got to my friend’s house, he was dressed spiffily for our “festive attire” party, wearing salmon pants, a long brown-leather jacket, and a checked shirt, and was refreshing social media on his phone, looking for updates.

It seemed that twenty people had been injured. (The figure was later revised down to nine.) We expressed our shock and sadness, but none of it was hard to believe. This is America.

Then we got an alert informing us that a suspect was in custody. My friend and I discussed whether we should go ahead with the party and decided that, if the threat had been neutralized, we may as well be together. Our daughters would be at his house with a babysitter.

I went home, but when I arrived, I got another alert, saying the first alert had been false, and no one had been apprehended. My phone swelled with messages from friends who were unsure about whether to come to the party. “Will streets be shut down?” one asked. With my apparent faith in small-town America, I assured him they wouldn’t. “Hey unfortunately our babysitter just canceled because of the active shooter,” another friend texted.

From there, the night unfolded stutteringly. After we debated the appropriate language, my wife and I sent out a mass e-mail cancelling the party (“We obviously don’t want anyone to unnecessarily venture out today”) but welcoming anyone who was already en route and wished to hunker down with us. An architect friend of mine who teaches at RISD was hiding out in his home on Governor Street, where another shooting incident was said to have occurred—this was later revealed to be false—and had told his wife and two young kids not to come home. We heard helicopters ripping overhead and police cars from up the hill. It was a pitch-black winter night. The shooter was still at large.

Surrounded by bottles of undrunk Campari and vermouth, we put blinds up on our front windows, which look onto a major street near campus, and tuned into the fire department’s live radio feed. As friends e-mailed and texted, I was struck by the frequent and unself-conscious invocation of the phrase “shelter in place,” the shelters of the nuclear era having given way to something equally queasy but more domestic. A grad student who’d been planning to attend the party messaged me from an open-to-the-public arts building on campus, where she was hidden in a tech closet. She wasn’t sure how she would make it home to the campus-adjacent Fox Point neighborhood, and asked if she could come to my place when she got out. I said yes, of course, though eventually she was escorted to her home by police, around 1:10 A.M. Later, I was shocked to learn that the student had also been in a lockdown thirteen years ago, as a fifteen-year-old, during Sandy Hook, in a neighboring town. “I had been telling people it was a matter of time,” she told me, sounding distraught.

Slowly, as the night went on, a picture of the shooting emerged: a teaching assistant and Brown senior had been leading a review session for Principles of Economics, an introductory course that many students take, often in their first year. Around sixty students, eager to do well in their exams, took notes in the tiered amphitheatre-like classroom. As the session ended, around 4 P.M., shots and screaming were heard in the hallway. A gunman dressed in black and wearing a face mask opened the door in the back, shouted something incomprehensible, and started firing a rifle. Students surged toward the front of the class; some escaped out the side doors. At the end of it, two students were dead, and seven others were injured. According to one student, it was only when the gunman fled the room that the students began screaming. The T.A., Joseph Oduro, held the hand of a first-year who had been shot twice in the leg as they waited for help to arrive.

These impressions were in my head as, at 8 P.M., I drove back to my friend’s house to fetch V. The shooter was still at large. Pulling out of my driveway, I saw a white Providence Police cruiser, lights flashing, speeding in the opposite direction. After I picked V. up, on the road home, I stopped briefly to let another police cruiser pass. The air was throbbing with the sounds of helicopters coming close and pulling away. When we got home, I ran with V. to our front door and hurried in. A friend whose son is at Brown messaged, “I hope you guys stay inside.” She had told her son that “what seems dangerous now is getting shot by accident by law enforcement.”

The next morning, we woke to a city blanked out by unexpected snowfall. Another acquaintance who’d planned to attend the party texted, “And I woke up to a mass shooting in Sydney, where I’m from. What a fucking weekend.” We learned that two other students on campus were survivors of previous school shootings. To our relief, Providence police reported that they had a “person of interest” in custody.

It was the first snowfall of the season, which is usually a cause for jubilation among students, but Brown’s main green was mostly deserted in the afternoon, except for three or four knots of quiet undergraduates. The trees were bare and crystalline and white. The American flag was at half-mast. Five snowmen, built overnight and in the morning, sat in random locations; one, shaped like a cat, had the labels of Bigelow tea bags for eyes. Two students were rolling a gigantic ball of snow and ice on the green to make a new snowman, and I stopped to chat with them. One, a sophomore, said that he had barricaded himself on the top floor of the Brown Center for Students of Color building with others, and they had stayed there from four-thirty until one-thirty at night. Luckily, they had access to snacks but, the other student told me, many on campus were afraid to even go near a hallway to get water.

“It made me start to rethink how safe I actually am,” the first student said. The second added, “It was weird hearing about it from the news, because it felt like hearing about any other shooting.” He remembered the first snow of his freshman year, and the way it had brought the students out together. Now they were being united “in a very different way,” he said. “I was in one dining hall, and you walk in and everyone’s giving each other hugs and pulling people a little closer.”

The streets around the engineering building were partially blocked off by police cruisers, their backs showing stuttering bars of orange-red and electric-blue light, but I was able to drive past the front of the brutalist structure, which has a student-designed stainless-steel infinity-symbol-shaped sundial sculpture out front. The building was marked off from the road by police tape and I realized with a start that it was only a block from my daughter’s pre-K, and a block from where I had lived when I first moved to Providence.

Late on Sunday night, as the snow melted, Providence police released the person of interest, citing a lack of evidence. The shooter, as of my writing this, is still on the loose. Many students have left campus.

I teach in Literary Arts—the creative-writing department—but many of my students also take Economics, and I am still waiting to learn whether anyone I have taught has been hurt. This void of knowledge is part of the unreality of my grief. Still, I am thinking about what one of the students on the green had said when I asked him why he was building a snowman. “I felt I wanted to do something productive,” he told me, his cheeks flaring red from the extreme cold. “There’s only so much of sitting and talking that can get done. I wanted to feel like I’ve done something.” ♦

Japanese people like to say that they “eat with their eyes,” relishing the colors, shapes, and textures of a dish before it ever hits the tongue. The phrase applies all the more when the dish in question isn’t meant to be eaten at all. Last year, I was one of two hundred thousand people to visit “Looks Delicious!,” an exhibition organized by the cultural center Japan House London showcasing dozens upon dozens of shokuhin sampuru—mesmerizingly lifelike handmade food replicas that appear in the windows and display cases of restaurants, kiosks, and bars across Japan. Shokuhin sampuru are a roughly ninety-million-dollar industry, and a beloved part of Japanese pop culture. A few decades ago, there was a show on Japanese television in which shokuhin sampuru artisans competed to make the most convincing replicas of dishes, a sort of inverse of “Is It Cake?”

But, according to Japan House, “Looks Delicious!” marks the first time that a cultural institution has dedicated a show exclusively to food replicas. The exhibition originated last year at London’s Japan House and became its most popular show ever—perhaps in part because shokuhin sampuru feel especially pertinent in a political-cultural environment that so often confounds the real and the fake. In September, the show travelled to the Los Angeles branch of Japan House, on Hollywood Boulevard, where it will run until the end of January. A sidewalk full of stars has got nothing, in my opinion, on a stencil used to apply dark-meat detail to the muscle near a mackerel’s spine.

Shokuhin sampuru can be wondrously intricate: iridescent slivers of shrimp; striated sirloins with fatty crusts; bouncy poached eggs on the brink of first ooze; cross-sections of cabbage with the labyrinthine swirls of an elevation map; a banana split with two scoops of chocolate ice cream, their granularity evoking just a whisper of freezer burn. So it is a bit surprising that “Looks Delicious!” begins with, of all things, a humble sack of yellow onions. Simon Wright, the director of programming at Japan House London, told me, during a tour of the gallery, that a different kind of exhibit might have begun with “a whole gantry of sushi,” but that he preferred the alliums for their exuberant plainness. “Remember those strings of plastic onions that might have hung in a restaurant in the nineteen-eighties?” he said. “These are nothing like them.”

Nor did they resemble the flimsy, skinless orbs of children’s play kitchens, daring you to bat them around like Wiffle balls. The onions sat on a ceramic plate, tumbling out of a burlap sack. Breaking protocol, I picked one up. Crafted in PVC, using a silicone mold, as most food replicas have been since the nineteen-seventies, it was offensively light. I felt almost as though I’d been pranked. I could all but hear the whisper of the onions’ peeling skin, smell the green-white flesh leaking juice under my nails.

Imitation sliced pumpkin, eggplant, and octopus.

According to Yasunobu Nose, a Japanese journalist who has written extensively about shokuhin sampuru, food replicas first appeared in Japan in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when three men started simultaneously producing them in three different cities. This coincidence, Nose explains, was a result of urbanization, which brought workers to big cities, where they began to buy more of their meals outside the home. As early as the Edo period, Japanese people “decided what to eat by looking at real food,” Nose said in a recent lecture at Japan House London. While researching shokuhin sampuru, he found a nineteenth-century genre painting depicting a street festival where merchants displayed actual dishes of sushi and tempura outside their stalls. Shokuhin sampuru were a pragmatic innovation, allowing venders to follow the same long-standing custom without wasting their actual food.

Early shokuhin sampuru were relatively rough replicas molded out of wax; some pioneering artisans were more accustomed to, say, sculpting ear canals for otologists and solar systems for science classes. Even in rudimentary form, they freed customers from having to badger employees with questions or take their chances ordering a bowl of ramen, not knowing whether it would come with two slices of pork or three. Food replicas eased embarrassment, prevented disappointment, and encouraged experimentation, just as they do today. “The Japanese customer loves to know what they’re getting,” the food writer Yukari Sakamoto told me. “When I’m meeting up with my family in Tokyo, we talk and talk and look at the plastic food displays until something jumps out at us.”

The first business dedicated to the manufacture and sale of shokuhin sampuru was founded in 1932 in Osaka by Iwasaki Takizō, one of the craft’s original three practitioners. A native of Gujō Hachiman, a town in the central prefecture of Gifu, he became enthralled by wax during his boyhood. Legend has it that he got the idea for food replicas after watching a candle melt into cold water, its drippings hardening into the shape of blooming flowers. Today, the Iwasaki Group is responsible for about seventy per cent of food replicas sold in Japan. A partner in the Japan House show, the conglomerate had provided the exhibition its “Celebration Omelette,” a reproduction of a seminal piece. Iwasaki achieved the wrinkled texture of the eggs “through repeated trial and error,” an accompanying text explains, by pouring agar jelly over a real omelette his wife had just cooked. The replica sits on a gold-rimmed plate, a glossy half-moon smeared with ketchup.

“Looks Delicious!” focusses on the period beginning in the nineteen-twenties, when Western food began to make inroads in Japan, and restaurateurs—particularly in Tokyo department stores—used replicas to communicate efficiently to prospective clients what, exactly, “spaghetti” or “ham sandwich” entailed. Later, shokuhin sampuru also came to be associated with kissaten—cozy, smoke-filled cafés featuring European décor and menu items like buttered toast and strawberry shortcake. “These food replicas have this very retro, Shōwa period, nineteen-fifties-and-sixties vibe,” Wright said. If they remained somewhat crude in this era—they couldn’t be tilted, for example, lest the wax soften and start to droop in the sun—their popularity didn’t suffer. By 1958, the Iwasaki Group was exporting a passable rib eye to the United States, to be used as a promotional item by a beer company.

Japan House is funded by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the exhibition’s organizers hit upon a clever way to emphasize the diversity of food replicas and promote tourism at the same time. An entire section is dedicated to regional cuisines—a dish for each of the country’s forty-seven prefectures. There is kiritanpo nabe from the mountains of Akita, a hot-pot dish featuring mashed rice wrapped around a cedar stick and baked, and a fish-and-fiddlehead-fern ohaw, a soup from the Ainu people, who live mainly in Hokkaido. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the mouthwatering simulacrum of sudachi-sōmen—wheat-flour noodles in chicken broth, topped with a light-green citrus fruit that grows in Tokushima.

Shokuhin sampuru are famously helpful to non-Japanese-speaking visitors to Japan. But a replica of kibinago—silver-stripe herring, which are eaten as sashimi, in proximity to the warm waters of southern Japan—served as a reminder that Japanese cuisine varies so much by region that Japanese people, too, can require visual assistance. Sakamoto, the food writer, told me that, on a recent trip to Kanazawa, she relied on a food replica to apprehend the texture and size of the roe in fugu no ko nukazuke, a local dish of puffer-fish eggs fermented in rice bran. Nose, for his part, once used shokuhin sampuru to figure out where the eastern Japanese habit of garnishing hot noodle dishes with chopped white onions gave way to the western Japanese preference for green ones. “I walked from Tokyo to Kyoto—about five hundred kilometres over twenty-six days—examining food samples at each restaurant along the way,” he recalled in his lecture. “I found that, in the famous resort area of Hakone, white and green onions coexist, so Hakone marks the boundary.”

Traditionally, shokuhin sampuru artisans specialized in Western, Chinese, or Japanese cuisine. Those divisions no longer hold, but some items are considered more difficult to render faithfully than others. At Japan House, Wright paused in front of a video detailing the creation of food replicas. On the screen, a man spray-painted stripes onto a pearlescent prawn. “You expect automated conveyor belts or robot arms or whatever, but it’s not,” Wright said. “It’s completely analog, from beginning to end.” One might assume that modern technologies are threatening shokuhin sampuru, but adepts contend that, in three dimensions, they convey nuances of proportion and texture that QR codes and Yelp reviews cannot. Craig Mod, an American writer and photographer and the author of “Kissa by Kissa,” a book about visiting coffeehouses in the Japanese countryside, likened the process of assessing shokuhin sampuru to scrolling. “You’re not looking at each dish individually, you’re assessing them collectively, at a blink,” he said. “It’s like grid view on Instagram.”

A model sushi set.

However persuasive they might be as facsimiles, shokuhin sampuru are subjective interpretations, seeking not only to replicate dishes but to intensify the feelings associated with the real thing. Nose told me, “It’s like augmented reality created by skilled artisans. I think this is the magic of replica food.” A replica of red-bean paste, for example, might be grainier than actual red-bean paste, because people tend to associate red-bean paste with graininess. A kiwi might be fuller and greener than usual, because the person who made it likes her fruit especially ripe. Liquids are among the most difficult foodstuffs to render, and leafy greens, raw meats, and emulsions are where real artistry is unleashed. One of the ultimate tests of virtuosity for a shokuhin sampuru maker is said to be whipped cream.

Kappabashi Street, in Tokyo, is lined with stores selling knives, whisks, brooms, napkins, crockery, whetstones, lanterns, banners, chef uniforms, and anything else you could conceivably need to cook, serve, and sell food, including food replicas. A few shops serve as the Madame Tussauds of shokuhin sampuru, drawing customers to gawk at avocados that stay creamy forever and frothy mugs of beer that will never spill. One day in April, when I was in Japan reporting on Uniqlo, I walked into a store with an impressive selection of fruit parfaits.

“Can I get the watermelon?” a child asked.

“How about a crab?” her mother countered.

The watermelon, too expensive, was out of the question. But certain items—a gloopy-looking rice dish, a brown beef curry with a spoon suspended in the air—bore yellow tags, indicating that they were on sale. I was intrigued by the concept of marking down items that, by definition, can never go bad. The instinct toward realism extended to how the pieces were packaged and stored: replicas of perishables were displayed in long, glass-fronted cabinets that resembled freezer cases, and even the bananas were swaddled in plastic wrap. I asked a woman sitting behind the counter how the store’s management decided what to put on sale.

“They’re old-style items,” the clerk answered. “Some of them aren’t manufactured anymore.”

Newer fake foods, meanwhile, are as contingent on trends as their edible equivalents. As I walked along Kappabashi Street, I noticed trays full of sliders and jugs of sangria, garnished with parsley. The recent vogue for verticality—towering plates of food look great on Instagram—was in ample evidence: in one shop window, I counted no fewer than fifty-seven golden, syrup-drenched faux pancakes in a stack topped with a pat of butter that more closely resembled scrambled eggs. Many of the items (a pear clock, an omurice memo holder, edamame key rings) were clearly intended as keepsakes rather than as working samples.

“Where are you from?” an employee asked an American couple, as they perused a wall full of sushi kitchen magnets.

“Los Angeles,” they answered.

“How did you hear about us?”

“YouTube!” the woman replied.

At a store on Kappabashi Street, I picked up a few editions of Replica Foods! magazine, a publication that celebrates Iwasaki employees’ entries in a “replica-foods art contest.” Let loose with their heat guns and paintbrushes, the workers were taking shokuhin sampuru into fresh territory, beyond any previously charted prefecture or national cuisine. Call it food-replica Surrealism: lasagna high heels, a T. rex with potato chips for bones, a “hand-formed hamburg steak in the shape of a fist.” One shokuhin sampuru tableau, complete with grubby potholder, was entitled “Drinking alone eating a whole grilled onion as a snack.” I started to wonder whether restaurateurs ever felt pressure to make foods look like their replicas instead of the other way around.

I had the weekend free, so I decided to take a bullet train to Nagoya and then a bus to Gujō Hachiman, the birthplace of Iwasaki Takizō. The town, which has become a mecca for shokuhin sampuru, is also famous for its sixteenth-century mountainside castle. (Rebuilt in 1933, it is something of a replica itself.) It was late cherry-blossom season, and the town was lovely, with a central thoroughfare and small bridges spanning a burbling bend of the Yoshida River. I was just in time to make it to the day’s final replica-making workshop at Sample Village Iwasaki, a sort of immersive corporate visitor center.

I knew I was in the right place as soon as I arrived at a white building where a bust of Iwasaki Takizō presided over a courtyard. A model fish that must have been twelve feet long hung over the entryway. Inside, in a visitor center, food replicas were everywhere. Near the cash register was a fake, hollow pineapple serving as a vase, filled with artificial flowers meant to look as though they were carved out of milk and white chocolate—an Inedible Arrangement. On a table, in metal trays, was an entire fake-food buffet. For two thousand yen, you could take a plastic container and, using tongs, stuff it with your choice of fried chicken, pieces of cauliflower, macarons, razor clams. Shokuhin sampuru is a century-old craft, but this faux feast felt strangely apt in a contemporary culinary-dietary culture that tries to decouple food from taste, encouraging eating with your eyes as a form of abstinence, rather than as a prelude to a meal.

An employee gave me a green cotton apron. I had chosen the sushi package, and we were going to make a two-piece set of maguro (tuna) and ikura (salmon roe). Two silicone molds awaited us on a stainless-steel work surface. The middle of the table was cut out, like a touch tank at an aquarium, and filled vats of colorful liquid, sitting in several inches of water.

“It’s paraffin wax,” the employee said.

She gave me a ladle and indicated that I should dip it into one of the vats. It filled with bright-orange liquid wax, for the ikura, which I poured into an oval-shaped mold. Then I did the maguro. The wax was so hot that my glasses were fogging up. The employee waved a paddle-shaped fan over the concoction, to make it dry more quickly. After a few minutes, she gave me permission to pop the fish pieces out of the molds. Thrillingly, the maguro came out veiny, just like real maguro. I moved on to the ginger-making station, which involved pouring flesh-colored wax into a tub of cool water, where it coagulated in thin sheets. I picked them off the water’s surface and squinched them into little light-pink bouquets.

Now it was time to assemble the sushi. I picked at the edges of the roe, removing a few stray pieces—highly satisfying, like shaving the lint off a sweater. Then I smooshed the roe onto a bed of rice and wrapped the bundle with a strip of nori. The employee handed me a soldering iron. It smoked and hissed as I pressed the tip to the bundle, binding seaweed to rice. “The preparation of a wax sandwich is not at all unlike the preparation of a real one,” Wim Wenders intones in his 1985 documentary “Tokyo-Ga,” which includes a long sequence about the production of shokuhin sampuru. He was right. We were cooking. A more elaborate piece would require hours of painstaking painting, but, for a beginner, all that was left to do was to spray the pieces of sushi with a varnish, rendering them as shiny as if they’d been plucked right out of the sea.

After the session, I got to talking—via Google Translate—with Yukiko Takada, an Iwasaki employee who was standing near a display case filled with fish of various colors and sizes. After beginning her professional life as a bank clerk, she’d been working as a shokuhin sampuru maker for about ten years. “Coloring is the hardest part, but I’m working on it every day,” she told me. She gestured at a speckled trout in the case. “Maybe ten more years,” she said, and she would be allowed to paint the spots on its belly.

I went back to the register and paid for a fruit-parfait kit. I couldn’t leave without trying my hand at whipped cream. ♦

Our cartoon caption was lost in a blizzard! Solve the clues to help us find it. Each answer is seven letters long and curls around one of the numbered spaces in the grid, as shown below:

The numbered space will always contain either the first letter or the last letter of an answer. The remaining letters will curl either clockwise or counterclockwise, exiting or entering the central hexagon through the gap in the bolded border. Each answer has four possible arrangements, as shown with the answer CURLING below:

We’ve placed one answer in the grid to get you started. As an additional solving aid, the top and bottom rows of the grid will contain the exact same sequence of letters. When you’ve completed the grid, the letters in the numbered spaces will spell out the missing caption.

Illustrations by Allan Sanders

Cartoon by Asher Perlman

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