The Ramen King and I Read online

  I don’t know what else to do, so I am following his instructions.

  So what I remember is that I was twenty-five years old and that I was living with my girlfriend in a garden apartment on a pretty street in Brooklyn. Her name was Maureen. I don’t remember being unhappy at the time, though I don’t remember being happy either. You would think I would remember more details, given that we lived together for two years, yet the sum total of my memories of those years comprises around five minutes. I remember a scene in which Maureen and I are cooking something in our kitchen—a soup maybe—from a recipe in a Gilroy Garlic Festival cookbook. There was a well-attended party we hosted. Once, we went for a hike in the woods with our friend Mike, who along the way began identifying trees just by smelling them. “Cedar,” he said, sniffing. “Hemlock.” I remember Maureen being impressed by this, and that I got jealous.

  Maureen was five foot two and had a bob of blond hair, and I met her after college, when we both signed on for the Long Island Youth Orchestra’s summer tour of Asia. I remember that when the group arrived in China, the banner that greeted us said, “wELCOME WRONG ISLAND YOUTH ORCHESTRA!” The first time I kissed her, in a hotel in Malaysia, I imagined a future together in which we would get married and have beautiful, musical children. After that summer, I worked as a computer programmer in Chicago, and Maureen would tease me about the large number of condoms I always purchased in anticipation of her visits. When she was hired by an English-language magazine in Tokyo, I quit my job and enrolled in the intensive course at International Christian University, a popular place for foreigners studying Japanese. I did this partly to pursue my interest in the language (which I had taken briefly in college ), but mainly to be with Maureen.

  We didn’t live together in Tokyo, but one night, when I was staying at her apartment, I peeked at her diary and discovered that she had slept with her ex-boyfriend. Technically, it had happened during one of our many breakups. I remember feeling that I should not be jealous or angry because during a breakup people can do whatever they want. When we returned from Japan, we moved in together in Brooklyn.

  I just called Matt and told him that writing this letter is too painful and that I don’t want to do it. He said it’s natural to feel that way, and to keep jotting down what I remember. OK.

  After six months of living together, I stopped having sex with Maureen. I’m not talking about a drop in frequency or the occasional lack of interest that my friends who were in couples experienced. I mean stopped, as in altogether. The disappearance of my desire was especially puzzling given how attracted I had been to Maureen previously. I began making up lies about being tired or sick. The truth was that, more and more, whenever Maureen touched me, even if it was just on my arm or my neck, I would experience a physical sensation that I can only describe as repulsion. It was as if her fingers suddenly began emitting a tiny electric shock from which my body needed to protect itself. Confused and frustrated by my disinterest, Maureen asked what was wrong. I didn’t know what to tell her because I didn’t understand it myself. I remember that she developed many theories. “Are you just not interested in sex?” she would ask. “Are you gay?”

  The first time it happened I was visiting my parents.

  They still live on Long Island, in the house I grew up in. I spent the afternoon with them, and then I heard about a party in a nearby town. I drove over, and when I saw the woman hosting the party, do you know what I wanted to do? I remember this part very well, Momofuku. I wanted to kiss her. My desire to kiss her was so strong that, as it swept over me, I didn’t think about Maureen or how she had slept with her ex-boyfriend or anything else in the world. There were a dozen or so people at the party, most of them playing poker and drinking whiskey. In the middle of the poker game, the host excused herself to go to the bathroom, and a few minutes later I followed. When she opened the bathroom door, I walked up and kissed her. Just like that. She kissed me back, and together we drifted into the bathroom and closed the door. We fell to the tiled floor and began taking off each other’s clothes. I didn’t have a condom, so we put our clothes back on, walked past the people playing cards, and got into my car. We drove to a 7-Eleven, where we bought a package of Trojans. On the way back to her apartment I couldn’t wait, so I parked the car near a pond where my ninth-grade science class once took a field trip to study erosion.

  The host and I had sex on the grass in the dark. When we got back to her apartment, everyone was gone, so we had sex in her shower, and again on her bed. I remember that, on the drive home to Brooklyn, I did my best to wipe the entire incident from my consciousness. I was not, I believed, a man who could cheat on his girlfriend. But I returned to Long Island under the pretense of visiting my parents several times. After each episode there was a sickening feeling in my stomach, and I swore to myself that I would never see the woman again. Of course, I always broke the promise. Over time, I convinced myself that Maureen was simply the wrong woman, and that if only I could meet the right one, I wouldn’t do what I did.

  The next thing I remember was looking for an excuse to break up with Maureen, and applying to several out-of-state MBA programs.

  Sincerely,

  Andy

  One sign that you are suffering from what Momofuku Ando called the Fundamental Misunderstanding of Humanity is that you betray people you love. A related symptom is that it’s hard to remember details of your past. You can remember some details, but the ones you think you would remember you forget, and the ones you think you would forget you remember. You find it especially difficult to describe people who have played an important role in your life. You want to describe them, but it’s difficult. They quickly turn into ghosts.

  You feel that it shouldn’t be this way, but it is this way.

  Why did I go to meet the inventor of instant ramen?

  While considering Gary’s question, I naturally thought about the letters. Of course, they were only part of the story. There was another part, a series of adventures that began, of all places, in a sushi bar.

  The letters cover a period that began roughly after I graduated from college and ended when I was thirty-eight years old. I found out about the sushi bar toward the end of that span, just a few years before Gary posed his question. I should do a better job of explaining how the letters and the events that began in the sushi bar came together. The weird thing is that, as I try to recall what happened in the sushi bar, I can’t remember any of the women. Often I was there on dates, but I remember only me, the sushi chef, and his wife. Another consequence, I am certain, of the Fundamental Misunderstanding of Humanity.

  I first learned about the sushi bar two years after moving to San Francisco. The turn-of-the-century dot-com boom had gone bust, and I was working as a staff writer at a nationally published business magazine. One day, I happened to read a positive write-up about the sushi bar’s monkfish liver on the restaurant-review Web site Chowhound. I called for a reservation.

  A woman answered the phone. “Hai. Hamako desu.”

  I didn’t speak Japanese right off the bat.

  “Hello. Do you have a table for seven o’clock?”

  “Sorry,” the woman grumbled. “We don’t take reservations.”

  I got in my car and drove over. There was no sign in front, making the restaurant difficult to locate. The only clue to its existence was a row of tall, green sake bottles in the front window. That, and a business card wedged into the doorframe that said HAMAKO in Japanese. Entering, I was greeted by a middle-aged Asian woman whose silver-streaked hair had been tied back in a complicated bun. I recognized her voice from the phone, and she seemed annoyed.

  “Can I help you?”

  I looked around. Just six tables and a sushi counter. No other customers.

  “May I sit at the counter?” I asked.

  “No,” the woman said. “You need a reservation to sit at the counter.”

  The only other person in the sushi bar was the sushi chef. Standing silently at his station, he remi
nded me a lot of Shota’s master.

  Shota is the fifteen-year-old main character in a Japanese comic book series called Shota’s Sushi. In Book One, his father’s sushi bar comes under attack by an evil sushi chain. Shota learns how to make sushi to help out, but as a novice he can only do so much. A visiting sushi master recognizes Shota’s prodigious talent, however, and takes the boy on as an apprentice. Shota hones his skills, first as an entry-level helper in the master’s Tokyo sushi bar, and then as a contestant in the All-Tokyo Rookie Sushi Chef Competition. There are fourteen books in the original series, and eight more in a sequel series (in which Shota competes in the All-Japan Rookie Sushi Chef Competition). Shota’s dream is to become a full-fledged sushi chef so he can return home and save his father from the evil chain.

  I had been reading Shota’s Sushi in the months before my first visit to the sushi bar, so I guess that’s why I made the connection. Like Shota’s master, the sushi chef in front of me was stocky with short gray hair, and his wrist muscles bulged out, presumably from making so much sushi. He seemed upset about something, and I had the feeling that, like many of the sushi chefs in the comic book, he was often upset about something. A clean white apron hung from his waist and a blue bandanna circumscribed his head.

  Still pondering the catch-22 around the restaurant’s reservation policy, I was directed by the woman to a two-top.

  “Would you like a beer?” she asked. “We have Sapporo and Asahi.”

  I ordered a Sapporo. Then the chef screamed at me.

  “Mr. Customer! Which sushi bars have you been to in San Francisco?”

  I recognized “Mr. Customer” as a direct translation of okyakusan, the Japanese word for addressing patrons. But the way he asked the question made me feel as if I were on a first date and had just been asked to list my previous sexual partners.

  I decided to be up front with him.

  “I like Saji and Okina,” I said. “Every once in a while, for lunch, I go to Tenzan.”

  The chef shook his head disapprovingly.

  “I play golf with Shiba,” he said, referring to Tenzan’s head chef. “Next time you eat there, tell him that my sushi is better than his. Don’t worry, he knows it’s true.”

  Zen used to advise me on how to behave at traditional sushi bars. I should say more about Zen, but for now I’ll just say that Zen is his real name, short for Zentaro, and that he once told me that when ordering omakase—leaving the selection up to the chef—you should carry a picture of what he called “your five starving children.” Near the end of the meal, Zen instructed, you should reach for your wallet and let the picture drop out, causing the chef to take pity on you when he tabulates the bill. Zen also shared with me his foolproof method for starting a relationship with a traditional sushi chef. “Ask about the guy’s knife,” Zen had said. “Specifically, ask how many times a day he sharpens it.”

  I asked the chef standing behind the counter, “Is your knife from Japan?”

  The chef lifted his knife. The blade was facing in my direction, but he didn’t say anything. I was getting nowhere with him, so I switched to Japanese.

  “Ichinichi daitai nankai toide irun desu ka?”

  Roughly how many times a day do you sharpen it?

  The waitress was in the middle of pulling a tall bottle of Sapporo Black Label from a refrigerator next to the counter when she turned around and answered my question before the chef could.

  “Actually, that’s just his demo knife,” she said in Japanese. “His real knife is at home, and it’s huge.” She held her hands in the air, about sixteen inches apart. “Like a sword.”

  She brought the beer and a glass to my table, and took my sushi order. The hamachi in the glass case looked particularly good. I also ordered saba, tai, mirugai, hirame, maguro, negi-toro maki, and, of course, ankimo—the monkfish liver. As the woman relayed my requests to the chef, I looked around the restaurant. A decorative white sake barrel rested on a tree stump in the center of the space, and what little there was of a kitchen—just a sink and a single gas burner—was in plain view behind the counter. Crayoned illustrations of the chef and the waitress adorned the walls, along with photographs of famous people dining at Hamako. In one of them, a younger version of the chef stood proudly next to the baseball star Ichiro Suzuki. I recognized several classical musicians, including the violinist Isaac Stern, the flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal, and San Francisco Symphony conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. One photo showed Yo-Yo Ma playing cello—in the restaurant.

  Twenty minutes later, the chef lifted a plate of sushi from his work area and set it down atop the refrigerated glass case in front of him. The woman picked up the tray and carried it to my table, where she recited the pedigree of each piece.

  “Tai from New Zealand,” she said. “Hamachi from Japan.” And so on.

  Then the chef screamed at me again.

  “Mr. Customer, you will not find better sushi than this in the entire United States!”

  With that, the chef burst out laughing. He appeared to be imagining that I had actually set out on an epic quest to find better sushi than his in the United States, and that I would one day return to concede defeat.

  Dear Momofuku,

  In my first year at the Wharton School, the thing my classmates talked about most was how they dreamed of landing summer jobs with investment banks. Investment banks offered the highest summer salaries and bonuses; you could pay off all your student loans if you got an internship. I didn’t know what anyone did at an investment bank, but because all of my classmates dreamed of working at one, I felt that I should dream about that, too. My grades were good enough to get interviews with several of them. The interviewers always asked, “What are you passionate about?” and I would say, “I’m passionate about trading stocks,” or “I’m passionate about doing mergers and acquisitions.” They must have seen through me because none of the banks made me an offer. At the last minute, a foundation specializing in overseas internships for Americans helped me get a position in the Tokyo office of an American computer company.

  My job there was to find Japanese software to bundle with the company’s hardware, so I was often on the phone negotiating. But even when I was on the phone, I would grab peeks at one of the marketing managers. She was petite, but her cheeks were disproportionately puffy, which I found attractive. Her legs were stunning. One morning we were standing together in front of the coffee vending machine, so I introduced myself.

  “I’m Andy.”

  “I’m Harue.”

  That was all, but something in her voice, some overtone maybe, wrapped around me like a blanket.

  I don’t remember how I learned that Harue loved lychees, but I learned, so I started buying them at a fruit stand. Her cubicle shared a partition with my boss’s; while talking to my boss, I would secretly leave lychees on top of the partition. I asked her out for dinner, and that night, when the dessert came, I learned that she judged the quality of a crème brûlée by how quickly it made her cry. Our first kiss happened the afternoon we went to see the Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven. We stopped off on the way at Hope-ken, a ramen restaurant famous for the tubs of garlic that customers were supposed to spoon over their noodles, and I went for the kiss in the theater, right after the lights dimmed for the opening credits. “Ooo, garlicky,” Harue said, and as she laughed, I imagined a future in which we would live in Japan and eat great Japanese food. We would have beautiful mixed-race children.

  Harue and I often bought bento-box lunches and ate them together in the courtyard of the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium, which was right next to our office. One day while eating there, I called her Pumpkin, and Harue responded by calling me Dark Cherry, as if those had always been our pet nicknames. She loved dragonflies but was scared of butterflies. At night we would cook together in my tiny apartment and eat dinner on my kotatsu, a coffee table with a heater underneath. We were both fans of Ryori no Tetsujin, the cooking-show-meets-gladiator-competition that I had been calling “Che
fs of Steel.” (It would later be released in the United States as Iron Chef.)

  The night after the second time it happened, Momofuku, Harue came over and prepared soboro gohan—sweetened ground beef over rice. The rice was from her parents’ farm in Iwate Prefecture; it was so fresh that, when steamed, it smelled like a flower. While savoring Harue’s soboro gohan, we watched a challenger chef named Koji “Mad” Kobayashi take on Iron Chef Chinese Kenichi Chen in a battle over potatoes. The announcer explained that Kobayashi had gotten his “Mad” nickname because he had apprenticed for years in Italy but couldn’t find an Italian restaurant in Tokyo that met his standards. Rather than cook in a subpar kitchen, he had opted to work as a truck driver. A video introduction showed Kobayashi scowling in the driver’s seat of an eighteen-wheeler, angry about the state of Italian cooking in Japan.

  Harue and I laughed and laughed as Kobayashi handily defeated Chen. Then she told me there was another TV show I might like.

  “It’s called Go Forth! Air Wave Youth,” she said.

  In the episode that night, the female host screamed, “I wanna take ceramic dishes from the Picasso exhibit and spin them on a pole like at the circus!” Peppy and perpetually giggling, the female host first practiced outside a train station with ordinary dishes—which promptly fell to the ground and shattered. “OK, I’m ready!” she cried, thrusting her fist in the air. Then she traveled to a small museum that happened to be exhibiting a collection of Picasso’s pottery. A security guard listened to her request and relayed it to his boss, but it was no surprise when, after a commercial, he returned to inform the host that his boss had said no. Yet watching the female host fail, I noticed something that did surprise me: She seemed to be having a great time! She made me wonder if voicing desires and acting on them—even if you failed—might be a great way to enjoy life.