The Ramen King and I Read online

  It was such a ridiculous notion that I promptly forgot about it.

  The show’s closing credits were still flashing on the screen when Harue felt something unusual under the kotatsu.

  “What’s this?” she asked, holding it in the air.

  It was a used condom. The truth involved a woman I had met at a party and had brought home the previous evening. I made up a story about how I had been “practicing” by myself, and Harue pretended to believe it. Momofuku, I don’t know if you can help me, because this was just the beginning. I’ll write more tomorrow.

  Sincerely,

  Andy

  I reached first for the Hamako chef ’s tai, and as it rolled around in my mouth, it made me recall the first book I had ever read in Japanese.

  When I was a student at International Christian University, I lived alone in a tiny Tokyo apartment and absorbed ten new kanji characters every night, writing them over and over until I had memorized their meanings, stroke orders, and multiple pronunciations. In my pocket I always carried a Canon Wordtank—a portable electronic kanji dictionary—so I could look up unfamiliar symbols on trains, billboards, and menus. I heard that a good way to learn Japanese was to watch TV, but as a student I couldn’t afford a TV, so instead I bought a radio with a TV-band tuner that played the sound of TV shows. On Tuesday nights I would sit by the radio listening to dubbed episodes of Star Trek, and for a long time I was at a loss to explain the presence of a character named Mr. Kato, whom I didn’t remember from the American version of the show. I finally figured out that he was Mr. Sulu, the USS Enterprise’s helmsman (played by the Japanese American actor George Takei), and that the dubbers had simply given him a real Japanese name. Mr. Spock was still Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk was Captain Kirk, but for some reason Mr. Scott had been renamed Mr. Charlie. I never found out why.

  It took about six months to master enough kanji characters—around two thousand—to start reading newspapers. When I felt ready to take on something longer, I went to the Yaesu Book Center, near Tokyo Station, and bought Kanda Tsuruhachi Sushi Stories. The cover showed four pieces of nigiri on a wood counter, and it caught my eye. A memoir penned by Yukio Moro-oka (a famous sushi chef), the book contains the lessons Moro-oka learned from his mentors—not only his father but also several other chefs under whom he apprenticed. For instance, his elders taught Moro-oka that sushi should never be eaten with chopsticks. “Sushi is made with hands, so it should be eaten with hands,” Moro-oka’s father used to say. In an exhaustive chapter titled “The Ideal Size and Shape of Nigiri,” Moro-oka explains that fish should be sliced so that, when viewed from the side, the cut resembles an unfurled paper fan. His take on size is more complex. If a customer cannot eat a piece of sushi in one bite, it’s largely the chef’s fault for not adjusting the dimensions to suit the patron’s mouth. Still, there are limits. A chef should never make a piece so big or small that he upsets the delicate balance between the fish and the rice. Moro-oka says that the only information he cannot reveal in the book is the ratio of salt to vinegar in his rice marinade, because his father once told him that the secret ratio was what made his sushi more than just rice and fish. So, to summarize what takes Moro-oka more than three hundred pages to explain, the rice is important and the fish is important, but the most important thing is the relationship between the rice and the fish. I got through the book in three months with the help of the Canon Wordtank. But I don’t think I ever really understood what Moro-oka was talking about until the tai began melding with the rice over my tongue at Hamako.

  Even then, it was just an inkling. I told the sushi chef:

  “I like your fish. I like your rice. But what I love is that I can taste the relationship between your fish and your rice.”

  The chef stopped what he was doing. Then he put down his knife and stared at me. He introduced himself.

  “My name is Tetsuo,” he said. Motioning to the waitress, he added, “This is my wife, Junko.”

  Junko smiled warmly now. “Nice to meet you.”

  When I told them my name, Tetsuo shared that he and Junko were originally from Kobe, and that they had opened Hamako in 1984.

  “Those were the days,” he lamented. “Japanese businessmen on expense accounts were always stopping by. A business card was all the sign we needed.”

  “Where did you learn Japanese?” Junko asked.

  I told her about studying at International Christian University, and how, after business school, I worked as a management consultant for six months in Fukuoka Prefecture, on the southern island of Kyushu.

  Tetsuo screamed again, but this time it was at Junko.

  “Toroku shite ii yo!”

  I wondered if I had misunderstood. Because the meaning of what I thought I heard was, “Go ahead and register him!”

  I had not misunderstood, because right after that, Junko walked over to the telephone and pulled out a small notebook. She opened the book, waving a ballpoint pen in the air.

  “What did you say your name was?” she asked.

  I repeated it.

  “Hmm,” Junko said. “We already have a regular customer named Andy.”

  She thought for a moment.

  “I know. We’ll give you a nickname. We’ll call you Hakata Andy.”

  Hakata is the city in Fukuoka Prefecture where I worked as a management consultant.

  Junko closed the notebook and clasped her hands together.

  “Hakata Andy,” she said, “now you can make a reservation.”

  When I got home I logged on to Chowhound and wrote about the visit to Hamako. I noted agreement with the previous entry about the monkfish liver—not pasty like at other places—and heaped praise on a piece of mirugai that was still squirming as it slid down my throat. I bragged about getting the nickname and being able to make reservations.

  The subtext of my post was, “I am totally in with Tetsuo and Junko.”

  Before my second visit, I called ahead and said it was Hakata Andy. I made a reservation at the counter, and when I arrived, table-bound patrons stared enviously as Junko ushered me toward Tetsuo’s station.

  “Hakata Andy!” he said.

  I ordered omakase, even though I didn’t have a picture of my five starving children. Over the course of an hour, Tetsuo threw sixteen pieces of sushi—including abalone, oyster, and squid with shiso leaf—onto the wood tray in front of me.

  In Shota’s Sushi, when a contestant in the All-Tokyo Rookie Sushi Chef Competition serves a truly great piece of nigiri, the next few frames in the comic depict the judges in various states of sushi bliss. Their eyes bulge and their mouths pucker. They look possessed. Then they’re shown hovering over an ocean, as if the sushi has transported them there. Images of shrimps, lobsters, fish, or whatever else they’ve just eaten spin around their heads. While savoring a particularly fine piece of uni, one the comic’s judges finds himself hurtling through outer space. “It’s like I’m flying in a universe of amazing sea urchin flavor!” he exclaims.

  It wasn’t quite like that at Hamako, and shortly before I asked for the check, I found out one reason why.

  “Hakata Andy,” Tetsuo said, “I am about to give you the second-best piece of fatty tuna you will eat in your life.”

  With that, he reached his pudgy hand over the glass case and dropped a soft mound of pinkish flesh onto my tray. I pondered the tuna, chopsticks in hand, for some time before gathering enough courage to ask the obvious question.

  “How come not first best?”

  Tetsuo did not look up from his work.

  “You’re not ready yet,” he said.

  There are many people who would refuse to patronize a restaurant in which they’re expected to earn the chef’s highest-quality cuisine. What I learned on my first night at the Hamako counter was that I was not one of them. Rather, I committed to becoming Tetsuo’s sushi disciple. I submitted to his will, devoting months to learning his rules. Still I couldn’t help but wonder: What was it about me that made me want to be
worthy of first-best fatty tuna?

  The biggest challenge early on was appreciating the holy status of the counter. One day a former business school classmate called to say that he was in town from Tokyo and wanted to get together for dinner. He had to wake up early the next morning to catch a bus to Yosemite National Park, so I called Hamako and asked for a reservation at six thirty—right when the restaurant opened.

  “I guess you’ll be sitting at a table, then,” Junko said.

  “Can’t we sit at the counter?”

  “No. The sushi counter opens at seven o’clock.”

  It wasn’t clear what she and Tetsuo had to do to “open” the sushi counter. I thought about it and wondered if the policy was Tetsuo’s way of showing that he valued himself. It was as if he were telling customers, “If you want to spend time with me, make it prime time. Don’t be scheduling me in.”

  There were rules about the sushi, of course. No “funky” rolls. Nothing spicy. Customers were expected to place orders up front—no follow-on requests. On several occasions, I heard patrons cheerily ask, “What’s fresh tonight?” and then watched as they were ushered out of the restaurant after a scolding from Tetsuo. Junko once revealed to me that she arranged the soy sauce dishes at every place setting so that Tetsuo could see them from his station. When he spotted customers dragging his art through a wasabi mud bath, he cut them off from premium fish.

  The most important thing I learned, though, was that sitting at the Hamako counter entailed certain responsibilities, and that chief among them was massaging Tetsuo’s easily bruised ego. Often he would complain about a sushi bar around the corner that was regularly packed with young, beautiful people. “How can that be?” he would ask. “Their sushi chefs aren’t Japanese, and they serve ridiculous rolls stuffed with multiple kinds of fish.” Deep down he must have known that most Americans love ridiculous rolls stuffed with multiple kinds of fish and don’t care about the nationality of their sushi chefs. But I guess he had a hard time accepting that, because he would always follow up with a self-deprecating comment about how his sushi was not what it used to be.

  “My hands are getting weak,” he would say. “I guess I should retire.”

  I always told him that his sushi was as great as ever, which it was.

  There’s one date at Hamako I remember.

  The woman was Japanese, and she was a fit model for an international clothing chain. We were sitting at the Hamako counter when Tetsuo began doing his pity-party routine about the sushi bar around the corner. This time, when he got to the part about how his hands were getting weak and how he should retire, he went one step further.

  “Junko and I have bought a home near Lake Tahoe,” he said. “We’re going to close Hamako in December and retire there.”

  I almost spit out a hand roll. He was speaking in Japanese, so I double-checked that I had heard him correctly.

  “Did he just say that he’s going to close the restaurant in December?” I asked my date. It was just four months away.

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “That’s what he said.”

  That’s why I remember her, because she confirmed it.

  I looked up at Tetsuo.

  “You’re going to close Hamako?”

  “In December,” he repeated.

  Part of me was sad. But another part was happy, because Tetsuo had apparently shared the news with me before telling anyone else. Was it a sign that he was beginning to see me as worthy of first-best fatty tuna? When I got home, I wrote another post on Chowhound. The title was “Hamako Closing?”

  The next night, my cell phone rang. It was Junko, and she sounded upset.

  “Hakata Andy, did you write something about us on the Internet?”

  I wondered how she had gotten my phone number, but then I remembered her asking for it during the registration process. I also wondered how she knew about the post, given that I had written it under a pseudonym. There was no use denying it.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Our phone has been ringing off the hook. People want reservations.”

  At any other restaurant, it would not have been a problem. Junko assured me that it was a problem at Hamako.

  “The calls are disrupting Tetsuo’s sushi making,” she said. “He’s angry, and he wants you to erase what you wrote from the Internet.”

  “Chowhound doesn’t let you erase a post from their site,” I said.

  It was the truth.

  “I don’t know what a post is,” Junko replied, “and I don’t know what a site is, but can you just erase it?”

  “I can’t. It’s impossible.”

  Junko made a clicking noise with her tongue. “Then you’ll have to apologize to Tetsuo.”

  I felt shame for telling the world that I was close to them. (Even though I posted using a pseudonym, people on Chowhound knew me from the annual Chowhound picnic in Golden Gate Park.) But I was unable to admit that to myself, let alone to Junko.

  “Why should I apologize? I mean, Tetsuo never said the information was top secret.”

  Junko paused, and then she said the thing that, when I think about it, sometimes makes me cry.

  “Hakata Andy, maybe you shouldn’t come back.”

  I told myself that I would just go to other sushi restaurants, and for a long time I wandered from sushi bar to sushi bar. I numbed out on sake bombs and inside-out caterpillar rolls. I sat at the kinds of sushi counters where multiple non-Japanese sushi chefs work in assembly lines, and frat-boy customers toast them with an endless supply of drinks.

  Dear Momofuku,

  Harue visited me in Philadelphia the next fall. I showed her around the University of Pennsylvania, and she swooned over the Ivy League-ness of the place. She was excited to see firsthand the Gothic architecture and preppy outfits she knew from Japanese fashion magazines. I promised to remain faithful when she went back to Japan, but I broke the promise several weeks later.

  A classmate named Nancy invited me to spend New Year’s Eve with her and a group of her friends in Manhattan, and I met them for dinner at a Mexican restaurant in the East Village. It wasn’t so much her friend Kim’s long blond hair or athletic figure that I found irresistible, but the way that she bit her lower lip while talking to me. She said she was a staff writer for an entertainment magazine, and on the side she was composing lyrics to a musical. I asked why she wasn’t eating anything, and Kim explained that she was planning to run the five-kilometer race in Central Park at midnight. My belly was full of beer and beans and it had been more than ten years since my days as a middling member of my high school’s cross-country team, but I wanted so much to be near her that I proposed to the group that we all run the race. It was a bitterly cold night, but all seven of them were up for it. Kim went home to change into her running outfit while I borrowed sneakers and leggings from another of Nancy’s friends. As we gathered again at the starting line, I recalled my high school coach’s moti vational advice, which was to imagine that the greatest thing in life was waiting for you at the finish line. In eleventh grade, I recorded my personal best for five kilometers while imagining a bowl of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese (with canned Cheez Whiz, not powdered) at the finish line, but during the New Year’s Eve race, right from when the starting gun sounded, I imagined Kim there.

  Kim ran in the park every day, but I somehow managed to keep her in my sights. I pursued her down the East Side, and on the last turn, the one near Tavern on the Green, I pulled even. She saw me and smiled, biting her lower lip again. We crossed the finish line together, and a moment later I kissed her. In the future I imagined this time, Kim would write articles and musicals, and I would wear a suit and take a high-paying position in finance. We would run together in the park and have athletic children.

  “You move fast,” she said.

  Momofuku, as I write these letters to you, I am remembering more details. For instance, I remember that when Kim visited me on the weekends in Philadelphia, I would turn off the ringer on my phone so it w
ent straight to voice mail in case Harue called from Tokyo. I remember e-mailing Harue as if nothing had changed. Once, when I was staying at Kim’s apartment in New York, we went running together in Central Park.

  “What’s your favorite book?” Kim asked along the way. Her blond hair was tied back in a ponytail to keep it from flying in her face.

  The best book I had ever read was a Japanese comic book called Cooking Papa. Actually, it’s a series of comic books (later adapted as an animated TV show) about a corporate executive who has to hide the fact that he’s a better cook than his wife. Kim was a professional writer, so I felt that my favorite book should not be a comic book.

  “Don Quixote,” I said instead. It was my favorite “book” book.

  “What do you like about it?” she asked.

  “Well, it’s funny, first of all . . .” I was running, so I had to pause every once in a while to catch my breath. “. . . and there’s a lot of, you know, meta-stuff . . . like characters in the second part of the book . . . who know about Don Quixote from . . . having read the first part. . . . What’s your favorite book?”