The Ramen King and I

by Andy Raskin

  I turned to look. She wore a blue sweater and jeans, and her body reminded me of Kyoko’s in Ramen Discovery Legend. She was standing in front of a shelf labeled CALIFORNIA WINES. I didn’t have to think about what to say. I spoke in English because it would be less threatening. Tokyo is full of Japanese-speaking foreigners who approach beautiful women, and I didn’t want her to think that I was one of them, I guess because I was.

  “Do you like California wines?”

  She seemed surprised, but not uninterested.

  “Are you Americans?” she asked.

  Her English was good, not perfect.

  “I’m from California.”

  Her eyes lit up.

  “Do you recommend?”

  I recognized one of the labels from a winery I had visited in Napa Valley, and when I recommended it, she smiled and I asked her name. She told me it was Masako. She also told me that she had just been divorced, and that her married name had been Ando. It’s a common last name, but it was still quite a coincidence. I asked for her phone number and if she wanted to have dinner with me.

  With Yamazaki everything was always difficult, but with the second Masako Ando it was not.

  I didn’t have to think at all. I just knew what to do. I knew that I should wait a few hours before calling her. I knew that I should wear my black shirt. I knew that I should take her out to dinner at Kitchen Five, which I feel guilty about now because it had been a special place for Harue and me. The owner was a middle-aged woman who closed the restaurant every six months and traveled somewhere in the world, usually in the Mediterranean, where she would stay with a family or cook at a restaurant. After mastering regional dishes, she would return to Tokyo and add them to her menu at Kitchen Five. Harue and I used to linger after dessert, browsing photo albums from the owner’s culinary excursions.

  The Kitchen Five owner always prepared all of her dishes in large serving trays, which she displayed at the counter as if she were hosting a potluck. Masako and I chose the lasagna, a lamb stew, and a stuffed artichoke. Over the course of the meal, I learned that Masako worked for a Japanese airline, but she made it clear that she was a ground-based agent, not a flight attendant. There was something in the way she said this that conveyed an image of herself as a runner-up. She was thirty-five and had grown up in Sapporo. Foreign men frequently asked her out.

  “Do you think it’s my breasts?” she asked, matter-of-factly.

  The bill came to nearly $150. I didn’t think about the money at all. Masako said she wanted to take me to her favorite bar, so after I paid the check at Kitchen Five, she hailed a taxi. She directed the driver, and when he stopped we were in an alley in a quiet residential neighborhood. I didn’t see any stores, or, for that matter, bars.

  The taxi door flew open on its own, which surprised me because I hadn’t been in Japan for a while, and I had forgotten how taxi drivers always open the passenger’s door with a mechanical remote control. Outside the cab, Masako began walking toward what looked like someone’s home. When we got closer to the building, I saw a small sign above what might once have been a garage.

  The sign said SOUL STATION in katakana.

  I followed Masako Ando inside. Soul Station was a bar counter, a sofa, and a few chairs. The owner, a short forty-year-old with a shaved scalp, manned the bar. Behind him, three long shelves showed off his LP collection—all soul and rhythm and blues. He must have had two thousand records. We sat on stools at the counter, and Masako ordered a mojito, which she said was just becoming popular in Tokyo. I ordered one, too.

  While mixing the drinks, the owner asked what kind of music I liked. I told him that I played the trombone, and he named some famous trombone players, mostly to show me that he knew them. J. J. Johnson, Kai Winding, Curtis Fuller.

  “You like Fred Wesley?” he asked.

  I told him that, yes, I liked Fred Wesley, and I tried not to think about the trombone striptease. The bartender served the mojitos in tall, thin glasses.

  “Kampai,” I said, lifting my glass.

  “Kampai!” Masako echoed. Then she asked a question. “Ne . . . nan de Ando Momofuku ni aitai no?”

  I had told Masako over dinner that I wanted to meet Ando, and now she was asking why. Zen had asked the same question. When Masako asked it, though, I felt close to her, and even without kissing her, I imagined a future in which I moved to Japan and she worked at the airport and I did translating or some other job in Tokyo and we got married and ate at lots of nice restaurants. The bar owner grabbed an album from his shelf, sliding the disk onto his turntable. The album was Pass the Peas: Best of the J.B.’s, and the title track started with someone (Fred Wesley?) posing a question to organist Bobby Byrd.

  “Hey, Bobby, why do you like soul food?”

  “Because,” Bobby answered, “it makes me”—then he stretched out the last word—“haaaaaaaaaaaapy.”

  Why did I want to meet the inventor of instant noodles? It was a straightforward question. I shook my head at the foolishness of my reply.

  “I just wanted to.”

  We talked about lots of other things, and then Masako asked another question.

  “Where are you staying?”

  I told her.

  “That’s a great name for a hotel,” she said, and when we finished our mojitos, the owner called us another taxi.

  At the Hotel Excellent, the driver flung the rear door open with his remote control, and Masako got out of the car. We rode the escalator together to the second-floor lobby.

  “Do you want to hang out in my room?” I asked, even though it was not yet Day Seventy of my ninety-day commitment to Matt.

  She walked into the elevator without answering, and when we got to my room, she headed straight for the bathroom, where she proceeded to take a shower. When she came out, she was wearing nothing but one of the hotel’s yukata robes. The words Hotel Excellent were printed in katakana, hundreds of times, all over the robe. She said she hadn’t been with anyone since her divorce, which meant in over a year.

  For the next hour, I didn’t think at all about failing to meet Momofuku Ando.

  When we fell asleep, I dreamed that Yamazaki called and invited me to participate in the training on Futonjima, the deserted island. The managers and I were pitching tents on the beach when I heard a helicopter above me, and looking up, I saw the Chikin Ramen Tweety Bird-like mascot painted on the helicopter’s tail. A rope ladder unfurled from the helicopter, and Nissin CEO Koki Ando, in sweat-pants and a T-shirt, descended on it, then jumped onto the beach. “What do you want?” he screamed at the managers. The managers shouted answers. “I want an instant T-bone steak!”; “I want instant lobster!”; “I want instant world peace!” Staring right at me, Koki repeated his question, but I awoke before answering.

  It was five o’clock in the morning, and I was alone in the twin bed. Masako lived in the neighborhood, so she must have walked home. The yukata robe lay neatly folded on the desk.

  I got out of bed and jumped into the shower. The nozzle was higher than the one in the Osaka business hotel, so the water hit my chest instead of my belly. The soap smelled sweet, like apricots. I scrubbed it into my skin with a small cloth. I scrubbed hard, as if I could wash away the fact that I had broken my promise to Matt.

  A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF MOMOFUKU ANDO, PART 12 : A MIND TORMENTED WITH REGRET

  All of Ando’s accounts are vague about how he became the chairman of the credit association, the demise of which led to his year in the backyard shack. He states only that he initially turned down the post but was eventually “sweet-talked” into it.

  “Just lend us your name,” someone from the association said.

  Although Ando lost most of his wealth during the two years he was held in Sugamo Prison, his reputation remained intact. Making the rounds of his business contacts and friends in downtown Osaka, he gathered nearly half a million dollars in deposits in just one day.

  Unfortunately, his credit association made many bad loans. Ando clai
ms they were executed by subordinates without his knowledge. Nevertheless, when the association declared bankruptcy, depositors went after him to recoup their losses. They took almost everything he had.

  “I was left with only my house in Ikeda City,” he writes in Magic Noodles, “and a mind tormented with regret. I wondered if this was what it meant to be punished by heaven.”

  PART III

  THE FUNDAMENTAL MISUNDERSTANDING OF HUMANITY

  Let me tell you a little about Andrew. That’s his real name, by the way.

  When he says that he works for a “nationally published business magazine,” he’s trying to imply that it’s a magazine you’ve heard of, like Fortune or Forbes or BusinessWeek. Trust me, you’ve never heard of it. Did you know that he’s disliked by many of the editors and writers he works with? It’s true. One reason is that he’s conceited, as evidenced by the fact that he often gets upset when his story ideas are criticized. Every Thursday morning at eleven o’clock, Josh presides over the story meeting in the large conference room, and writers and editors like Andy pitch their story ideas. While one person is pitching, others around the table chime in with their objections. Things like “BusinessWeek did that story last week” or “If we do that story it might not work out because” of x, y, or z. But Andrew is so sensitive that he can’t handle the objections. His ego is so fragile that he gets upset hearing this kind of honest, constructive criticism. I mean, please. This is how idea meetings work at every magazine and newspaper on the planet!

  He’s not so in shape anymore. There is the beginning of a paunch. A layer of flab has appeared on the insides of his thighs. I tell him YOU SHOULD BE THINNER, but he says he can’t do long-distance running because he feels pain in his shins from so many marathons. I always tell him, YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE RUN SO MANY MARATHONS. I used to tell him, YOU SHOULD DO YOGA, but that was a disaster. He tried it, and aside from downward dog, he couldn’t do the poses. He couldn’t even do downward dog properly, and the teacher had to come around and make adjustments. Did I say anything about that? No, I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut. Until one day Andrew’s in yoga and it’s the end of the class and the teacher is doing the shavasana and she’s saying, “Breathe in compassion for yourself, breathe out compassion for others,” and before she’s finished, he farts. He farts in yoga, right in the middle of this very contemplative time! Everyone hears it, and trust me, everyone knows it was him. So I tell him, DON’T GO BACK TO YOGA FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS UNTIL THE PEOPLE CHANGE OVER AND THEY WON’T REMEMBER YOU.

  Andrew’s hair is falling out and it’s graying. His father has all of his hair. How embarrassing is that? I always tell him, YOU SHOULD NOT BE LOSING YOUR HAIR.

  He tells people he’s fluent in Japanese. Well, sort of. He can read a lot of kanji characters, yes, but he’s forgetting how to write them. And he spent all that time in Japan studying how to write!

  Andrew plays the trombone. Is there any instrument less cool? Let’s face it. No one sits around the campfire playing the trombone. In jazz ensembles, the trombones are sandwiched between the trumpets and the saxophones, so no one sees them. In orchestras, they’re in the back. Talk to any trombone player, and more likely than not, that person did not choose the instrument. Usually the band director didn’t have enough trumpets to go around. I remember when Andrew got put into a class to start instruments, and the band director said, “What instrument do you want to play?” And I was like, YOU SHOULD SAY NOTHING BECAUSE YOU TRIED PLAYING THE PIANO AND THE DRUMS AND YOU WEREN’T VERY GOOD AT EITHER ONE, SO WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU’LL BE GOOD AT ANOTHER INSTRUMENT? So Andrew was silent, and the teacher said, “Sit down for a surprise.” The surprise was a trombone. When he moved to San Francisco, he answered an ad for a funk band, and I was thinking, OK, that might get him some exposure because horn players stand in the front in funk bands. But Andrew is a bad dancer and a bad soloist. I keep telling him, YOU ARE A BAD DANCER AND A BAD SOLOIST, SO DON’T DANCE AND DON’T TAKE SOLOS BECAUSE IT’S GOING TO BE EMBARRASSING.

  Andrew has very few male friends. There’s Andy, who Andrew met in summer camp, but Andy has a wife and two children and has moved on to adult stages of life, while Andrew remains stunted and single. Andrew used to have three good friends from high school named Dan, Dave, and Sam, but when the four of them would get together as adults, Dan, Dave, and Sam would reminisce about how they went on a backpacking trip to Maine after high school graduation and how the three of them canoed and smoked pot and had all kinds of adventures that Andrew wasn’t part of. Sometimes Dan, Dave, and Sam reminisced about a game they played in junior high school with Ritz crackers, where they would sit around and jerk off onto the crackers and the last one to do it had to eat all the crackers. Now I’m not saying those guys actually ever played the game, but Andrew was certainly never invited. So rather than watch him suffer the humiliation of being the odd man out during get-togethers, I told Andrew, YOU SHOULD BREAK OFF ALL CONTACT WITH DAN AND DAVE AND SAM. In San Francisco, Andrew plays Ultimate Frisbee every Saturday morning with a group of thirty- and forty-something men who have known each other since college, and they all go out for beers or burgers after the games. But they never invite Andrew. Which is probably for the best, because if Andrew were going to hang out with them, he wouldn’t know what to say. I guess he’s still friends with Zen, but that relationship is strained. Zen is in Japan making tons of money as a management coach, so it’s obvious which of the two of them has skills and value.

  It’s a shame, really, because Andrew was born with so much promise. He had so much of what I’ll call “life potential.” But I’m like, make something of that already, will you? When he didn’t get to meet Ando, I said over and over, YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE TRIED BECAUSE IT WAS CLEAR THAT YOU WERE GOING TO FAIL AND ANYWAY NO ONE REALLY CARES ABOUT HIM. Then, when he broke his promise to Matt, I told him, YOU SHOULD JUST GO HOME NOW BECAUSE IT’S PRETTY CLEAR THAT YOU ARE NEVER GOING TO HAVE A REAL, COMMITTED RELATIONSHIP WITH A WOMAN, NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU PRAY TO THE INVENTOR OF INSTANT FUCKING RAMEN FOR HELP.

  Masako and I had planned to visit the Yokohama Ramen Museum, but I decided to change my plane reservation and fly home instead. In the morning, I called her to say I was leaving, and she walked to Ebisu Station to see me off. She let me know that she was disappointed and confused.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Why did you change your flight?”

  I was confused myself, so I didn’t know what to tell her. We sat for a while in a coffee shop, and then I hugged her good-bye. As I passed through the Ebisu Station turnstile, I looked back. Masako was dabbing her cheek with a tissue, in the area below her sunglasses.

  I had finished all of the Ramen Discovery Legend books I was carrying, so on the flight I had nothing to read except The Story of the Invention of Instant Ramen—the Nissin-published English translation of Magic Noodles that Matsubara had given me. The book answered questions about the invention of instant ramen that I didn’t even know I had.

  Q: Did Ando set goals for the instant ramen he hoped to develop?

  A: Yes, he established five goals. He wanted the resulting noodles to be

  1. Tasty

  2. Able to keep for a long time

  3. Ready in three minutes or less

  4. Economical

  5. Healthy and safe

  Q: What lucky developments coincided with the 1958 launch of Chikin Ramen and helped make it successful?

  A: At least three:

  1. Japanese commercial TV broadcasts began in 1953, allowing Nissin to advertise Chikin Ramen to a mass audience on shows such as Beaver-chan (Leave It to Beaver).

  2. Japan’s gross national product grew by 17.5 percent in 1959, and 14 percent in 1960.

  3. Instant coffee was introduced to Japan in 1960, helping popularize the word instant (spelled “” in katakana).

  Q: What did Ando do when Nissin went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1963?

  A: He recalled the year in his shack, and he was deeply moved.
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  Q: Why did Ando almost not make his historic journey to the United States in 1966, the one during which he got the idea for Cup Noodles?

  A: There had recently been two plane crashes at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, and Masako, being superstitious, urged him to stay home. “One can die even while sitting in a room,” he told her, “and it’s highly unlikely another accident will occur in the wake of so many.”

  Q: At the offices of which supermarket did he watch American executives eat Chikin Ramen with forks out of Styrofoam cups (giving him his inspiration for Cup Noodles)?

  A: Holiday Magic, in Los Angeles.

  Q: How did Ando feel while watching the Holiday Magic executives eat Chikin Ramen this way?

  A: “At that moment, I understood what it meant to be awakened by the truth.”