The Ramen King and I

by Andy Raskin

  Many of the stories in the book had been recycled from previous collections, but Ando had written a new introduction. It began,

  My life has been one of ups and downs. I experienced difficulties in my work, and I faced hardships. Many times I tasted despair. At my lowest point, I lost all of my wealth, but I put all of my trust in what seemed like a tiny desire. . . . I made the decision that food would be my life’s work, and then I was saved.

  Ando continued by talking about the importance of food in society, but then there was this:

  Human beings have all kinds of desires. Some we must hide. Some, as we get older, we must learn to control. Perhaps it is only the desire for food that we can continue to indulge without shame.

  What kind of desires, I wondered, was Ando talking about that he had to control?

  In the back of the book, a bibliography listed Ando’s previously published work, including Noodle Road, Peace Follows from a Full Stomach, and the autobiographies. There was one title, though, that I had never seen before:

  Kukyo kara no Dasshutsu.

  Dasshutsu means “to escape.” The first character of that word,, is the same as the first one in dassara. As for kukyo, I knew the meanings of the two characters, but not the combined word. Looking it up in my Kenkyusha Japanese-English dictionary, I discovered that kukyo is a fancy word for “difficulty.”

  In 1992, Momofuku Ando authored a book called How to Escape from Difficulty.

  The book was out of print, but I found it in the online catalog of a Kyoto bookseller. The company wouldn’t ship to the United States, so I had it mailed to Zen, who forwarded it to me. The jacket showed a shimmering white sphere with a long rainbow tail. I had read enough about Ando to know that the image was a reference to Halley’s Comet.

  How to Escape from Difficulty was yet another telling of Ando’s life story. Based largely on his previous autobiographies, it included the episode about being tortured during World War II, and the two years he spent in Sugamo Prison fighting charges of tax evasion. This book, however, started at a different point, and it was organized in a different way. Namely, it began with Ando losing everything in the credit association debacle. Then it described a transformation that took place in his soul, and how that transformation enabled him to invent instant ramen. The key to the transformation, he wrote, was his realization that, his entire life, he had suffered under a delusion. He called this delusion the Fundamental Misunderstanding of Humanity.

  SHOULD NEVER QUIT A JOB BEFORE YOU HAVE A NEW JOB. Dear Momofuku,

  Is there any better way to prove to Dr. G that I am not a father-hating boy than to take up sailing?

  I enroll in sailing camp, and on the first day, I look around at my classmates. Sharon is one of them.

  In the pool, she barely noticed me. But now when I look at her, she meets my gaze. We practice sailing in small boats called Blue Jays, and Sharon goes out of her way to get assigned to my Blue Jay. She calls me on the phone one night, and we talk about the Blue Jays and the other kids and about the sailing instructors. She calls the next night, too.

  “Is she your girlfriend?” my father asks at the dinner table.

  YOU SHOULD NOT ADMIT THIS, BECAUSE IF YOU DO, THEN IT WILL MEAN THAT YOU ARE A SEXUAL PERSON, AND HOW CONCEITED WOULD THAT BE?

  “No.”

  My father doesn’t believe me. “Love is blind,” he says, “but the neighbors ain’t!”

  I never kiss Sharon, because I’m too shy. Somehow, though, just knowing that a girl is interested in me, I feel better about myself.

  “I’m feeling better about myself,” I tell Dr. G.

  “Let’s run some tests,” he says.

  Dr. G runs the exact same tests—the same sentence completions, the same inkblots, the same drawing exercises. Perhaps he has forgotten how well I scored last time on the memory portion.

  In the next session, he shows my parents the evidence for how much I have changed.

  “My father helps me with my homework.”

  “I want to go fishing.”

  My drawing of an adult female includes two prominent semicircles on her chest.

  Dr. G says I can stop seeing him, so I do.

  I consider Sharon to be my girlfriend, even though we have never kissed. But one afternoon, I see her out on a Blue Jay with another boy. He’s the son of a famous sailmaker.

  YOU SHOULD FORGET ABOUT HER BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY SHE’S GOING TO BE MORE INTERESTED IN HIM. HE’S TALL AND HE HAS BLOND HAIR, AND HE’S THE SON OF A SAILMAKER. YOU SHOULD NOT TELL HER YOU’RE JEALOUS BECAUSE THAT WOULD MAKE YOU LOOK WEAK AND LIKE AN IDIOT. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO IS PRETEND THAT YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT HER ANYMORE SO THAT SHE CAN’T HURT YOU FIRST.

  The next night, I call another girl from the camp.

  Sincerely,

  Andy

  “Are you hungry?” my mother asked.

  It was Thanksgiving, and she had just met me at the baggage claim in Kennedy Airport. I thought about making a crack about Woody Allen, but instead I just hugged her.

  By transcribing the voice in my head, I had learned to recognize it in others. When my mother asked me about being hungry, I felt its presence. It was telling her that she needed to keep me well fed in order to be a good mother. Had it told her that she was a bad mother when I cried as a child? Had it somehow been responsible for her lashing out at me? I wondered, too, if she had inherited the voice from her mother, and I realized that she probably had. Grandma Millie died in a car accident caused by a teenager who ran a stop sign, and after we all cried for a month, Grandma Millie’s friends told us that she had been stockpiling sleeping pills in case her body deteriorated to where she couldn’t take care of herself. The voice in Grandma Millie’s head told her that she shouldn’t be a burden on her children or her grandchildren. She must have inherited the voice from her parents, who must have inherited it from their parents.

  “What’s new?” I asked my mother.

  We were in the Denali now, exiting the short-term parking lot.

  “Not too much. Oh! Your father’s walking across Long Island.”

  “What do you mean, he’s walking across it?”

  “He joined a club. They print maps, you know, trails that connect up across the Island. Some go east-west, some go up and down.”

  “How long does it take to walk across?”

  “Depends if you’re going east-west or up and down. He does a little section one day, and then another section the next. He’s going tomorrow to do one of the sections. You should go with him before all the relatives arrive for dinner. It’ll be nice. A father-and-son walk.”

  Momofuku: I want to walk across Long Island with my father.

  HE DOESN’T REALLY WANT TO WALK WITH YOU. IT’S JUST YOUR MOTHER FORCING HIM INTO IT.

  I slept in my old room, and in the morning my father pulled the Denali out of the garage. He was sixty-four years old, and he still looked like a linebacker, probably because of all the time he spent on his sailboat. His hair was graying, but he still had all of it, which the voice never let me forget. Before we left, he told me he had been traversing an east-west trail. Actually, he had started on the western border of Nassau County and was making his way to Montauk, so technically it was a west-east trail. His last segment had ended in Oyster Bay. I got into the passenger seat, and he drove toward the expressway.

  “So what are you going to do for money?” he asked in the car.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “If you need it, we can help.”

  YOU SHOULD NOT BE DEPENDENT ON YOUR PARENTS, GIVEN THAT YOU’RE ALMOST FORTY.

  “Thanks, Dad. I wanna try and figure this out.”

  “You know, I always say that you should never leave a job before you have a new job.”

  At least I knew where that one came from.

  “Ever think about writing a book?” he asked.

  “What would I write a book about?”

  “The stories of your life. Like that time you climbed to the top of the
bridge with the Japanese people.”

  Back when I lived with Maureen, I worked for the Manhattan office of a Japanese television company. I would scout locations, rent lighting equipment, and translate for the directors. Once we were hired to produce a profile about the city’s bridge inspector, a former Czech acrobat who loved to walk on suspension cables without safety equipment. A cameraman and I climbed a rickety staircase to the top of the Williamsburg Bridge, where we filmed the inspector making his way up the cable.

  “I don’t think anyone wants to read a book about that, Dad.”

  “I don’t know, I thought it was exciting stuff.”

  In high school, I used to wonder why my friend Dan could talk about girls and sex with his father, yet I couldn’t with mine. At some point, I came to the conclusion that it was my fault. If I hadn’t been so impatient and embarrassed during his birds-and-bees talk, he wouldn’t have given up on building a closer relationship. I once asked Dan how he and his father became so open with each other, and he remembered the exact day it happened. He was sixteen years old, and his father came into his room with comic books from the 1930s that showed famous characters like Betty Boop engaging in kinky sex acts. Dan and his father bonded over the comics. For a long time, I thought that if I could just bring up a sexually explicit topic with my father, the same thing would happen. I tried it once, but it was a complete disaster. I was in my early thirties, and I was eating dinner with both my parents at an Italian restaurant in Tribeca. Before the main course, I said, “I just want to put it out there that I have had sex.” My mother said, “Yeah, we figured.” My father said, “There are certain topics that just aren’t appropriate to talk about with your parents.” Maybe I should have waited until I was alone with my father, but I was so embarrassed that I never tried again.

  My father exited the expressway near Oyster Bay, continuing a short distance along the service road. He stopped in front of a chain-link fence, checking his club map.

  “This is the spot,” he said.

  We got out of the Denali and walked to the gate, which had been secured with a rusty chain and a combination lock. Behind the fence, a dirt path led into some woods. I had probably driven past the spot dozens of times in high school, but I had never noticed the woods.

  My father grabbed the lock, spun the numbered dials, and popped open the latch.

  “How did you know the combination?” I asked.

  “It’s a public trail, so you can call the park service and they’ll tell it to you. But the club also prints it on the map.”

  He unraveled the chain, swinging the gate open, and we both passed through. Then he relocked the gate, and together we continued his walk across Long Island.

  The sun cast sharp shadows over the trail’s carpet of brown leaves, though it was cold enough that we both wore thick coats. Sloping downward at first, the trail leveled out and we came upon a large pond. A family of ducks floated past clumps of reeds near the edge. I scanned for other wildlife, but didn’t see any.

  We had walked halfway around the pond’s perimeter when the trail veered back into the woods.

  “You smell the maple sap?” my father asked.

  I didn’t. “I do.”

  We were silent the rest of the way. One reason was that my father had begun walking a few paces ahead of me.

  It was only a few paces, so I didn’t think much of it at first. Soon, though, he was a good three yards in front. When the distance was five yards, I heard the voice in my head.

  YOU SHOULD REALLY WALK FASTER.

  In How to Escape from Difficulty, Ando defines the Fundamental Misunderstanding of Humanity as “believing that we can achieve all of our desires, without limitations.” The implied double negative is a less awkward construction in Japanese, but I still had to reread it several times before I parsed it correctly.

  HE’S EASILY TEN YARDS AHEAD OF YOU. WILL YOU WALK FASTER ALREADY?

  Ando tells his reader, “I am about to reveal some very shameful things. And it is my hope that together we will uncover hints about how one can escape from a difficult situation.” The shameful things are the many failures he chronicles in his other books—the loss of his businesses and real estate holdings, the wartime torture, his arrests and imprisonments.

  HE MUST BE TWENTY-FIVE YARDS AHEAD OF YOU. LET’S GET A MOVE ON.

  Ando attributes many of these failures to circumstance, but not the credit association collapse. For that he takes responsibility, if simply for allowing himself to be “sweet-talked” into getting involved. He recounts the shame he felt. “It was the most difficult period of my life. I went from being a success to being penniless, and I experienced the harshness of this world.” This time he couldn’t run from his shame. He didn’t have the money to start a new company or to buy land.

  THIRTY-FIVE YARDS. THIS IS YOUR IDEA OF A FATHER-AND-SON WALK?

  “Be it the desire for food, sex, or power,” Ando writes, “. . . desire always breeds more desire. Eventually, it becomes difficult to control.” Ando saw how shame powered so many of his desires, and that, unless he made peace with his shame, it would continue to rule him. (I assumed he was talking about his quest for wealth, though the mention of sex hardly passed unnoticed.) Walking thirty-five yards (and counting) behind my father, I recognized the voice in my head as the shame Ando was talking about.

  HE’S ABOUT TO DISAPPEAR AROUND THAT BEND IN FRONT OF YOU. THERE ARE THREE POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS FOR THIS: (1) HE’S THINKING, “MY SON IS A SLOW WALKER, SO FUCK HIM.” (2) HE CARES SO LITTLE ABOUT YOU THAT HE HASN’T NOTICED YOU’RE THIS FAR BEHIND HIM. (3) HE DOESN’T LIKE YOU VERY MUCH, AND HE PREFERS TO KEEP HIS DISTANCE.

  So this was the battle I had been preparing for. Not with my father, but with the voice in my head, a collection of thoughts that had long been unconscious yet controlled my behavior in ways I was just beginning to comprehend. Whenever I was on the verge of admitting things I was ashamed of—as Matt liked to put it, whenever I was about to become intimate with myself or another person—this voice would stop me. Now, feeling the urge to walk faster, I understood that if I gave in I would again be running from the truth. So I followed Matt’s advice and focused on what the voice was saying. I gave it all of my attention.

  OH, MY GOD, HE’S NO LONGER VISIBLE. ARE YOU REALLY THIS PATHETIC?

  Only when Ando accepted his failure—his limitations—did he become aware of another kind of desire, one rooted not in shame but, as he puts it, “the innate human urge to connect with the world.” His wife’s friends began asking about her husband’s activities in the backyard, and when she told them, they said, “Oh,” because they felt sorry for her that she was married to a man who had devoted his life to ramen, the lowest of all foods. Of course, once he committed to his true desire, the opinions of others no longer held sway over Ando. “I realized that all of my failures were like muscles and blood added to my bones,” he writes. “I had no choice but to keep on moving in the direction of the dim light ahead.”

  What were my limitations? One, obviously, was that I wanted to walk with my father, but our walking speeds were such that I could no longer see him. Another was that I couldn’t talk to him about sex. I was nearly forty years old and not married. I had a critical voice in my head, no job, and no prospects. I had dated many women, but when I got close to them I often felt an uncomfortable physical sensation. I always cheated. I couldn’t say “Beeyotch!” I had tried and failed to meet the inventor of instant ramen. The list of limitations was much longer, but these were the ones that came to mind while walking across Long Island.

  Could I accept these limitations?

  NO, YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY NOT ACCEPT THEM. THEY’RE NOT GOOD THINGS TO ACCEPT IN YOUR LIFE. WEAK PEOPLE ACCEPT LIMITATIONS. ARE YOU WEAK? WHAT YOU SHOULD DO IS, YOU SHOULD GET ON CRAIGSLIST OR THE MEMBER DIRECTORY OR JUST CALL ONE OF THE WOMEN IN YOUR PHONEBOOK AND FORGET ABOUT THESE LIMITATIONS. YOU SHOULD HAVE FUN.

  And there it was, the Fundamental Misunderstanding of Humanity.r />
  I understood now that the voice’s beating heart was a question: “WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?” It gathered strength from virtually any limitation I encountered, be it my inability to participate in a conversation at a Lake Tahoe ski house, my failure to meet the inventor of instant ramen, or the distance between my father and me on a walk across Long Island. I had learned to use women to shout back, “Look! Nothing is wrong with me!” But like a security alarm, if a woman got too close, the voice would grow louder and louder. Then I would look for someone new to appease it, and the cycle would start all over.

  Did I create this voice to shield myself from some pain I suffered as a child? Was I born with it? The answer didn’t really matter. What mattered was that I had more resources now. I had Matt, for one, and I had my faith in Ando, even if I communicated with him only through letters I never sent and books he wrote long ago. I had a drawing of a duck that looked like a shoe, and I had samurai heroes too numerous to name. I had the horror of how I behaved in relationships, and every Monday night I sat next to an aging trombone player who offered me restaurant tips and the detailed history of my Conn 78H.

  So I kept walking at the same pace, which felt like jumping off a cliff. I asked Ando to catch me.