Authors: Andy Raskin

The Ramen King and I (21 page)

BOOK: The Ramen King and I

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The book provided practically every detail about Ando’s life and his invention of instant ramen except for the one that I had wondered about in the first place. Why did he suddenly devote himself to developing an instant noodle? He said he was inspired by the line at the ramen stand behind Umeda Station and by the health ministry official who challenged him to research noodles. But why did he commit himself ten years later? I still didn’t see it. It struck me, however, that aside from taking only three minutes to prepare, the goals Ando set for his noodles also described the kind of healthy romantic relationship that had eluded me.

When I got home, I slept for sixteen hours. Then I called Matt. We met at a Vietnamese restaurant in the Mission District, just a few blocks from Dolores Park. He hugged me when I got there.

“Welcome back! I want to hear all about it.”

We ordered bowls of pho—Vietnamese noodle soup topped with thin slices of raw beef—and I related everything that had happened. I told Matt that I felt like a failure for breaking my commitment, and that I would understand if he quit as my mentor.

“Don’t beat yourself up about it, buddy,” he said.

I felt better hearing Matt call me “buddy.”

“It was Ando’s will.”

I felt worse when he talked like Ando was really God. He grabbed a stem of fresh basil from a side plate and tore the leaves off, sprinkling them over his soup.

“Did you write in your notebook before you went to Tokyo?”

I remembered that I did, and I told Matt about the second-person capitalized voice that came out on the page.

“So you’ve started hearing your voice,” he said.

He made it sound like everyone had one.

“You have a voice, Matt?”

“Mine sounds like my father.”

“Really? What does your father say to you?”

“Well, it sounds like my father, but it’s not my father. And that’s an important distinction. Anyway, I just started dating someone, and she’s great. But my voice is always telling me that she’s out of my league.”

“So you ignore it?”

Matt slurped his noodles.

“Ignoring it will get you into trouble. You have to listen to it.”

“Then what?”

Instead of answering the question, Matt made another demand.

“I want you to commit to another ninety days of no dating and no sex.”

I was sure that I would be single for the rest of my life, but I still didn’t know what else to do.

“OK.”

“I also want you to write a few pages as if you are that voice. Be it.”

“OK.”

“Then I want you to think back to your childhood and try to recall when you heard the voice. Write to Ando about what you remember.”

“But I just started hearing it last week, when I was in Japan.”

“Yeah, well, it’s probably been with you for a long time. It might help if you write as if the past is happening now.”

“You mean, in present tense?”

“Right.”

“OK.” It was all I could do not to roll my eyes. “Anything else?”

“Uh, one more thing. This time, jot down in your notebook whenever you want something that is
not
related to dating or sex. Then listen to what this voice has to say about what you wrote.”

“OK.”

“Repeat after me.”

Before I could stop him, Matt put his hands together in what looked like the
gassho
pose. He closed his eyes.

“O Momofuku.”

“Matt, I’m sorry. This praying to Ando thing is a joke. It didn’t work.”

“What are you talking about?” Matt said. “It worked perfectly.”

“No it didn’t. I broke my commitment.”

“Listen, by not meeting you, Ando put you in touch with your voice. This was the luckiest thing that could have happened. Don’t you get it? Ando made this happen.”

The waiter brought the check, and when he saw both of us with our hands in front of our chests in the
gassho
pose, he gave us a look.

“O Momofuku,” I repeated.

“Please show me how not meeting you was lucky, how not meeting you was the way to better do your will.”

I repeated it, and then I went home to write about the voice. As usual, Matt was right. It had been there for a very long time.

Dear Momofuku,

I am seven years old, and I am walking in front of a toy store with my mother. In the window, I see Trouble, the Milton Bradley board game, and I am overcome with the desire to own it.

Trouble comes with two dice encased in a plastic dome—the trademarked Pop-O-Matic. When you push down on the dome, a taut metal strip underneath buckles, rolling the dice. I am the only kid on our block in Brooklyn without Trouble, the only kid without a Pop-O-Matic.

“Can you buy me Trouble?” I ask my mother.

“No,” she answers. “You’ll play it once and you’ll get tired of it. Then it’ll sit in the closet, and you’ll feel like an idiot for wanting it in the first place.”

I start to cry.

“Stop your crying,” my mother says.

I don’t stop crying. “I want Trouble!”

“I told you to stop your crying!” she yells.

I can’t stop.

“Stop your crying this instant!”

I don’t stop, so she raises her hand. She clenches her teeth and shuts her eyes, and there is so much anger coursing through her body that she starts to tremble. As she spanks me, she punctuates each attack with a word.

“You”—whack—“better”—whack—“stop”—whack—“crying”—whack—“this”—whack—“minute”—whack—
“crying”—whack—“this”—whack—“minutes”—whack—
“you”—whack—“no”—whack—“good”—whack—“dirty”—whack—“rotten”—whack—“idiot!”

She pauses to catch her breath, then continues.

“What”—whack—“is”—whack—“wrong”—whack—“with”—whack—“you?”

There is a rhythm to her hitting, the pain and the volume of her insults rising then falling, like waves crashing on a beach.

I am still crying when my father comes home from work.

“Stop your crying!” my father says.

He doesn’t say anything while spanking me. He is six feet tall and built like a linebacker.

When he leaves the room, Momofuku, I hear the voice for the first time.

YOU SHOULD NOT TRUST YOUR DESIRES, BECAUSE THEY WILL MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE AN IDIOT AND BRING YOU SO MUCH PAIN.

Sincerely,
Andy

I
didn’t suddenly remember the spankings and the insults when I started writing the second set of letters to the inventor of instant ramen. Long before I learned about Momofuku Ando, I had discussed them with my parents. We would sit together—in a park when they visited me in San Francisco, or at their house on Long Island when I visited them—and I would ask what I had done that made them so angry. My mother would rub her forehead and cry, and through her tears she would say that if there were one thing she could go back and do differently in her life, it was that. She would tell me that as a young child I was always crying and that my crying touched off a rage that she could not control. My father would apologize, too, though he defended the spankings as standard practice for the times. “People spanked their kids back then,” he would say, and he was certainly right. These discussions always ended with my parents feeling blamed for something they regretted but couldn’t change, and they would urge me to take an antidepressant. I would refuse, and sometimes we would stop speaking for months.

After writing this last letter to Ando, I made a list five pages long of all the wonderful things my parents did for me, and while I thought about reproducing the list here, suffice it to say that I have been very lucky to have them. Nevertheless, when I tried to remember the first time I heard the voice, it was after one of the spankings.

Meanwhile, my second abstinence period went more smoothly than the first. I still had the occasional thought about placing online dating ads, but I didn’t count the days. Whenever I wanted to do something—anything at all that was unrelated to dating or sex—I would record it as a memo to Ando in my notebook, per Matt’s instructions. Then I would listen to what the voice had to say about it.

Momofuku:
I want to watch
Seven Samurai.

ANOTHER SAMURAI MOVIE? WHY DON’T YOU TAKE UP ORIGAMI WHILE YOU’RE AT IT?

Until renting
Samurai Trilogy I: Musashi Miyamoto,
I had never watched a samurai movie in my life. I had been proud of the fact that I had never watched any, the way I was proud that I didn’t know anything about karate or tea ceremony or flower arranging. I was not
that
kind of
gaijin
. But because I had rented that first samurai movie,
Seven Samurai
showed up one day in my online video store’s “Movies You’ll ♥” list.

Seven Samurai
turned out to be a tale of isolated men trying to find connection and meaning in their lives. My favorite part was when the head samurai, Kambei, recruits his old deputy, Shichiroji, to defend the farming village from bandits. As his recruiting pitch, Kambei says, “It will bring us neither money nor fame. Want to join?” To which Shichiroji immediately replies, “Yes.” What Shichiroji values above all else is the connection to his former master.

I rated
Seven Samurai
five stars out of five, so the online video store recommended more samurai movies, including
Yojimbo
and what would become my favorite samurai movie of all,
Hara-kiri.
(The latter is about a castle where samurai show up—without appointments—asking if it’s OK to kill themselves in the courtyard). Next I rented
Tale of Zatoichi
, the first film in the long-running Zatoichi series. The synopsis label on the DVD sleeve said “(1962) Blind masseur and swordsman Zatoichi (Shintaro Katsu) is living and working in a province that’s under siege by rival warlords. . . . Unwilling to sit idle while his province is ruthlessly destroyed, Zatoichi must take matters into his own hands, regardless of the consequences.”

Unable to go on dates, I had plenty of time to sit idle in my living room. I rented eighteen more movies in the Zatoichi series, watching one Zatoichi movie after the next. The online video store shipped the exact same synopsis label on all of them, but because the plot in every Zatoichi film was more or less the same, the description was never far off. If anything changed from movie to movie, it was Zatoichi’s approach to women. In the early Zatoichi installments, when young girls fell for the main character, he tended to reject them, putting himself down as a good-for-nothing wandering samurai. But around 1970, Shintaro Katsu, the actor who played Zatoichi, started his own production company to make Zatoichi and other films. In these he played swaggering studs who conquered women and swordsmen alike. In
Hanzo the Razor: Sword of Justice
(1972), Katsu’s character is a detective who pounds his penis with a stone (to keep it in shape) and drags secrets out of courtesans by suspending them naked from the ceiling, bound in a net, and lowering them over his erect member until they orgasm.

I watched
Incident at Blood Pass, The Twilight Samurai, Kage musha, Chushingura, The Sword of Doom, Sanshiro Sugata, Sanshiro Sugata 2, Hidden Fortress,
and
Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in the Land of Demons.
I watched
Samurai Rebellion
. I watched the disappointing
Yojimbo Meets Zatoichi
. For months it seemed like all I did was watch samurai movies. I watched them mostly at night and on weekends, but sometimes I watched them on the DVD player in my office computer. If there was one thing, above all, that surprised me about samurai movies, it was that, in general, the heroes don’t do very much. A lot of the time, they just sit around. For instance, in
Samurai Trilogy II: Duel at Ichioji Temple
, Takezo spends a good part of each day in his room, whittling. Sometimes he peruses ancient texts. Zatoichi can frequently be found sharpening his sword, gambling, or giving massages.

Of course, this is how they prepare for battle. A silly thought crossed my mind. Was it Ando’s will that I watch samurai movies in preparation for some kind of battle?

Dear Momofuku,

I am eleven years old, and I’m at sleepaway camp for the summer. I live in an A-frame cabin with nine other boys. My best friend is Adam. Adam and I have a lot in common. We both have curly brown hair, we like to play baseball, and we’re the only boys in the bunk with pubes.

One night, just after the sun sets, Adam walks outside the cabin and howls. Like a wolf.

“Aoooooooooooooooo!”

A few days later, we have what’s called a boy-girl social. That’s where we get together with girls and have a campfire in the woods. The counselors build the fire and play their guitars, while we kids roast hot dogs and marshmallows on sticks. Adam and I are chewing on burned marshmallows and singing folk songs like “Circle Game” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” but I’m not singing very loud.

YOU SHOULD JUST KIND OF MOUTH THE WORDS BECAUSE IF PEOPLE HEAR YOUR SINGING VOICE THEY’LL MAKE FUN OF YOU.

In the middle of “Puff the Magic Dragon,” a girl our age approaches us.

“Who did the howl?”

She must have heard Adam all the way over where the girls’ cabins were.

“It was me,” Adam says.

The girl walks away. Later she returns, but this time she’s joined by three of her friends. The four girls crowd around Adam.

“Do the howl,” they cry. “Come on, do the howl!”

Adam acts embarrassed, but then he stands up. He plants his right foot on the large rocks that surround the campfire. He tilts his head back, cupping his hands around his mouth. Even before he makes a sound, as he’s doing this preparation, the girls’ eyes track his every movement.

Their lips tighten.

Adam howls at the stars, undulating the pitch and dragging it out for what feels like forever.

“Aooo, aoooo, aoooo . . . !”

The girls applaud and laugh and jump up and down.

“Do it again,” they scream. “Do the howl again!”

Adam is bathed in female attention. Watching this, I come to the conclusion that any reasonable person would come to, which is that what girls want, what makes them want you, is howling.

I am about to howl myself.

YOU SHOULDN’T TRY IT BECAUSE, WELL, YOU’RE NOT A HOWLER. YOU’RE JUST NOT. I MEAN, IT’S GOING TO BE EMBARRASSING IF YOU TRY AND FAIL. BESIDES, HOWLING IS ADAM’S THING, SO EVEN IF YOU CAN DO IT, YOU’LL LOOK LIKE A COPYCAT. YOU SHOULD FIND SOMETHING THAT IS HOWLING-LIKE, BUT NOT HOWLING.

I try to think of something else. One idea is to memorize the names of all of the episodes of
Star Trek.
But of course that is being a copycat, too, because Adam has memorized not only the names of all the episodes, but also the order in which they were originally broadcast. Another idea is model rockets. I love model rockets. At home, I buy kits with my allowance money and after I build them, my father takes me to a park near our house to shoot them off. Sometimes they fly so high I can’t see them until the parachute pops out.

It takes time and effort to make my knowledge of model rockets a selling point to the girls at camp. The rockets are manufactured by the Estes Aerospace Corporation, so during rest periods I memorize the names of all the models in the Estes Aerospace catalog, including Big Bertha, Apogee II, and the Mars Lander. I memorize their weights and lengths, and details about which ones fly highest on C6-5 engines and which ones can handle D engines. I memorize how high each one is expected to fly with a given engine, and so on.

At the next boy-girl social, I am flipping through the Estes Aerospace catalog next to a blond-haired girl, hoping she will notice.

“What’s that?” she asks.

“It’s a catalog of model rockets.”

“Do they really fly?”

“Yeah. I’m going to shoot off the Shark on the baseball fields tomorrow. My parents brought it on Visiting Day, and last week I cut the fins from balsa wood and applied the decals. I’m thinking of using a C6-3 engine on it.”

“I’m thirsty,” the girl says, and she walks away.

WHAT KIND OF IDIOT THINKS THAT GIRLS ARE GOING TO BE IMPRESSED BY YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF MODEL ROCKETS?

When I get back to the cabin, I lift the Shark off the Estes Aerospace launchpad, and rip it to shreds.

Sincerely,
Andy

BOOK: The Ramen King and I

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