The Ramen King and I (5 page)

N
ot too long ago, a woman I was dating found the notebook in which I had written the letters to Ando. She read them all. Then she left a message on my voice mail breaking up with me. “It’s obvious from these letters that you have a problem,” she said, “and that you will never be able to function in a committed relationship.” I called her back, but I didn’t argue. One reason was that I don’t argue as much anymore. Another was that I used to think pretty much the same thing.

I should talk about what happened after I was banned from Hamako. Specifically, I should explain how I became involved in the world of ramen, which would come to play such an important role in my life. I should say “descended into” rather than “became involved with.” Because if sushi occupies a position in Japan’s food hierarchy akin to that of haute French in the West, then ramen’s culinary status hovers somewhere around the prestige of a sloppy joe.

The status of instant ramen? Probably several notches below that.

The first thing that happened was that I finished the last book of the
Shota’s Sushi
sequel series. In the final episode, after vanquishing his archenemy in the tiebreaker round of the All-Japan Rookie Sushi Chef Competition, Shota returns home to save his father’s shop from the evil chain. Exploiting his knack for converting enemies into friends, Shota reforms the chain’s evil owners, who hire him as a consultant to guide their expansion into South Korea.

Having lost one important sushi chef in my life, I found reaching the end of the
Shota
books especially difficult. To fill the void, I visited the bookstore in San Francisco’s Japan Center, and asked the woman at the information desk to recommend another comic book.

“You want English translations?” she asked.

“No, Japanese is OK. I tend to like the food-related ones.”

The woman led me to the comics section in the back of the store. She scanned the hundreds of titles on the shelves for ideas.

“How about this one?”

She was holding
Oishinbo
, a long-running series about two food reporters. I remembered that the reporters got their jobs in the first few episodes by winning a taste test in which they correctly distinguished between tap water, well water, and Tanzawa Mountain mineral water.

“Already read a bunch of the
Oishinbo
books. But yeah, something similar would be nice.”

She pulled another book from the shelf. It was Book One of
Cooking Papa
.

“Read those, too.”

“How about
Natsuko’s Sake
?”

The daughter of a sake-brewing family, Natsuko dreams of making sake from a legendary strain of rice left behind by her deceased older brother. The rice can’t be cultivated using pesticides, so she has to convince an entire farming village to adopt organic pest-control methods. The son of a rival brewery falls in love with her, as does her own head of production. I shook my head because I had read five of the
Natsuko’s Sake
books.

“Natsu’s Brewery?”
the woman suggested.

A prequel series about Natsuko’s grandmother, who battles and overcomes the traditional exclusion of women from sake making.

“Read it.”

A traveling chef for hire, Mr. Ajisawa uses culinary knowledge to solve clients’ problems, which at first glance seem unrelated to food.

“Sorry.”

Dai and his wife, Yuko, run a bento-box lunch shop. For their tenth wedding anniversary, Yuko presents Dai with a special train ticket so he can travel around Japan indulging his passion for bento-box lunches sold at train stations. “It’ll be a nice vacation from me!” says Yuko, who stays home to mind their shop.

“Read that, too.”

Mr. Osawa, a twenty-eight-year-old chef, gets a job at the Japanese embassy in Vietnam, where his deft kitchen skills help the ambassador overcome various diplomatic crises.

“I don’t think so.”

A human resources manager at a troubled bank, Mr. Akagi is ordered to lay off one hundred employees. He feels guilty, so he lays off ninety-nine and then lays himself off. Later, he goes to work for his father-in-law at Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish market, where he’s ostracized because he lacks fish knowledge.

“Sorry again.”

I had read only Book One, but I didn’t get into the plot line, which was about a boy born in nineteenth-century Szechwan Province who turns out to be a cooking prodigy.

I was about to leave when the woman made one last suggestion.

“How about
Ramen Discovery Legend
?”

“What?”

The cover of Book One showed a photograph of a bowl of noodle soup topped with bamboo shoots, a slice of pork, and several squares of dried seaweed. Next to the photograph, an illustrated young man was holding out an illustrated bowl of ramen in his left hand. He was looking straight at me, and his right hand was clenched in a fist.

“Go ahead,” he seemed to be saying. “Try it!”

I
purchased
Ramen Discovery Legend
Book One and decided to search for a sushi bar in which to read it. I was driving along Clement Street when I noticed a small storefront with a Japanese sign. Was it a sushi bar? Yes, it was. Its name, Murasaki, was written vertically down the side of the door in hiragana. Hiragana symbols are like letters in the alphabet, except instead of standing for consonants and vowels, each once represents a whole syllable. (Technically, therefore, hiragana constitute a syllabary, not an alphabet. An example:
is pronounced “mu.”) You can write all Japanese words in hiragana if you want to—and in kids’ books, that’s how it is. But in adult writing, some strings of hiragana are replaced with kanji, the ideographs inherited from the Chinese.

When to use kanji and when to use hiragana is a matter of convention and style, but sometimes the decision conveys meaning. For example, if
Murasaki
had been written in kanji, it would have been just one character,
, which means “purple.” But, like I said, it was spelled out in hiragana:
. And since (like Roman letters) hiragana have no implicit meaning, they give rise to homonyms. So
Murasaki
could have meant “purple,” but it also might have been a reference to the sushi chef’s code language.

I learned about the sushi chef ’s code language translating a newspaper essay while I was a student at International Christian University. The essay described how sushi chefs developed the code so they could talk business in front of customers. For example,
agari
usually means “rise up,” but in the sushi chef’s code language it means “tea.”
Menoji
usually means “the eye kanji,” but in the sushi chef ’s code language it means “five.” (The connection is that it takes five brush strokes to write the eye kanji,
.) In the sushi chef ’s code language,
murasaki
means “soy sauce.”

Something about Murasaki looked right, and it wasn’t just that the name might have been a reference to soy sauce in the sushi chef’s code language. Through the window I could tell that there were only a few tables and one chef.

When I walked inside, he welcomed me from behind the counter.

He looked about Tetsuo’s age, but he was thinner and smiled more. Behind him, a calligraphy painting of a single kanji character—
arashi
—hung on the wall.

Arashi
means “storm.”

The chef motioned me to sit at his counter, and after surveying the contents of his refrigerated case, I ordered
hirame
,
maguro, saba,
and
uni
to start.

When the chef put a plate of his sushi in front of me, I reached deliberately for the
hirame
. In
Kanda Tsuruhachi Sushi Stories
, the sushi chef’s memoir, Moro-oka divides sushi into four types: white-flesh stuff (
hirame
,
tai
), red-flesh stuff (
maguro
,
katsuo
), shiny-skin stuff (
saba, kohada
—shiny-skin stuff is usually pickled), and other stuff (shellfish, etc.). He says customers are supposed to eat the white-flesh stuff first because if they eat red-flesh or shiny-skin or other stuff first, they’ll overwhelm their palates with fat or vinegar, and they’ll be unable to enjoy the white-flesh stuff ’s delicate flavors. I was hoping that by reaching for the white-flesh
hirame
I could convey to the chef—without even speaking Japanese—that I knew what I was doing, but he didn’t seem to notice.

Whoa. Did I see what I thought I saw?

To my left at the counter, a few seats away, a Japanese man was eating sushi. And plopped in the corner of his wood tray was a green clump. Even from a distance of several place settings, I could make out its coarse, grainy texture—the telltale sign of freshly grated wasabi. The green clump on my sushi tray was smooth and featureless. Powder-based wasabi.