The Ramen King and I

by Andy Raskin

  Kim found it easier than I did to run and talk at the same time.

  “I like anything by John Irving,” she said, “especially Garp.”

  I hadn’t read many “book” books except for the ones required in English courses, but I had seen the movie version of The World According to Garp. Mostly what I remembered was the oral sex scene in a car. Still, part of me wanted to get closer to Kim—to really know her—and the talk about books gave me an idea.

  “How about . . . after this we hang out . . . and write together?”

  Kim kept running. She didn’t say anything for a while, but then she did.

  “What do you want to write about?”

  “Maybe we could . . . both start with the same sentence and . . . see what we come up with.”

  I figured I was the first person to ever propose such a thing, but Kim informed me otherwise.

  “Writers call that a prompt,” she said.

  Her apartment was close to the park, so we showered there, grabbed pens and a couple of notebooks, and walked up Broadway to the Barnes & Noble at Eighty-first Street. I bought coffee drinks while Kim found a table in the café.

  “OK, what do you want to use as the prompt?” she asked.

  I opened my notebook, but I couldn’t think of anything.

  “Come on,” she said. “Just write down the first thing that pops into your head.”

  I wrote down the first thing that popped into my head and showed it to Kim, who read my prompt aloud.

  “ ‘Fruit trees are rare in these parts,’ ” she said. “That’s your prompt?”

  “Is something wrong with it?”

  “It’s a little bleak.”

  Ashamed of my bleak prompt, I tried to defend it.

  “It could be hopeful. Like, there are precious things in the world, and you have to appreciate them.”

  Kim disagreed. “Andy, you’re saying good things are rare in your life.”

  I wasn’t saying it. I was just using it as a prompt. Still, rather than discuss with Kim how embarrassed I felt, I made an effort to never be bleak around her again. I stayed as upbeat as possible, and not long after that I began looking for a way out. After receiving my MBA, I was hired by an American management consulting firm that had just opened an office in Japan, so when the opportunity arose for a six-month Tokyo posting, I jumped. Kim and I got together the weekend before I left, and we talked about how we were still going to be a couple and how we would wait for each other. Once I got to Japan, though, Harue practically lived in my apartment.

  The firm assigned me to work with a department store in Fukuoka Prefecture, on the southern island of Kyushu, and part of my job was teaching executives at the department store about commitment. I gave speeches about how they had to commit to buying inventory, commit to getting to know their customers, commit to vendors, and commit to each other. Meanwhile, I was dating two people. My coworkers knew that I had a girlfriend back in New York, so I had to hide my relationship with Harue. (My boss lived across the street from my Tokyo apartment, so when Harue came over, I not only turned off the ringer but also drew the blinds.) The queasy feeling in my stomach was now present almost all the time, and I was often depressed. Amazingly, I never made the connection between those feelings and what I was doing. Perhaps on some level I knew because I would write in my journal, “OK, I’m going to end things with Kim.” Then I would write, “OK, I’m going to end things with Harue.” But I was powerless to do either. I had even convinced myself, Momofuku, that it was because I didn’t want to hurt them.

  Sincerely,

  Andy

  Not 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.”

  “The Chef?”

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

  “Sorry.”

  “Train Station Bento-Box Single Traveler?”

  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.”

  “Embassy Chef?”

  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.”

  “Third-Generation Tsukiji Fish Market Man?”

  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.”

  “Best Chinese?”

  I had r
ead 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.

  “Irasshaimase!”

  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.

  The chef must have seen me staring at the man’s fresh wasabi.

  “Kare wa joren da yo,” the chef whispered.

  He was saying that the man was a regular customer. Fresh wasabi was apparently the chef ’s version of a loyalty reward.

  “How did you know I spoke Japanese?” I asked.

  The chef laughed but didn’t say anything. Maybe he had noticed me eating the white-flesh stuff first.

  The Murasaki chef went about his business and didn’t engage me in further conversation, so I pulled out Book One of Ramen Discovery Legend and began reading it at the counter. The story’s main character was twenty-seven-year-old Kohei Fujimoto, an entry-level executive at Daiyu Trading Company. During the day, Fujimoto wears a suit and acts like an ordinary salaryman. But at night, even though it’s against company policy to moonlight, he secretly runs a ramen stall in the park. Fujimoto’s dream is to achieve dassara. The word is composed of the kanji character, datsu, which means “to separate from,” and sara, the beginning of the word salaryman. Fujimoto wants to leave salaried life so that he can open his own ramen restaurant, but first he has to have lots of ramen adventures. Often he is accompanied by Ms. Sakura, a secretary at Daiyu, who knows about his secret ramen life. In the first episode, Fujimoto is having lunch with his boss at a ramen restaurant near their office. Fujimoto declares the broth substandard and makes a derogatory comment, which the owner of the restaurant overhears.

  “Who are you to criticize my broth?” the owner retorts. “I simmer my pig bones and chicken carcasses for ten hours, and I serve over six hundred bowls of broth a day. Shut up, unless you think you can do better!”

  The episode ends with Fujimoto defeating the owner in a ramen duel. Fujimoto wins by concocting a broth from the freshest free-range Nagoya chickens and the highest-quality kurobuta pork. He simmers it for twenty-four hours, reminding the owner of an earlier time, a time when the owner, too, simmered his broth that long, when the owner slept in his kitchen and woke up every few hours to skim off fat. Fujimoto reminds the owner that his ramen is his life. The owner comes to understand that Fujimoto has criticized his broth out of love, and he pledges to do better.

  I was in the middle of the next episode when I noticed that the Japanese man with the fresh wasabi was staring at my comic book. He was in his mid-thirties, maybe a year or two younger than me. From his suit and tie I deduced that he had come straight from work.

  He leaned over and spoke to me. His English was very good.

  “You like ramen?” he inquired.

  I looked up from the page I was reading.

  “Not really. I just bought this book.”

  The man resumed eating his sushi. But a few minutes later, he addressed me again.

  “Sorry to bother you, but have you ever heard of Ramen Jiro?”

  I sipped some green tea.

  “Is that a comic book?”

  He didn’t answer the question.

  “I’m Masa,” he said instead.

  “Andy.”

  We shook hands.

  “So, what’s Ramen Jiro?” I asked.

  Masa looked down at the sushi tray in front of him. From the look on his face, I could tell that I had just asked his favorite question in the whole wide world.

  Dear Momofuku,

  So I was dating Harue and Kim at the same time, and gradually cutting myself off from other people. My isolation only got worse after the consulting firm transferred me back to the United States. I was assigned to the firm’s New York branch, so I was back together with Kim, turning off the ringer when she stayed at my apartment in case Harue called. I only saw Kim on weekends, though. As the newest consultant in the New York office, I got last dibs on client assignments, which meant spending Monday through Thursd
ay, every week, at Kmart headquarters.

  On Monday mornings I would wake up at five thirty, kiss Kim good-bye, and catch a cab to LaGuardia Airport, where I would board a plane to Detroit. I always called ahead to reserve a subcompact at the Detroit Avis (I hated big, boatlike cars), but the Avis agents would invariably upgrade me to a midsize. I would complain, and the agents would stare at me like I was speaking another language. “Sir,” they would say, “it’s bigger.” Then they would hand me the keys to a lime-green Chevrolet Cavalier or a maroon Buick Skylark, and I would drive north along Interstate 75 to the city of Troy.

  Kmart had hired a team of consultants from our firm to fix what it called the cross-dock problem. A year earlier, Kmart’s warehouses had begun installing “intelligent” conveyor belts to route merchandise from supplier trucks to store-bound ones. The belts were supposed to save tens of millions of dollars a year, but for some reason it wasn’t happening. My job was to find out why. I would follow the signs on I-75 to Troy and take the exit at Big Beaver Road, the city’s main thoroughfare. Kmart headquarters was down a ways, past the industrial parks; it was right across the street from the Somerset Collection, a mall that considered itself too upscale to be called a mall. (The Collection’s tenants included Neiman Marcus, Barneys, and Saks Fifth Avenue.) As you drive along Big Beaver, Kmart’s offices were on the right, housed in brick-faced, hexagonal buildings linked by tube-encased hallways. The campus resembled a giant Habitrail (the modular hamster cage that was popular when I was a kid). Weirder, though, was the giant metallic skull that loomed over the cul-de-sac near the entrance. It was one of the spookiest things I had ever seen: a two-story-high cranium forged from smooth, shiny bronze. There were holes in its sides, and through the holes you could see lots of little metallic skulls inside the big one. In the lobby, a plaque explained that the skull was the work of an English artist commissioned to express the idea “We are our people.”