The Ramen King and I

by Andy Raskin

  According to the plaque, the sculpture was titled the “Kmart Corporate Head.”

  I couldn’t see the Head from the Cross-Dock Team office, but it was always in the back of my mind. I had to cut through the parking lot to get to the warehouse (where I would question Kmart staff about the conveyor belts) and on the way over I would feel the Head’s icy gaze upon me. I slept at night in the Somerset Inn, a small hotel attached to the Somerset Collection, and once I had a nightmare in which the Head was chasing me and I was trying to move my legs but I couldn’t run away. I would ask Kmart employees if they found the Head creepy, but no one seemed to mind it. All they talked about was the cross-dock problem. They talked about how the conveyor belts were supposed to scan a bar code label on every box, and how sometimes the suppliers put the label in the wrong spot. They talked about how the suppliers often used the wrong data format when transmitting computerized packing lists. The result was a huge reject pile in the warehouse that was expensive to sort through. I advised my boss, the head consultant on the project, that the key to solving the cross-dock problem was educating the suppliers on how to prepare their shipments, and he agreed. “Why don’t you write a manual?” he suggested. Actually, it was more of an order. So my job became writing a book for Kmart suppliers about where to place bar code labels on their boxes and how to create electronic packing lists using the correct data format.

  As awful as that sounds, for a while this arrangement actually worked for me. I felt like my life was going great because I was working for a big company and I had Kim, who was beautiful and athletic and intelligent. Never mind that I was still talking to Harue on the phone as if she were my girlfriend. The even stranger thing, Momofuku, is that I barely knew Kim. I mean, Momofuku, I’m telling you virtually nothing about her. Nothing about who she was aside from her blond hair and a handful of things she said. I’ve told you more about conveyor belts than about a woman I dated for two years. That’s partly because I can’t remember much. But, for the most part, I never knew what she loved or what she cared about or what she was afraid of. Why is it that I never realized how sad that was until now?

  My Kmart book had grown to a hundred pages—all created in Microsoft PowerPoint—when Kim and I took a vacation in Seattle. We rented a car and drove to the San Juan Islands, where we planned to go mountain biking and stay in bed-and-breakfasts. We were boarding a ferry when she mentioned an old friend in Seattle.

  “Is it a guy?” I asked.

  It was a guy.

  “Did you guys date?”

  “For like a second.”

  I imagined the guy to be much taller than me, and much more handsome. I imagined that when they dated they were very close, much closer than Kim and I were, and that he was never bleak. I imagined that they laughed all the time and sang songs together in the car. I was jealous, even though I still had another girlfriend on the other side of the world.

  When we went mountain biking, I wondered if Kim went mountain biking with her old boyfriend, and if he was a better mountain biker than me. One night, in one of the bed-and-breakfasts, she asked me to pull her hair during sex, and I wondered if that was because she was thinking about how he used to do that. She never told me his name, and I was afraid to ask what it was.

  The day we planned to head back to Seattle, fog settled over the ferry port. We were in the car again, waiting in a long line to board the ferry, when I was so overcome with jealousy about going back to Seattle (because Kim’s ex-boyfriend lived there) that I said, “I love you.” Kim didn’t say anything back. Instead she got out of the car and went for a walk in the woods around the ferry terminal. When she returned, she still wasn’t talking.

  We drove off the ferry on the Seattle side. The road had only one lane in each direction, but there was so much traffic that we were barely moving. I glanced at Kim in the passenger seat and she was staring straight ahead. I was pretty sure she was planning to break up with me. I panicked, marking all of the “lasts” in my mind: the last time I stayed at her apartment; the last time we saw a movie together; the last time we ran in the park; the last time we had sex.

  I thought maybe there was still something I could do, so I put my hand on Kim’s shoulder. Then I reached under her shirt. At first she seemed indifferent, but what followed was a car sex scene like the one in her favorite book (except that my genitals survived intact). Now everything was going to be OK, I thought, because without saying anything, Kim had basically told me that she loved me.

  I spotted a blueberry bush on the side of the road.

  “Let’s get out and pick some blueberries,” I proposed.

  I pulled over, but Kim didn’t get out of the car. Picking blueberries by myself, I felt the panic return. How could a woman say no to picking blueberries by the side of the road with a man she loved? The only explanation I could think of was that she didn’t love me after all, and that she was still planning to break up.

  We flew together as far as Chicago; from there Kim returned to New York and I to Detroit. I complained to the Avis agents about being upgraded to a midsize and left Detroit Metro Airport in the front seat of a purple Pontiac Grand Am. The next morning I was so obsessed with whether Kim was going to break up with me that I found it impossible to write about bar code labels. In the middle of the workday, I drove across the street to Saks, where I picked out a lacy white bra and matching white panties that made me hot just looking at them, and the thought of Kim wearing them drove me crazy.

  That night, in my hotel room, the phone rang.

  “We need to talk,” Kim said.

  I don’t remember anything else she said, but she made it clear that she wasn’t happy and that she wanted to be apart. After I hung up, I threw the phone receiver at the wall so hard that it made a hole. How’s this for self-delusion, Momofuku? I convinced myself that I was the victim, and that Kim had betrayed me.

  The next morning, I left the hotel and got into the purple Grand Am. It was almost Thanksgiving, so the air was cold and heavy; Big Beaver Road was veiled in a thin layer of snow. I drove across the street to Kmart headquarters and parked in a spot directly in front of the Kmart Corporate Head. The lingerie I had bought for Kim lay on the passenger seat, in the bag from Saks. I felt that I should get out of the car because people were expecting me in the Cross-Dock Team office, but I just sat there, staring at the Head. Then I began to cry. Snow was falling now, partially obscuring the view through the windshield, but I could still make out the Head hovering in front of me.

  Just then, I thought of Go Forth, and in the front seat of the Grand Am, I tried screaming the line from the show.

  “I wanna ___!”

  I got the first two words out. But I couldn’t think of anything—not a single thing—to fill in the blank. This put me in touch with something I can only describe as horror. It was a horror I must not have been ready to face, because I only let myself feel it for an instant.

  Sincerely,

  Andy

  After being asked his favorite question in the world, Masa told me that Ramen Jiro was a small restaurant on a triangular plot near the edge of Keio University, the elite school in Tokyo where he had been an undergraduate. Ramen Jiro served ramen, Masa explained, and eating ramen was all anyone did there.

  “Yet,” he insisted, “Ramen Jiro is not about ramen.”

  I asked what it was about.

  “Difficult to explain,” Masa said. He seemed to struggle for the right words. “I guess it’s something on another dimension.”

  I ordered more sushi. For the next thirty minutes, Masa related his experiences at Ramen Jiro.

  The first time he went, he was a freshman at Keio University. A senior had invited him, explaining on the way to the restaurant what to do and what not to do.

  “The first rule,” Masa said, “is that no matter what, you can’t talk to the owner. He’s this serious-looking old man, and you can only talk to him if you’re on the university judo team. That’s because he sometimes works out wi
th those guys. Anyway, I was on the tennis team, so no talking. The second rule is that you can’t leave any noodles or soup in your bowl. That is difficult because regular chashu men [a bowl of ramen with roast pork slices on top] usually comes with very thin pork slices. But this guy gives you very thick pork. There is a humongous amount of noodles, and a half-inch-high layer of liquid lard on top.”

  “It sounds disgusting,” I said.

  “Actually, it is disgusting,” Masa confirmed. “The first time you eat it, you get sick. But the same day, around midnight, you start to feel like, ‘Oh, my God, I wanna eat that again.’ So the next day you go back, and you eat it, and you go, ‘What the heck was I thinking? This is crazy. I don’t want to ever eat this again.’ Then you just keep going in this cycle, until finally you are addicted.”

  I ordered cold sake for both of us—a junmai from Kochi Prefecture.

  Masa explained that the moment of truth in any Jiro visit was when you gave your order. There were basically just two items on the Jiro menu: small and large. What Masa had been talking about so far was the small. As a rule, a first-timer was not supposed to even think about a large, but Masa said the decision was harder than it sounded.

  “The wait is always at least forty minutes. Then you finally reach the entrance, and this gray-haired, big-bellied owner looks up from his vat of boiling pig carcasses and says ‘Nani?’ Then you have to say either ‘sho’ (small) or ‘dai’ (large). And even if you’ve made up your mind that there’s no way you could eat a large that day, after standing in line in front of this owner and watching him cook soup for, like, five or ten minutes, you’ll start whispering to yourself, ‘Maybe I can do it! Maybe I can do it!’ And when you’re in that mode, you’re in trouble. Because when he all of a sudden comes at you with ‘Nani?’ you’ll just blurt out ‘dai!’—large. And then you’ll think, ‘What the hell did I do? I can’t eat that much.’”

  “It sounds like you don’t really know what you’re going to do until you come face-to-face with this guy.”

  “Exactly. You get in front of him, and you really can’t think straight.”

  Masa took a sip of sake and his face turned serious.

  “Once, after I finished, like, one-third of the noodles, I felt like I had to go to the bathroom.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “There’s actually a bathroom there, but no one uses it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s too embarrassing! Think about it. Everybody’s waiting forty minutes to get in, and if you make them wait more, the owner’s going to get mad at you. You’re always feeling this kind of pressure. Pressure. Pressure. I started slowing down because I couldn’t finish it, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, how can I get out of this place?’ So I put the pork underneath the noodles, trying to at least hide it, and then I put the bowl on the counter and screamed, ‘Thank you very much—good-bye!’ And I just ran away and couldn’t go back there for three or four months because it was so embarrassing. I was so traumatized because I couldn’t finish it. I was like, ‘What if it happens again?’ ”

  Masa said he suffered alone for much of the time he stayed away from Ramen Jiro. Eventually, though, he admitted his failure to friends. To his surprise, he learned that many of them had encountered similar problems, so they banded together to perfect their pre-Jiro conditioning.

  “You can’t have a big breakfast, obviously,” Masa warned. “But an empty stomach is almost as bad. My friends tried a lot of different foods before going there. This one guy figured out that the best thing to have was fruit. And the best fruit was an Asian pear. The worst was a banana. Don’t even think about eating a banana. Anyway, we would eat a pear before going there, and then be like, ‘I think I’m ready. I think I’m ready.’ ”

  That night, when I got home from Murasaki, I typed “Ramen Jiro” into Google’s Japanese search page. I found not only the street address and a map but also a Web site that oriented Jiro newcomers. A section called “How to Jiro” was divided into advice for novices (“If you need something to drink, order the tea”) and advice for Jiro old-timers (“Don’t even think about ordering tea. Remember, this water goes into the Jiro broth and boils the Jiro noodles. It’s too precious to be wasted on tea”). Referencing a schematic diagram of the counter—with locations labeled A, B, C, etc.—the Web site deconstructed the ordering ritual that Masa had described. I learned, for instance, that when the owner was ready to present your bowl, his younger assistant, Mr. Sakai, would stand at the location labeled G (near the cash register) and repeat your order back to you. In other words, he would say “sho” or “dai,” depending on which you had chosen. This, it turned out, was a cue meaning, “Your order is ready, what toppings would you like?”

  The Web site outlined acceptable responses, which were a kind of Japanese code:

  Karame: Extra soy sauce flavoring

  Dokayasai: Double-extra bean sprouts and cabbage

  Abura: Extra-thick layer of lard

  Abu-abu: Double-extra-thick layer of lard

  Nin-nin: Double-extra minced garlic

  According to the Web site, if you didn’t make your topping call quickly enough, Mr. Sakai would say, “Would you like garlic on that?” Hearing this line from Mr. Sakai was the ultimate Jiro disgrace, because it meant that you would be denied the pleasure of ordering extra vegetables, lard, and flavorings.

  I settled on the codes for extra vegetables, extra soy sauce flavoring, and double-extra garlic, and practiced yelling them rapid-fire in my apartment.

  “Yasai karame nin-nin! Yasai karame nin-nin!”

  After a few weeks, when I felt ready, I proposed a story about Casio, the Japanese electronics firm, to Josh, the editor in chief of the business magazine where I worked. I had read an article about Casio in Nikkei Business—Japan’s equivalent of BusinessWeek—that said the company was famous for shunning consumer input when designing products. The result was a history of strange gadgets that often turned out to be failures. Ill-fated Casio calculators of the 1970s and ’80s, for example, included the QL-10, which doubled as a cigarette lighter; the PG-200, which doubled as a pachinko machine; and the QD-151, which, long before anyone knew what to do with one, doubled as a mobile stock-trading device. But once every decade or so, the company’s “producer is king” approach led to huge hits, such as the first cheap portable calculator (the 1972 Casio Mini), G-Shock watches (which became popular with American skateboarders in 1991), and ultrathin Exilim digital cameras (promoted in 2002 as a fashion accessory).

  I called Casio’s press relations office and set up some interviews.

  In Tokyo, I rode the Chuo Line to Casio’s engineering center on the western outskirts of the city. There I interviewed Yukio Kashio, the youngest of the company’s four founding brothers. In what was a highlight of the trip, Yukio showed me how to divide 1 by 3 on the Casio 14-B, a 1959 calculator the size of a desk. Cordoned off by ropes in the lobby and constructed from telephone relay switches (transistors were not available when it was designed), the machine clicked and clacked to produce the dividend.

  After the interview, I returned to Tokyo proper and rode the subway to Mita Station. Exiting the turnstiles, I followed signs to Keio University. A light rain was falling, so I stopped at a supermarket to buy an umbrella. I also swung by the fruit aisle. Ten minutes later I was standing in line—pear in belly—at Ramen Jiro.

  There were around twenty men—and no women at all—in front of me on line. The rain had gotten heavier, so everyone held umbrellas. Through a window in the side of the restaurant, I could see the owner. His thin gray hair was almost gone, and he wore a dirty white apron over a dirty white undershirt.

  I rehearsed saying “Sho!” over and over in my head.

  The wait was almost exactly forty minutes, just like Masa had said, and when I finally got near the front of the line, I saw the owner up close. His apron was smeared with dried pig and chicken blood, and the impressive belly protruding from his modest fram
e kept him from getting too close to the soup vats he was tending.

  “Nani?” I heard him say.

  I replied as decisively as possible, and with the best accent I could muster: