The Ramen King and I

by Andy Raskin

  “Sho!”

  The other men in line began giggling. The owner giggled, too. Taking pity on me, the man behind me explained what had happened.

  “Actually, he didn’t say ‘Nani.’ He was just asking if anyone could make change of a one-thousand-yen note.”

  I had been so anxious about making the call that I wasn’t listening very well. Now I had made a terrible mistake. My face flushed in embarrassment. I thought that maybe I should leave. Everyone in the restaurant was giggling.

  Soon the owner really did yell “Nani?” and I guess I felt the need to compensate for my mistake.

  “Dai!”

  The giggling stopped.

  I proceeded toward the counter. It was reddish orange and had two levels, one for eating, and another, above, for bowls in transit between patrons and the staff. Behind the counter stood the chef and a younger male helper, who I deduced was Mr. Sakai. Apparently willing to forgive my earlier gaffe, Mr. Sakai motioned me to the only open seat. It was on the left side of the counter.

  Inside, Ramen Jiro was a cacophony of slurping. The middle-aged man next to me was sitting on his suit jacket and had removed his tie, presumably to keep it clean. Some kids, probably students from Keio, had slung white bath towels around their necks, which they occasionally used to wipe the mixture of sweat and splattered soup from their faces. A sign on the wall just above the counter said RAMEN JIRO CORPORATE PHILOSOPHY. Below the title, there were six points:

  • Live cleanly, rightly, beautifully. Take walks and read books, laugh and save money. On weekends, fish, golf, and transcribe Buddhist texts.

  • Live for the world, for others, for society.

  • Love & Peace & Togetherness

  • Have the courage to say you’re sorry.

  • Unbalanced flavors lead to unbalanced hearts. Unbalanced hearts lead to unbalanced families. Unbalanced families lead to unbalanced societies. Unbalanced societies lead to unbalanced countries. Unbalanced countries lead to an unbalanced universe.

  • Would you like garlic on that?

  When my bowl was filled with noodles and soup, Mr. Sakai brought it over.

  “Would you like garlic on that?” he asked.

  Maybe I wasn’t fast enough or maybe he figured that because of my earlier mistake, I wouldn’t know the secret calls. The ultimate Jiro disgrace. I had spent all that time studying the Web site and practicing the codes in my apartment for nothing.

  I pretended not to hear Mr. Sakai and yelled, “Yasai karame nin-nin!”

  Mr. Sakai looked at me and smiled as he ladled on the extra vegetables, extra soy sauce flavoring, and double-extra garlic. The Web site had said that Mr. Sakai was a nice guy and could be an important ally in difficult situations. Sure enough.

  I examined the bowl in front of me. It was huge, yet looked doable. Of course, by now my judgment was unreliable. The noodles were thicker and darker than the average ramen noodle, and the broth—a combination of pork- and chicken-based stocks—was topped, as Masa had promised, with a half-inch layer of liquid lard. I picked up a pair of chopsticks in my right hand, and a soupspoon in my left.

  I began slurping.

  In contrast to Shota’s Sushi, which depicts happy sushi competition judges hovering over an ocean, when Fujimoto tastes a great bowl of ramen in Ramen Discovery Legend, he’s shown floating in a cloud of Nagoya chickens, dried anchovies, and the other ingredients he discerns on his tongue. And during my first five minutes of slurping at Ramen Jiro, that was how I felt. There was an explosion of pork and chicken flavor. In particular, the roast pork slices on top were richly marinated in soy sauce and nicely fatty.

  Slowly, though, I began feeling full. Then my stomach started to hurt. I moaned.

  “Uuuuuuuuu.”

  I was not the only one moaning. Some of the people around me were also in pain. Slurping and moaning, slurping and moaning. Occasionally, I paused to catch my breath. There was no way I could go back to Masa without finishing.

  It took nearly an hour, but I finished. I was shaking from the pain, and sweat dripped down my back.

  The owner saw my empty bowl.

  “Arigato,” he said.

  When I got up to leave, I felt feverish. I remembered how Masa told me that I would be sick, so I went back to my hotel and lay down on the bed in my room. I couldn’t sleep for long, though, because that afternoon I had to interview Casio’s CEO, Kazuo Kashio, at Casio headquarters.

  “Are you OK?” one of Casio’s public relations officers asked. “You don’t look well.”

  “Jet lag,” I said, and somehow I made it through the interview. When I got back to San Francisco, I called Masa.

  “Wait a second,” he interrupted. “Tell me again what the owner said after you put your empty bowl on the counter.”

  I repeated it. “Arigato.”

  “Oh, my God!” Masa cried. “He never thanks first-timers.”

  Masa explained that in the world of Ramen Jiro, I was now like a god. Two weeks later, though, I woke up in the middle of the night. Some sushi I had eaten for dinner was making its way back up my throat. I felt like someone had stabbed me in the ribs. I threw on some clothes, hailed a cab, and told the driver to take me to the nearest emergency room. When I got there, the doctor on duty ran some tests.

  “Have you eaten anything super-fatty recently?” he asked.

  I described the bowl of ramen at Ramen Jiro.

  “I can’t be sure if there’s a connection,” the doctor said. “On the other hand, I can’t be sure there isn’t. What I can tell you is that your gallbladder is infected and has to be removed.”

  I called Masa from the emergency room telephone booth and shared the diagnosis.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Same thing happened to my friend.”

  There was a window in my hospital room, but I was on such a high floor that I couldn’t see anything except sky. Maybe it was because I had never had surgery before, or maybe it was the lack of a street-level view, but my hospital room felt separate from life. As if I had been taken out of the game and asked to reflect on my performance from the sidelines.

  The night before the surgery, I caressed the smooth skin of my stomach, which would soon be cut open. (It was going to be a laparoscopic surgery, in which the gallbladder is removed through a small incision in the belly button, but still.) Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, I found myself thinking about Tetsuo and Junko and all the good times at Hamako. Here was Tetsuo surprising me with a whole crab for my birthday; Junko kicking out a customer for requesting a spider roll; Tetsuo lifting up a whole yellowtail tuna to show me the part he had cut for me.

  A phone sat on the table next to my hospital bed, and I stared at it for a while. I still remembered the number. It was April. Had they really closed the restaurant back in December?

  I picked up the phone and dialed. It rang twice before I heard Junko’s voice.

  “Hai, Hamako desu.”

  They hadn’t closed after all. But I was too ashamed to say hello, so I quickly hung up the phone. I told myself it was because I didn’t know how to say “gallbladder” in Japanese.

  I woke up after the surgery with pain in my side and bandages around my stomach. An orderly wheeled me back to my room to recover, and later that afternoon, my friend Andy came to visit. Known by my family as “the other Andy,” he’s my oldest friend. We met in summer camp when we were fourteen years old, and now he was living in Petaluma, north of San Francisco, with his wife and children. On the way over, he had stopped at my apartment to pick up my mail.

  I lay in bed while the other Andy went through the letters. Halfway through the stack, he held up a magazine.

  “Dude, what’s this?”

  The other Andy was holding the February 23, 2004, issue of Nikkei Business. Its cover was a close-up, shot from above, of a container of Cup O’ Noodles.

  Dear Momofuku,

  Harue sent me an online greeting card for my most recent birthday. This is the last vestige of ou
r relationship—acknowledging each other’s birthdays by e-mail. Usually I type out a brief note, but she sends online greeting cards. The card she sent this year showed a cartoon penguin singing a song that consisted of three notes. Sometimes I play the penguin song over and over, and each time the three notes end, I think about what I did.

  I cried and cried in the Kmart headquarters parking lot, and since I couldn’t stop crying, I called in sick and drove to the airport. I flew back to New York, where I cried in my apartment. I just kept on crying. The following Monday morning, I told my boss that I couldn’t stomach the idea of flying to Detroit, and he said that if I couldn’t do that, then I couldn’t work for his management consulting firm. I quit the next day.

  For weeks I walked around the Upper West Side, unemployed, like a zombie. I walked up Broadway and down Broadway. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. One day, I noticed an advertisement for a class called “How to Write a Magazine Article” at the West Side YMCA. It always sounded like fun when Kim had talked about researching stories for her magazine, so I enrolled in the class. Of course, Kim lived around the corner from the YMCA, so I was also hoping that I would run into her and she would want to date me again.

  Looking back now, Momofuku, I see that enrolling in the class was one of the few times in my adult life—aside from studying Japanese and some adventures around Japanese food—when I pursued a desire that was at least partially unrelated to women. The writing class would lead my romantic life to spiral even further out of control, but now I see that it also led me to you.

  It didn’t take long to find a new job. The head of a Japanese computer consulting firm with an office in New York plucked my résumé from a personnel agency and hired me to do what he broadly termed “Internet business.” The job wasn’t very demanding, so on company time I pitched story ideas to magazines. These were magazines that not many people had ever heard of, like Java Developer’s Journal (a publication devoted to the Java programming language) and Bank Technology News. Meanwhile, Harue applied to a college in Manhattan. It was her dream to study graphic design, and it was her dream to do it while living in Manhattan with me. She almost didn’t get in. The admissions department accepted her on the basis of her portfolio, but they sent her acceptance letter to the wrong address; by the time she got it, the deadline for the deposit had passed. I was so sure that I could be faithful if we were together again that I called the head of the graphic design department and asked if there was anything he could do. He kept saying no, so I stayed on the phone with him for forty-five minutes. Finally, he said “maybe,” and a week later, after receiving a second acceptance letter, Harue wired the deposit.

  I was afraid that what had happened with Maureen might happen with Harue—that living together would increase the chances I would cheat—so I arranged for Harue to rent a room in an apartment owned by a friend. Still, we did so many things together. We ate at nice restaurants. We went apple picking on Long Island. We sat in the stands at New York Yankees games, and we danced along with the grounds crew to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” We watched Seinfeld. I was afraid at first that Harue wouldn’t understand the jokes, but one of the greatest pleasures in my life became listening to her descriptions of episodes I had missed. She could barely stop laughing long enough to relate the plots. Harue was my date at family events like Thanksgiving. Aunt Pat, who fashioned herself a Buddhist—her outgoing voice mail greeting asked, “If not now, when?”—took a liking to Harue, who soon began accompanying Pat and me on secret Nathan’s-hot-dog runs before Passover seders. Pat could never figure out how to pronounce Harue’s name, so Harue told her that it sort of rhymed with caraway. After that, Pat always called her Caraway Harue to make sure she got it right.

  In short, Harue was my girlfriend. I often thought that she was the “one” I was meant to be with. And she was beautiful. Men in Manhattan would turn around on the street to gawk at her. My friends would tell me they were jealous. I think I was in love with her. But none of that mattered.

  My first story assignment for a magazine that most people had heard of came from Playboy, although it was the Japanese edition. My friend’s wife, Kumiko, worked as an overseas editor for the magazine and wrote reviews of Manhattan restaurants for Japanese businessmen. Kumiko paid me to translate the reviews so restaurant owners could hang them in their windows. She liked my translations, and one day she asked if I wanted to write a story under my own byline. The one she had in mind involved a dating service that catered to graduates of Ivy League and other top colleges. Kumiko said that, while Japan was lousy with matchmaking services, she had imagined that all Americans simply fell in love without third-party assistance. Japanese readers, she believed, would be fascinated to learn of an elite dating service in the States. I signed up for the service and ordered personal profiles for twenty-five women in the mail. (This was just before online dating caught on.) The profiles listed educational backgrounds, ages, and answers to questions such as “What is your idea of a perfect Sunday morning?” I told Harue what I was doing, and that I was only doing it for the byline. She wasn’t happy, but she trusted me.

  A twenty-seven-year-old filmmaker’s idea of a perfect Sunday morning was “coffee, sex, and Soho—not necessarily in that order.” I called her on a Saturday night and we arranged to meet early the next day at a café on Spring Street. On the phone she had said, “You’ll know me because I’m pale.” Pale can be good, but over her pale skin she wore a white jump suit, white tights, and white go-go boots. At the café she told me her last name, and it was a name you hear at the end of public television programs when they announce the underwriters. She stressed that she produced her films with her own money because her side of the family had been cut off from the side that underwrote TV shows. We got to only two out of three items in her perfect Sunday, so my article for the Japanese edition of Playboy wasn’t very exciting.

  For the next few weeks, however, my mind kept going back to the twenty-four profiles that were still stacked in a corner on my desk. I called another woman from the stack, and we ate dinner at a French restaurant. A week later, we went out to dinner again, but this time she invited me back to her apartment. She told me that I was irresistible, and because she said it, I believed that I was. I called another woman from the stack, and when she came up to my apartment, I had to ignore the look from my doorman that said, “How could you do this to Harue?” When I got through the first stack, I ordered another.

  It was around this time that I noticed a menu option on America Online titled “Member Directory.” I clicked on the heading, and a box popped up with a search form. After I typed in the key words “Manhattan AND single AND female,” a list of one hundred single women appeared. There was an icon next to the user names of people who were online, and a button to send an instant message.

  “Hi,” I wrote to the woman whose user name was NYCTEACH 212.

  “Howdy,” NYCTeach212 typed back.

  I didn’t think about Harue at all. I only thought about how exciting it was to be talking to a woman I had never met. I told NYCTeach212 that I had an MBA and that I spoke Japanese and that I played the trombone. I didn’t mention that I had a girlfriend. She said she was a schoolteacher, which I guess was obvious from her user name.

  “This might sound crazy,” I typed. “But would you like to get together for a drink?”

  NYCTeach212 and I met at a bar on the Upper East Side. Cute, petite, Jewish. A few hours later, we were making out on her sofa. She said, “What really turns me on about a man is his trapezius, and you have a nice one.” Momofuku, after all these years, I can remember how good it felt to have a stranger compliment my trapezius, but I can’t remember many words spoken by the women I was supposedly close to.

  Soon I was spending hours a day on America Online, sending instant messages to women I had met through the member directory. I would arrange dates while “working” in my office, and all day I would look forward to them. If Harue called to make plans, I would
say that I was hanging out with my friends Dan or Dave or Sam, or that I wasn’t feeling well. And I wasn’t only cheating with women I met online. I met people in coffee shops and in the gym, in restaurants and at parties. I met them at conferences and on business trips to Japan.

  Occasionally, I would think about what I was doing—the most intense moments of clarity came just after sex with someone who was not Harue—and it was as if I had awoken from a dream in which I had been possessed by someone else, someone utterly indifferent to betraying someone he cared about. I would feel dirty and ashamed. Like with Maureen, I would promise myself over and over that I would never cheat again as long as I lived, and often I would remain faithful for several weeks or even months. I would convince myself that I was a good boyfriend, as if these loyalty periods wiped away what I had done. But without fail, and with increasing frequency, I found myself back in the dream, calling women from the dating service and typing keywords into the America Online member directory.

  Remarkably, even though I was spending so much of my energy on romantic pursuits, I came up with an idea for an Internet start-up. I hatched it with a colleague at the Japanese consulting firm. His name was Zen, and the idea involved frequent flier miles and viral marketing. I wrote the business plan, and our boss gave us seed money. We pitched the plan to venture capitalists in San Francisco, and one of them offered to invest a million dollars, on two conditions: (1) The company had to relocate to Silicon Valley, and (2) I had to take over as CEO. We had made Zen the CEO, but the venture capitalists couldn’t always understand his English.