The Ramen King and I (13 page)

“That’s a little weird, Jude.”

“What’s weird?”

“It would be a little weird for them to have you in their living rooms.”

“What’s weird about that?”

“Where would they put you, on the mantel?”

“OK, they can bury the urns in their backyards.”

“What if they move? You’ll be buried in some stranger’s backyard.”

“They can dig me up and take me with them.”

Shortly after the funeral, my grandfather moved to an assisted-living facility. To prepare his house for sale, my parents, along with my aunt and uncle, flew to Florida. They sent Polaroids to all our relatives of items my grandfather didn’t want, and asked everyone to put in requests. I didn’t have a big apartment, so I inquired about my grandmother’s KitchenAid mixer. Everyone, it turned out, wanted the KitchenAid mixer. I settled instead for a framed photograph of my grandparents on their sailboat, a dictionary on a display stand, and Grandma Sylvia’s recipe box. UPS delivered the package a few weeks later. I hung the sailing photograph in my living room, and set up the dictionary on its stand near my desk.

The recipe box was made of pressboard, its cover attached with a rusted hinge. Opening the box, I saw that it was stuffed with index cards. I wondered if Grandma Sylvia’s clam chowder recipe was among them, so I reached in and pulled out a random card.

The title was “Cousin Jody’s Asian Coleslaw,” and the list of ingredients included “instant ramen, one-half cup (crushed).”

T
he various accounts I have read of Ando’s life agree on many points. For instance, they all state that his parents died in Taiwan when he was very young (although none explains how), and that, along with two older brothers and a younger sister, he was raised by his paternal grandfather, a textile distributor.

He calls his grandfather “a strict disciplinarian” and an excellent role model for life as an entrepreneur. Starting in elementary school, Ando was expected to do his own laundry and to cook for himself. He learned how to dress chickens, and made box lunches each morning for himself and his sister. He was surrounded by the vitality of commerce—steady streams of customers and suppliers, workers busily preparing shipments, and the sounds of looms operating in the neighborhood.

At age twenty-two, with an inheritance from his father, Ando started a company to import socks from Japan. He focused on synthetic fabrics that were just becoming available. Demand was so high that, to ensure supply, he left Taiwan and established a wholesale buying operation in Osaka. On the side, he took management classes at Kyoto’s Ritsumeikan University. By the time he was twenty-eight, Ando had built a thriving business.

Four years later, during one of Ando’s visits back to Taiwan, Japanese warplanes attacked Pearl Harbor. In
Conception of a Fantastic Idea
, Ando writes that, as he listened to radio reports of the bombing, he decided to return to Japan and never again set foot in his home-land. But in none of his autobiographies does he really explain why, and it’s easy to draw the conclusion that he’s not being entirely forthcoming.

Of the decision, he simply states (in
Magic Noodles
), “It is difficult to communicate exactly how I was feeling at the time, except to say that there was something cutting into my heart.”

T
he longer I was abstinent from dating and sex, the more ramen showed up unexpectedly in my life. Typically, it would appear just after I had written in my notebook.

I called a writer I knew in Chicago and left a voice mail message. He had just written a book about economic development in Asia, and I congratulated him on breaking into the
New York Times
best-seller list. The next day, he called back. I was at lunch, so he left a message:

“Cool, I’d be into doing the story. Give me a call back and we’ll talk. And thanks for the kind words on the book. Hey, you used to live in Japan, right? Are you by any chance into instant ramen? Because I am getting totally into it. My favorite is an Indonesian brand called Indomie. Their Chicken Rendang has five—count ’em—five flavor packets. This is not instant ramen. This is theater!”

I once met Murakami. It was while I was getting my MBA. I was taking a Japanese literature class at the University of Pennsylvania, and for my final project I translated one of his short stories. It took place in a hotel, and one of the main characters was a guest who was always smelling her hand. My professor happened to know Murakami’s wife, who arranged for me to meet him at Princeton (where he was giving a lecture). I found him in a dark, Gothic hallway, and sitting on cement benches, we discussed the story I had translated. I asked Murakami what the smell on the woman’s hand represented, but he wouldn’t tell me. “What do you think it represents?” he kept asking back. I couldn’t understand why a writer would write something like that and not tell a student what it represented.

Several stories in
Spider Monkey in the Night
had food-related titles, including “Croquettes,” “Donut-ification,” “Eel,” “Beer,” “Milk,” and “Donuts Again.” In the final chapter, Murakami had composed a song to the tune of “If I Had a Hammer.” He called his version “Ramen in the Morning.” “Honestly,” Murakami wrote in an afterword, “I don’t like ramen. I don’t even like walking past ramen restaurants. But with this ramen song, it was as if I had been dragged by fate to write it. If you feel the urge, sing along.”

Honestly, I had nothing better to do.

On the fourth day of my vacation, my friend Ellen called. It was Ellen who, a year earlier, turned me on to the record company that produced the CDs for Pottery Barn and Eddie Bauer. We had been driving to the beach in her car when I opened her glove compartment and discovered that it was filled with CDs branded by chain stores. She owned
Williams-Sonoma: Dinner Is Served
,
Pottery Barn: Sounds of Soul,
and
Swingin’ Holiday
, a collection of big-band Christmas songs distributed by plus-size clothier Lane Bryant. “I don’t know how I got that one,” Ellen said at the time. “I’m a size four.”

For a long time, Ellen and I enjoyed an ambiguous relationship that included a onetime hookup, but now I couldn’t do that. She said she was house-sitting at her wealthy friend’s home, and that there was a big pool. Her friend Carla would also be there, and Ellen invited me to join them. At first I thought it might be a bad idea, because the last thing I needed on Day Fifty-Nine was to be alone with two bikini-clad women, one of whom I had been involved with. But I was bored sitting at home, and Ellen and I wouldn’t be alone.

Not that I thought it would do any good, but I found myself whispering Matt’s prayer as I drove south on Highway 101.

The house was in Woodside, a Silicon Valley suburb famous for sprawling homes, wooded vistas, and dot-com millionaires. It took about an hour to reach it from San Francisco. Ellen’s directions led to a curvy street and then a dirt road. I made my way up a long, steep driveway and parked in front of the house, one of the largest I had ever seen. The front door was open, so I walked in. The owners must have been art collectors; huge contemporary paintings hung on the walls. I spotted Ellen and Carla through the back window. They were sitting by the pool.

“Hey, you guys.”

Ellen was overjoyed to learn that I had brought along
Jiffy Lube’s Romantic Moments
, a CD I had purchased while getting an oil change.

“I cannot even believe this thing exists,” Carla said.

Ellen wore an orange bikini and she was lying on a deck chair. Carla’s bikini was turquoise, and her feet dangled over the pool’s edge. Part of me was disappointed not to be alone with Ellen, but part of me was relieved.

“Hey, why aren’t you at the magazine today?” Carla asked.

She and Ellen worked as freelance marketing consultants, but they were between contracts, and the downturn in the Silicon Valley economy was making it hard to find new jobs. I sat on the deck chair next to Ellen’s.

“I’m off for a week. I had the vacation time.”

“Use it or lose it,” Ellen said.

“Right.”

Carla wanted to know why I hadn’t taken advantage of the opportunity to travel.

“I thought about it, but I couldn’t come up with anywhere I wanted to go.”

“Come on,” Carla said. “There’s no place you want to see?”

Carla slid into the pool and climbed onto an inflated blue raft. She paddled around with her hands.

“Mostly I’ve just been cleaning my apartment and reading,” I said.

Carla didn’t give up.

“You mean to tell me that there’s nothing in the whole world that interests you?”

I thought about it.

“Well, there’s this one thing,” I admitted.

“Yeah?”

“You remember when I was in the hospital?”

Ellen remembered, sort of.

“For your spleen, right?”

“Gallbladder. Anyway, the day after the surgery, I read an article in a Japanese magazine about the inventor of instant ramen.”

Carla sat up on her raft.

“The inventor of what?”

I repeated it.

“You mean, like Top Ramen?” Carla asked.

“That’s one of his brands.”

I told Carla and Ellen about how Ando spent a year in his backyard shack, and about the managerial training on the deserted island. I did not tell them that I had been writing letters to Ando about my love life. They were both laughing.

“He also invented the cup. You know, Cup Noodles. And he built a museum dedicated to instant ramen. It’s supposedly across the street from his house.”

“I can’t explain why,” Carla said, “but there’s something inherently funny about instant ramen.”

Ellen agreed. “I know a guy who writes songs about instant ramen and sings them at parties.”

I told her about Murakami’s ramen song, and sang a few bars.

“So, is this inventor of instant ramen still alive?” Ellen asked.

“Barely. He’s ninety-four. According to the article, though, he sometimes comes to the museum and makes instant ramen with the visitors.”

“What I would like to know,” Carla mused, “is what makes a guy decide to spend a year in a shack trying to invent an instant noodle.”

“Right?” I said. “I was wondering about that, too.”

Carla lay back down on the raft, closing her eyes. “You know, you should interview him and write an article about his company.”

“Tried that. Their PR department stopped returning my e-mails.”

Ellen: “Where does he live?”

“In Japan. Osaka.”

“You should just go there!” Carla yelled. “Just show up.” She was still lying on the raft, but laughing now. “Maybe he’ll make instant ramen with you.”

With that, Carla began splashing water in the direction of my lounge chair. She prepared to defend herself, expecting me to lean over the edge of the pool and splash back. But she needn’t have worried, because her suggestion had sent my mind elsewhere.