The Ramen King and I (2 page)

I laughed when I read the
Times
piece. I laughed because I was not a person who never suspected there was an inventor of instant ramen. Here are excerpts from e-mails I received in the wake of An-do’s death:

My father sent me the
Times
clipping in the mail, along with an obituary that ran in the Long Island newspaper. He attached a note on his personal stationery. “It even made
Newsday
,” he wrote.

Zen just typed a text message that said, “He is died.”

 

 

 

T
hree weeks after Ando’s death, I stuffed a cup mute and a plunger mute into a knapsack, carried my trombone out to my car, and drove to rehearsal. The group I played in was a full big band—five trumpets, four trombones, five saxes, and a rhythm section—and it rehearsed in a warehouse in San Francisco’s South of Market district. Some of us called it the Monday Night Band, but there was no official name.

We never had gigs. We only rehearsed. We rehearsed on a cement floor surrounded by drills, saws, and workbenches. Many of the men in the band were more than twice my age. The lead alto saxophonist had just turned ninety-two. His tone sometimes wobbled, and he had trouble hearing instructions. The average age of the rhythm section hovered around eighty. By comparison, the trombone section was downright youthful. Aside from me, everyone was in their seventies. The band was led by the bassist, a thin man with a white beard who, when he wasn’t plucking his upright bass, worked in the warehouse building props for photo shoots and conference booths. A human figure made out of cereal boxes stared down at us from an open loft, and a golf cart dressed up to look like a spaceship (in which a telecom executive once made his entrance at a trade show) was permanently parked next to the grand piano.

Setting my trombone case on one of the workbenches, I screwed together the bell and slide sections and slipped in a Bach 7 mouthpiece. I blew a few notes, mostly low B-flats, to loosen my lips. I was playing the third trombone part, so I took a seat between the first and fourth trombonists, because that’s the traditional trombone section arrangement.

“One hundred twenty-two,” the bassist called out.

The sheet music was numbered. I searched the folder on the music stand in front of me and found “122” stamped on a Sammy Nestico composition titled “This Is the Moment.” The bassist counted off two measures in a laid-back swing feel. The band jumped into it. The third trombone part wasn’t very exciting—mostly whole notes and background figures—but I enjoyed harmonizing with the other horn players and trying to match their phrasing so we all sounded like one instrument. That’s the goal when you’re playing a Sammy Nestico chart.

The bassist had just waved his hand to cut off the final chord when Gary, the first trombonist, leaned toward me.

“Son, how much would you pay for a thick, juicy slice of prime rib, a baked potato, and a side of vegetables?”

Gary played a silver King Liberty from the 1940s with intricate floral engraving on the bell and a sound that filled you up. It was the third time in as many Monday nights that he had asked me the question about the prime rib, the third time he was going to share with me the deal he had found in Millbrae. I’m still not sure whether his memory was failing, or if he was just really excited about the deal.

“I don’t know,” I said, feigning a guess. “Twenty-three dollars?”

There was a time not long before all this when I would have informed Gary that, first of all, I don’t eat a lot of red meat, and second of all, he was about to share his tip for the third time. But one of the things I had come to realize was that I loved when Gary shared restaurant tips. That his sharing of them was the point, not the tips themselves.

“Well, son, what would you say if I told you there’s a spot in Millbrae where you only had to pay sixteen ninety-five?”

As Gary repeated the name of the restaurant, the bassist called out, “Eight.” It was the number for “Four Brothers,” the up-tempo Woody Herman classic that showcases the saxophone section.

“By the way,” Gary continued, pulling the music for “Four Brothers” from his folder, “I read the news.”

At first I had no idea what he was talking about.

“About your ramen guy.”

I had forgotten telling Gary about Ando.

“Oh.”

Gary normally lifted his horn to his lips long before an entrance, but even as the bassist began counting down to the first bar of “Four Brothers,” Gary’s silver King Liberty remained perched on his knee.

“Tell me again,” he said, “why did you go to meet the inventor of instant ramen?”

Before I could answer, we had to start playing.

The trombone parts on “Four Brothers” consist mainly of short hits punctuating the saxophone melodies, and there are long rests while the saxophonists take their improvised solos. What I’m saying is that I had plenty of time to ponder Gary’s question. I had plenty of time to sum it all up. Yet as we approached the fermata at the bottom of the page, I still wasn’t sure what to say.

O
ne sign that you are suffering from what Momofuku Ando called the Fundamental Misunderstanding of Humanity is that you betray people you love. A related symptom is that it’s hard to remember details of your past. You can remember some details, but the ones you think you would remember you forget, and the ones you think you would forget you remember. You find it especially difficult to describe people who have played an important role in your life. You want to describe them, but it’s difficult. They quickly turn into ghosts.

You feel that it shouldn’t be this way, but it is this way.

Why did I go to meet the inventor of instant ramen?

While considering Gary’s question, I naturally thought about the letters. Of course, they were only part of the story. There was another part, a series of adventures that began, of all places, in a sushi bar.

The letters cover a period that began roughly after I graduated from college and ended when I was thirty-eight years old. I found out about the sushi bar toward the end of that span, just a few years before Gary posed his question. I should do a better job of explaining how the letters and the events that began in the sushi bar came together. The weird thing is that, as I try to recall what happened in the sushi bar, I can’t remember any of the women. Often I was there on dates, but I remember only me, the sushi chef, and his wife. Another consequence, I am certain, of the Fundamental Misunderstanding of Humanity.

I first learned about the sushi bar two years after moving to San Francisco. The turn-of-the-century dot-com boom had gone bust, and I was working as a staff writer at a nationally published business magazine. One day, I happened to read a positive write-up about the sushi bar’s monkfish liver on the restaurant-review Web site Chowhound. I called for a reservation.

A woman answered the phone.
“Hai. Hamako desu.”

I didn’t speak Japanese right off the bat.

“Hello. Do you have a table for seven o’clock?”

“Sorry,” the woman grumbled. “We don’t take reservations.”

I got in my car and drove over. There was no sign in front, making the restaurant difficult to locate. The only clue to its existence was a row of tall, green sake bottles in the front window. That, and a business card wedged into the doorframe that said HAMAKO in Japanese. Entering, I was greeted by a middle-aged Asian woman whose silver-streaked hair had been tied back in a complicated bun. I recognized her voice from the phone, and she seemed annoyed.

“Can I help you?”

I looked around. Just six tables and a sushi counter. No other customers.