The Ramen King and I (24 page)

I probably could have gotten a press pass, even though I had quit my job. I could have met Ando.

I typed back an expletive.

“Andy, do you still want to meet him?”

“OK,” Zen typed. “In the next five seconds, tell me how you’re going to do it.”

“Five seconds?”

Zen sent another link. This one led to the page on Amazon Japan for Zen’s newest book,
Wow Meetings.
A line of marketing copy under the title said, “Based on the management coaching philosophy of Jew Howard Goldman!” Howard was the management coach we had hired at our start-up, and Zen considered him a mentor.

“You make it sound like Jew is his title,” I typed.

“Andy, it’s a term of respect.”

Zen explained that quickly coming up with ideas was a tenet of
Wow Meetings
, though a similar concept also appears in
Wow Method
under the heading “Answer Your Big Question in Five Seconds.” Adopting speed chess as a metaphor, Zen asserts that 86 percent of all moves are just as good as moves the same players would make without time limits. Of course, it’s virtually impossible to know what a player would do in the exact same situation without a time limit, so Zen had obviously made up the figure. I decided to go along anyway.

“I could write him a letter.”

“You’ve never written him a letter?”

“I e-mailed his PR people a bunch of times, but I guess I’ve never written directly to him.”

“I find that when I write a letter directly to the person I’m trying to meet, my success rate in hearing back from that person jumps thirty-six percent.”

Another made-up number, to be sure, but I was grateful for Zen’s support.

“By when will you write the letter?” Zen asked.

Wow Meetings,
I learned later, was all about making clear commitments with firm deadlines.

“How about in the next hour?”

“Wow,” Zen typed back.

I could have written it faster in English, but I felt that I would make more of an impact by sending the letter in Japanese.

I typed out a draft.

I e-mailed the letter to Zen so he could check my Japanese, and he made several edits. He struck the part about the ATMs because he felt it would be better if I sounded like a man who always walked around with only a few hundred yen in my pocket. He also changed the closing salutation from “Sincerely” to “Praying that these sentiments have reached your heart, I am . . .”

“Do you have his mailing address?” Zen typed.

I didn’t, but then I remembered a
Brady Bunch
episode where Bobby takes a photograph of Greg’s football game and blows it up to find out if one of the players stepped out of bounds. It might have been a real
Brady Bunch
episode, or it might have been a dream. (As a child, I often dreamed that I was a friend of the Brady kids, and that they would invite me over for lunch.) I connected my digital camera to my computer and downloaded the photos of Ando’s front gate. I zoomed in on the ANDO nameplate.

The address was right under the kanji characters for Ando’s name!

I sent the letter by Federal Express, and after two days, checked the tracking number. The letter had been delivered and signed for by “M. Ando.”

I e-mailed Zen: “That’s either Momofuku or Masako!”

Three days later, I received another express mail envelope. It came so quickly that I never imagined it could be a response. Unfortunately, Ando hadn’t written it.

There was obviously poor interdepartmental communication at Nissin, because this Fujioka seemed unaware of my previous attempt to meet Ando and my visit to the museum. I was about to throw out the envelope, when I felt something inside. I reached in and pulled it out. It was a small green book.

The book was titled
Praise the Appetite
and it was a newly published collection of Ando’s short, food-themed essays. Most were about his invention of instant ramen, but not all. In “I Am a Salad Bar Man,” he proclaimed a preference for simple foods (like salad) over lavish meals when traveling abroad. An essay about fish began with the line, “Striped bass brings up certain memories.” In “Instant Ramen Finally Reaches Outer Space,” he summarized Nissin’s successful effort to develop a version of instant ramen that could be prepared and consumed in zero gravity. First enjoyed by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi aboard Space Shuttle
Discovery
(on July 26, 2005), Space Ram came in a basic soy sauce flavor and—in response to Noguchi’s requests—also in curry, miso, and
tonkotsu
varieties.

Many of the stories in the book had been recycled from previous collections, but Ando had written a new introduction. It began,

Ando continued by talking about the importance of food in society, but then there was this:

What kind of desires, I wondered, was Ando talking about that he had to control?

In the back of the book, a bibliography listed Ando’s previously published work, including
Noodle Road
,
Peace Follows from a Full Stomach,
and the autobiographies. There was one title, though, that I had never seen before:

Dasshutsu
means “to escape.” The first character of that word,
, is the same as the first one in
dassara
. As for
kukyo
, I knew the meanings of the two characters, but not the combined word. Looking it up in my Kenkyusha Japanese-English dictionary, I discovered that
kukyo
is a fancy word for “difficulty.”

In 1992, Momofuku Ando authored a book called
How to Escape from Difficulty
.

The book was out of print, but I found it in the online catalog of a Kyoto bookseller. The company wouldn’t ship to the United States, so I had it mailed to Zen, who forwarded it to me. The jacket showed a shimmering white sphere with a long rainbow tail. I had read enough about Ando to know that the image was a reference to Halley’s Comet.

How to Escape from Difficulty
was yet another telling of Ando’s life story. Based largely on his previous autobiographies, it included the episode about being tortured during World War II, and the two years he spent in Sugamo Prison fighting charges of tax evasion. This book, however, started at a different point, and it was organized in a different way. Namely, it began with Ando losing everything in the credit association debacle. Then it described a transformation that took place in his soul, and how that transformation enabled him to invent instant ramen. The key to the transformation, he wrote, was his realization that, his entire life, he had suffered under a delusion. He called this delusion the Fundamental Misunderstanding of Humanity.

“
A
re you hungry?” my mother asked.

It was Thanksgiving, and she had just met me at the baggage claim in Kennedy Airport. I thought about making a crack about Woody Allen, but instead I just hugged her.

By transcribing the voice in my head, I had learned to recognize it in others. When my mother asked me about being hungry, I felt its presence. It was telling her that she needed to keep me well fed in order to be a good mother. Had it told her that she was a bad mother when I cried as a child? Had it somehow been responsible for her lashing out at me? I wondered, too, if she had inherited the voice from her mother, and I realized that she probably had. Grandma Millie died in a car accident caused by a teenager who ran a stop sign, and after we all cried for a month, Grandma Millie’s friends told us that she had been stockpiling sleeping pills in case her body deteriorated to where she couldn’t take care of herself. The voice in Grandma Millie’s head told her that she shouldn’t be a burden on her children or her grandchildren. She must have inherited the voice from her parents, who must have inherited it from their parents.