The Ramen King and I (26 page)

With Matt’s blessing, I had begun dating again. Together we came up with some ground rules. I was not to have sex until the fifth date (the number was relatively arbitrary; Matt said I could pick anything higher than three), and if I chose to do so, then I was not to date or have sex with anyone else. After a breakup, I was to wait at least thirty days before dating someone new (to ensure I wasn’t using a new person to squelch the voice in my head). If I ever felt like breaking these rules—these limitations—I was to pray to Ando. If that didn’t work, I was to call Matt. I had a couple of short-term relationships, and once I broke the five-date rule. But for the first time in my life, I didn’t cheat.

I had yet to find a job, but I was having success selling personal essays. Instead of writing about climbing the Williamsburg Bridge, I mined the transcriptions of the voice in my head for themes. I sold a story based on “YOU SHOULD BE MARRIED LIKE THE PEOPLE IN THE
NEW YORK TIMES
WEDDING ANNOUNCEMENTS” to National Public Radio, and I performed one about “YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO FINISH THE LARGE AT RAMEN JIRO” for a San Francisco reading series. I wrote a piece on “YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO FIND GREAT PARKING SPOTS, THE WAY YOUR FATHER ALWAYS DOES,” though I had yet to find an outlet for publication. The voice, I came to realize, was like a pointer to things that I cared about. Interestingly, the more I wrote about it, the more it came out in the first person, and in lowercase. It hardly disappeared, but its power over me seemed to wane. Sometimes it even made me laugh.

I had been on a date with a woman in a movie theater—we were watching Alfonso Cuarón’s
Children of Men
—when my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled out the phone and saw a series of square symbols, which was how my phone displayed Japanese Google Alerts. I had programmed my Google Japan account to send alerts to my phone whenever Ando’s name appeared in the news, but I received them so frequently that I rarely paid attention. Usually they were triggered by nothing more than a Nissin press release about some new Cup Noodles brand extension or a limited-time Chikin Ramen promotion. I once received one after a speech by the conservative politician Shinzo Abe, later elected prime minister, who during a campaign stop in front of the Instant Ramen Invention Museum likened his political fortitude to Ando’s persistence in the shack. (Abe would eventually resign as prime minister, citing among other insurmountable obstacles, a chronic case of diarrhea.) After the movie, I said good night to my date in front of her apartment building, and when I got home, I logged into my Google account. The alert I had received in the theater contained a link to a newspaper article from the
Tokyo Shimbun
. I clicked on it, reading the headline:

“Momofuku Ando, the Father of Instant Ramen, Is Dead.”

Why did I go to meet Ando?

“I think I went, Gary, because he wanted me to not meet him.”

 

 

 

G
ary looked confused and was about to ask more questions, but then the bassist called out another song and then another, and soon it was time for our fifteen-minute break. I put my trombone back in its case, grabbed a root beer from the warehouse’s makeshift kitchen, and walked out to the alley in the back. Gary was already outside smoking a cigarette, his trombone hanging from his elbow, and he was reminiscing with John, the second trombonist, about the days when they supported their families by playing dance halls and musical theater. Gary described how his friend Archie—the man who owned my Conn 78H before I did—made a good living in Las Vegas until producers won concessions from the musicians’ union. “First they moved the orchestra to a back room and piped the sound in through speakers,” Gary said. “It wasn’t long before they plugged a computer into the speakers and sent the musicians home.”

I wanted to know more about Archie, but just then my cell phone vibrated in my pocket again. I had just purchased a new one, with special software that displayed Japanese characters. After Ando’s death, I had been receiving Google Alerts on his name almost every hour—mostly obituaries and blog posts about him. Like Lawrence Downes, the
Times
editor who wrote “Appreciations: Mr. Noodle,” the rest of the world seemed as amused as I had been to learn that there was an inventor of instant ramen.

I flipped open the phone, and sure enough, it was a Japanese Google Alert. This one was a tiny item from a regional newspaper called the
Tokushima Shimbun
:

 

Gary saw the Japanese characters on my cell phone.

“What does it say?”

I told him.

“Are you going?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

I had learned that I was suffering from the Fundamental Misunderstanding of Humanity. I was dating women while honoring my limitations. I had learned to accept and love my parents in ways I previously could not.

“Gary, I don’t even know if it’s open to the public. Anyway, I just don’t think I need to go.”

Gary flicked his cigarette onto the pavement, extinguishing it with his foot.

“Yeah,” he said. “But what if Ando wants you to?”

T
here were no cheap flights from San Francisco to Osaka, but I found a good deal into Tokyo. Even adding in the cost of a Japan Rail Pass to ride the bullet train, I was coming out ahead. As the plane descended toward the Narita Airport runway, I remembered how on my last visit to Japan the waves reminded me of drops of lard atop a bowl of ramen. This time the Pacific Ocean seemed calmer. Tiny ripples were visible on its surface, like scales on the body of a big black fish.

At Narita, I exchanged dollars for yen and bought a ticket for the Narita Express, the train line that connects to downtown Tokyo. Boarding my assigned car, I stowed my suitcase in the luggage compartment and took my reserved seat. Next to me, a young Japanese man was staring out the window. His suitcase lay at his feet, not in the luggage compartment, and I could make out the initials “YVR” on the tag wrapped around the handle. It had been nearly three years since my last trip to Japan—the one when I failed to meet Ando—and I wanted to practice my Japanese.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but I noticed the tag on your suitcase. Were you skiing at Whistler?”

I knew that YVR was the airport code for Vancouver, which is only a two-hour drive from Whistler Mountain. A lot of Japanese people ski there.

“No.”

I waited for the man to tell me why he had gone to Vancouver, but he didn’t say anything.

“So why did you go there?” I finally asked.

“Did you know,” he said, “that there are seventeen casinos in British Columbia?”

I did not know that. “So you went to Vancouver to gamble?”

“No. I went to hike in the mountains.”

“How was the hiking?”

He raised his left arm, extending it straight out. It was covered in the sleeve of a blue jacket.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand.”

The man sighed, as if his meaning should have been obvious.

“Look how thin this jacket is,” he said, pinching the material.

“What I’m saying is, it was snowing in the mountains, and I couldn’t go hiking because I didn’t have a warm coat.”

“So you gambled instead?”

“A little. And I stared longingly at the mountains.”

 

 

 

M
y conversation partner got off the train at Shinagawa Station, and I got off a few stops later. I wheeled my suitcase through the food court and rode the escalator down to the street. Spotting my destination, I crossed the busy intersection at Komazawa-dori, ascended on the escalator, and walked into the lobby. The marble walls looked lighter than I remembered.

“Welcome to the Hotel Excellent,” said the man at the front desk.

This time, I had made a reservation before leaving San Francisco. After checking in, I went up to my room, which looked exactly the same, except that the yukata robe on the bed was plain white. It didn’t say “Hotel Excellent” in katakana. I wondered if it was a cost-cutting measure.

I had e-mailed the second (ground agent) Masako Ando that I would be arriving in the early afternoon, and she had offered to meet me after work. Greeting me in the Hotel Excellent lobby, she led me on a short walk to her favorite restaurant, a trattoria called Uncle Tom. The restaurant’s name was derived from the last name of the owner, Mr. Saotome, who happened to be a fan of the Beatles. He played only Beatles music in the restaurant, and he had decorated the walls with the art of John Lennon. He kept a diorama on his bar counter in which miniature Beatles dolls were arranged on a miniature concert stage. I ordered spaghetti and meatballs. Masako chose the penne with eggplant and asparagus.

“So I quit,” she said.

“You quit the airline?”

“Yes. I’m no longer a ground-based agent!”

“I thought you said that you were coming from work today.”

“I work at a publishing house now. We translate new-age books from America and issue them in Japan.”

“Isn’t that like opening a car dealership in Tokyo to import Chevrolets?”

“Funny. Anyway, I love my job,” she said. “I’m also studying
fura
.”

“Fura?”

“You know,
fura
dancing.”

I still sometimes get tripped up by the katakana words. “Hula dancing?”

“Yes,
fura
.”

The owner’s wife, Mrs. Saotome, brought our dishes.

“Masako, one of the reasons I wanted to see you was to apologize for what I did last time.”

She nodded, as if she was remembering, and for a while she didn’t say anything. Then she did.

“You left so suddenly. I thought that maybe I did something to make you mad. I kept asking myself what I did wrong.”

Japanese people, I realized, had voices in their heads, too.

“This is hard to explain,” I said, “especially in Japanese, but you didn’t do anything wrong. I think that I used you to escape my shame about not meeting Ando, and my shame about some other things, too.”

“Yes. That was how I felt. Used.”

“I am really sorry. I know it doesn’t change anything, but I’ve spent the last three years trying to understand why I behave like that.”

Masako chuckled. “Andy, a lot of men behave like that.”

“I don’t know if that’s true.”

“Well, none of them ever apologized before. So thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

We went back to our pasta, but then Masako looked up.

“You know,” she said, “you really missed out that day. After the Ramen Museum in Yokohama, I was going to take you to see the fire-works with two of my hot flight attendant friends. It was going to be
yori-dori midori
.”

The expression literally translates as “green all over the place,” but as an idiom it means to be surrounded by beautiful women.

 

 

 

I
offered to walk Masako home, but she said that her apartment was so small she didn’t want me to see it. I told her that I had lived in some very small Tokyo apartments, but she still refused. I was exhausted from traveling, so I didn’t argue. I hugged her good-bye, and she walked home by herself.

By the time I got back to the hotel, I was so jet-lagged that I had passed the point where I could sleep. So I opened my laptop computer and connected to the Hotel Excellent Wi-Fi network. The hotel may have skimped on the yukata robe, but now it had Internet access. I found the Web site of Kyocera Dome Osaka, the venue for Ando’s funeral, and learned that it was a baseball stadium. It had been called Osaka Dome until 2006, when electronics maker Kyocera bought the naming rights. The stadium held more than 35,000 people, and was home to the Orix Buffaloes, a team formed by the 2004 merger of the Orix Blue Wave (Ichiro Suzuki’s team when he played in Japan) and the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes. Madonna had performed there, as had Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, and the Rolling Stones.

I wondered if Japanese newspapers had published information about getting tickets, so I checked the Japanese search engines. There were several mentions of the funeral, but nothing more detailed than the time and place. I was about to give up and try again to sleep when, in the results of one of my search queries, I noticed an intriguing title: “Momofuku Ando’s Three Wives and Last Will and Testament.”

Clicking the title led me to an article in
Shukan Bunshun
, a gossipy weekly magazine. The article turned out to be an interview with Hirotoshi Ando, the son that Momofuku had deleted from his second autobiography. It began with a quote from Hirotoshi:

Now seventy-six years old, Hirotoshi went on to accuse his father of polygamy.

According to Hirotoshi’s account in the article, he was born in Taiwan in 1930, when his father, Momofuku, was only twenty years old. His mother was a Taiwanese woman whom Momofuku had married. When Momofuku emigrated to Japan, he left Hirotoshi and this first wife behind, but when Hirotoshi was still young, his mother sent him to Japan to live with his father:

“I believe that I came to Japan just before entering elementary school,” Hirotoshi said in the article. “My mother stayed back in Taiwan. My father had brought with him another lady from Taiwan, a so-called ‘other woman.’ This other woman became my father’s second wife, and she bore a child, though she (the mother) has since passed away. His current wife (Masako) is number three.”