The Ramen King and I (23 page)

J
osh twirled spaghetti on a fork.

“Are you happy?” he asked.

After I returned from Japan, he promoted me from senior writer to senior editor, and then again to assistant managing editor. But he was putting pressure on me to develop stories about famous technology companies. “I want you to do stories about Apple, Microsoft,” he was always saying. “You know, companies people care about.” I knew that he needed those stories to sell his magazine, but big companies like those have big public relations departments that are very good at controlling what’s written about them. Where was the fun in that? He had taken me out to lunch because he knew something was wrong.

“I don’t know,” I said, biting into a slice of pizza.

“Well, you don’t look happy. These last few months, you seem like you’re somewhere else. You don’t talk much at the idea meetings. You don’t seem like you want to be here.”

I thought about telling Josh that, after failing to meet the inventor of instant ramen, I had been paying attention to things that I wanted to do (aside from dating and sex), and that they included making art and watching samurai movies and playing the trombone in a 1940s-style big band that had not had a gig in thirty years. I thought about telling him that I watched samurai movies on company time, and that I suspected I might be preparing for a battle, the nature of which I did not yet understand.

“I’ve just been going through some things,” I said instead.

Josh slurped his spaghetti.

“Anything I can do to help?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you need a vacation?”

I had another two weeks saved, so I took Josh up on his offer.

I spent the first week of my vacation at a spa resort in Mexico, near the U.S. border. It was the type of place that attracts women of a certain age who also want to get back in shape. I went on hikes in the surrounding mountains, and did Pilates. Every week, the spa hosted a guest lecturer, and the week I was there, the guest lecturer was an elderly woman with a Ph.D. who had coauthored a seminal book about the G-spot. One evening, she led a sexuality workshop in which she discussed, among other things, a surefire method for giving men multiple orgasms. “Can anyone lend me a water bottle so I can demonstrate?” she asked the audience. The technique involved squeezing, and as she acted it out on the water bottle, I glanced at her husband, who was running the slide projector. Amazingly, he wasn’t smiling. While at the spa, I felt that it would be good to get Ando off my mind for a while, so I tried not to think or talk about him. I wasn’t entirely successful. As I boarded the bus to return home, a graying lesbian announced that she was changing her cat’s name to Momofuku.

For the second week of my vacation, I enrolled in a creative writing workshop at Tassajara, a wooded retreat area affiliated with the San Francisco Zen Center. I wasn’t drawn by the Buddhism part of it, but rather by Katy Butler, a creative writing teacher who had been recommended by a friend. I found out when I arrived, though, that Katy would be co-teaching with a monk. I enjoyed the class, though it was often difficult to reconcile Katy’s insights about narrative structure with the monk’s koanlike directives, such as “Start anywhere” and “You don’t need more knowledge.” Every morning at five thirty, members of the monastery would run around ringing chimes to summon guests for a Zen sitting mediation. I usually slept through it, but one morning I dragged myself out of bed and walked to the Zen-do, a temple in the middle of the grounds. The ritual wasn’t unlike the sitting training I had been forced to do as a student in Kyoto, except that everybody was American (and no one, as far as I could tell, worked at a gas station). I had been sitting silently on a cushion for half an hour when the head monk began chanting in English:

Later the head monk identified what he had chanted as the four great vows of the bodhisattva. I didn’t know what that was about, but number two made me think of the hosts on
Go Forth
.

I came home thoroughly rested, and before reporting back to work, I wrote something else in my notebook.

When I told Josh I was going to leave, he seemed to understand. He threw a good-bye party in the large conference room, where he made a speech about my contributions. Everyone ate Vietnamese sandwiches, which was what Josh always served at resignation parties. I left the office in the afternoon and rode home on the Muni streetcar.

The next morning, I got dressed and walked out to the Muni stop. When I remembered that I no longer had a job to commute to, I just stood at the stop and watched the trains come and go. Matt had asked me to pay attention to my desires, and now I was not only single, but also unemployed. I didn’t know whether to move my right foot or my left foot, so for a long time I didn’t move either one.

Eventually I went home and watched a samurai movie.

B
etween watching samurai movies and writing the letters, I searched the Internet for books written by Ando. I found the two autobiographies,
Conception of a Fantastic Idea
and
Magic Noodles
, and I learned that he had penned several essay collections, including
Peace Follows from a Full Stomach
,
Noodle Road,
and
Food Changes with the Times: Field Notes of Momofuku Ando.
I ordered them all.

In his essay collections, Ando documents a series of culinary research excursions—in Japan and abroad—during which he studied noodles and other foods. Some of these have oddly beautiful titles, such as “Noodles Are Ambassadors of Peace” and “The Sadness of Tea.” More interesting, however, is the way in which the autobiographies seem to hide details of his life. There’s his murky decision to reside permanently in Japan, the paucity of details around his marriage to Masako, and of course, the mysterious disappearance of his eldest son, Hirotoshi. I knew from Nissin annual reports that Hirotoshi served as Nissin’s CEO in the early 1980s, shortly before his younger brother Koki took over, but in the books published after that, there was no mention of him.

One night, just as I was about to go to bed, an instant message popped up on my computer screen.

“Did you hear about the summit?”

The message was from Zen.

“The what?” I instant-messaged back.

Zen e-mailed me the URL of a Japanese newspaper article describing the fifth biennial World Ramen Summit, a conference sponsored by an organization called the World Instant Noodles Association. Under the official slogan “Happy World with Ramen,” the summit had brought together representatives of the world’s largest instant noodle manufacturers. Previous summits had taken place in Tokyo, Bali, Bangkok, and Shanghai; Seoul had hosted this fifth one. On the summit’s official Web site, I found a photograph of Ando presiding over a dais, and another in which he was enjoying a performance by South Korean schoolchildren. The summit had ended with participants signing the Seoul Declaration, in which they pledged to uphold common manufacturing standards and to donate more instant ramen to disaster relief efforts around the world.

“When did this happen?” I typed to Zen.

“Last week.”