The Ramen King and I Read Free Page A

Momofuku. I wanted to kiss her. My desire to kiss her was so strong that, as it swept over me, I didn’t think about Maureen or how she had slept with her ex-boyfriend or anything else in the world. There were a dozen or so people at the party, most of them playing poker and drinking whiskey. In the middle of the poker game, the host excused herself to go to the bathroom, and a few minutes later I followed. When she opened the bathroom door, I walked up and kissed her. Just like that. She kissed me back, and together we drifted into the bathroom and closed the door. We fell to the tiled floor and began taking off each other’s clothes. I didn’t have a condom, so we put our clothes back on, walked past the people playing cards, and got into my car. We drove to a 7-Eleven, where we bought a package of Trojans. On the way back to her apartment I couldn’t wait, so I parked the car near a pond where my ninth-grade science class once took a field trip to study erosion.
    The host and I had sex on the grass in the dark. When we got back to her apartment, everyone was gone, so we had sex in her shower, and again on her bed. I remember that, on the drive home to Brooklyn, I did my best to wipe the entire incident from my consciousness. I was not, I believed, a man who could cheat on his girlfriend. But I returned to Long Island under the pretense of visiting my parents several times. After each episode there was a sickening feeling in my stomach, and I swore to myself that I would never see the woman again. Of course, I always broke the promise. Over time, I convinced myself that Maureen was simply the wrong woman, and that if only I could meet the right one, I wouldn’t do what I did.
    The next thing I remember was looking for an excuse to break up with Maureen, and applying to several out-of-state MBA programs.
     
    Sincerely,
Andy

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