When we arranged to meet Andy Raskin, the author of The Ramen King and I, for lunch during his recent visit to New York, Momofuku Noodle Bar seemed like the most logical option. We talked about how he had first gotten into manga as an exchange student in Japan. “When you’re starting to read,” he explained, “it helps to start with things are geared to junior high school kids, books that don’t use as many characters, and use the easier character systems.” Many of his favorite manga series had to do with food, and he enthused about multi-volume epics like Oishinbo and Ramen Discovery Legend.
Comic books like this play an recurring role in Raskin’s memoir, but ultimately it’s a highly personal tale about how his fascination with Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen noodles, helped him cope with a lifelong psychological block that led him to self-sabotage relationship after relationship. Although he does not use the language of 12-step programs to describe his recovery, part of Raskin’s process did include choosing what such programs would call a “Higher Power,” to whom he was instructed to address in a journal. He chose Ando, then decided he wanted to go meet the man (who was then in his 90s) in Japan.
“I was not thinking about a book,” Raskin points out; his original intention was to maybe get a magazine article out of an audience with Ando. But he never got near his self-selected hero—and yet, it was in that “failure” that he made one of his most powerful emotional breakthroughs: He learned to recognize the inner voice that had been tearing his life down from the inside ever since he was a child.
So if the interview was a bust, how did the book come about? Raskin attended the Niemann Conference on Narrative Journalism in 2006, and sat in on a critique session where four agents gave notes on blindly submitted first pages. “It degenerated into an atmosphere of lions ripping apart raw meat,” he recalls, but Stuart Krichevsky always found something to praise in each sample—and he invited the rest of the audience to submit their first pages, with one lucky writer receiving a consultation. Raskin took the plunge, talking about a Japanese television show he particularly admired, and that led to a correspondence with Krichevsky about developing a proposal concentrating on the failed interview attempt, but for a long time the project went nowhere. “I couldn’t find a way into the material,” Raskin confided. “I didn’t think I could write about my personal side.”
Later, after Ando’s death, Raskin revisited the proposal, but even then it wasn’t until he actually sold the book that he told his editor that there was this whole other story that ought to be included.
As the servers cleared away our ramen bowls, we asked Raskin if he still heard that voice, doing its best to convince him he wasn’t good enough to be happy or successful. “There’s nothing like a book launch to get the voice going,” he smiled. “But awareness is what transforms my reaction.”