Customer Reviews

The Ramen King and I: How the Inventor of Instant Noodles Fixed My Love Life

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Ramen King and I is a fun, engaging read, a highly personal memoir about love, sex, and one man's relationship to...Momofuku Ando. In The Ramen King and I, American journalist Andy Raskin recounts how he made instant-ramen inventor Momofuku Ando his spiritual guide - despite never actually having met the man -- while attempting to discover why he sabotages relationships with women. Thoughout the book, Raskin is unable to maintain healthy long-term relationships with the women in his life. He juggles girlfriends on multiple continents and falls in and out of love in the time it takes to boil water for a serving of Nissin Chikin ramen.

Raskin travels to Osaka to visit the Instant Ramen Museum and hopefully meet his hero/quasi-god. Part travelogue, part mystery as he begins to uncover the secrets of Ando's life, part Japanese food porn, and part self-help, The Ramen King and I is an engaging book that made me laugh and cry at the same time. I especially enjoyed Raskin's accounts of his travels in Japan, description of Japanese Culture, and his visits to many restaurants.

I would highly recommend this book as a "fun read" for anyone who loves a little soap opera-esque drama, Japanese Culture, and food porn.

Raskin, for me, wasn't a particularly likeable companion as he goes on a journey of self-discovery that weaves skillfully back and forth in time. What Raskin tries to discover is why he's so habitually unfaithful to his many girlfriends. The sayings and life of Momofuku Ando, the world renowned (ok, Asian renowned) inventor of instant ramen, become Raskin's higher power on his road to recovery.

But a funny thing happened in the final part of the book. Oh, I consistently enjoyed reading about Ando, and I found the asides on Japanese matters (business etiquette, food-themed manga, puns, sushi, museums devoted to ramen or gyoza, and samurai movies) fascinating and often funny. Surprisingly a revelation about Ando's life proves relevant to Raskin's plight. And Ando's Zen like sayings go from seemingly silly business platitudes or personal eccentricities to something profound and useful. They become another example of the transforming wisdom sometimes found in the unlikely places of popular culture or the lives of the eccentric.

Raskin has started an advice column using the sayings and life of Ando. That may be worth a look, and I definitely would like to see him do more Japanese related material.

A book about a man's past relationship woes--in particular, his inability to remain faithful to women--hardly seemed like the kind of book that would interest me. Similarly, before I tried them, blocks of instant noodles w/ foil packets of spices hardly seemed like delicious--or even edible--cuisine. To my surprise, my initial judgment of both was wrong and both are quite appealing.

Raskin turns out to be a charming and skilled narrator. He draws the reader into his story quite skillfully. Before we know much about him, we are reading strangely intimate letters written to Momofuku Ando, the inventor of Instant Ramen. At first, there is no explanation, other than an apparent fascination with Japanese culture, why these letters are being written or why in the world they are addressed to Ando. Discovering the answer to this question is part of the appeal of this book. So, I will not reveal it here.

Raskin goes beyond letter-writing and begins a quest to meet Ando that involves trips to Japan and visits to the Ramen Museum. He achieves just the right balance between his personal memoir, biography of Ando, and fascinating insights into Japanese culture. What the reader is left with is a mixture of ingredients that form an entertaining and appealing whole. As with Ramen, initial impressions may generate misgivings and doubts. But, don't let these misgivings stop you from enjoying this delightful and strangely appealing read.

The Ramen King and I is an incredibly absorbing book. The stories are a testament to the phrase, "Truth is stranger than fiction." The intimidating sushi chefs, the initiation processes to graduate from the table to the sushi bar, the ramen noodle slurping rituals, all of this, had me chuckling but also learning about Japanese culture, driving motivations and ultimately about my own personal goals. It is not necessarily a self help book but if you need to understand your own obsession with noodles at the very least as well as about your other possibly more involved fixations, this book may be the soba of our times....

Well, there were so many parts of this book I really enjoyed. Very funny and made me laugh.

Other parts, gosh.

Andy, Andy, Andy...he was a very bad boy. VERY bad. And when he was bad, I didn't like him very much. In fact, I wanted very much to throw the book across the room when he repeated AGAIN and AGAIN the same bad behavior. But, he kept getting the girls. Somehow he would keep pulling them in. And that is what Andy did to me; he kept pulling me in. I couldn't stop reading.

I love all things Japanese and I just ate up everything Andy wrote about Japan, the culture and it's people. Oh, and the food! The descriptions and stories around the food were just right!

When I finished reading the book I felt satisfied and pleased that I had read it. It was fun reading about everything Andy did (and had to stop doing) as he moved forward towards redemption.

Well written and frightfully honest. Recommended!

I loved this book. I too was intrigued to find out about ando's life & I was sad to have missed it. Andy's misunderstanding of humanity is poignant & a worthy read.

I would consider myself the "target demographic" for this book - someone who could best identify with the story, background, author's experiences, and lessons that the author draws. I am a male who is interested in Japan and currently studying Korean in Korea. The author is a male who studied Japanese in Japan and then based much of his career and some of his personal life on knowledge of Japanese and interest in Japan. So, be aware that you (depending on life experiences and gender) may not get the same feeling of identity with the book that I did.

Anyway, for me the author's honesty and authenticity was truly engaging. He didn't gloss over his mistakes or important events in his life (as this book is as much autobiography as memoir). In response to Ms. K's 3-star review below, I will first say that I have no relation with the author whatsoever. Second, when Ms. K says "but (the author) doesn't really share what might be going on in his head behind all the cheekiness," I question whether we really read the same book.

In summary, for anyone with an interest in Japan, ramen, or sushi I see this as a must-read. It is at the same time a good book about relationships and self-improvement. The prose is fluid and there are laugh-out-loud paragraphs and one-liners (though I don't consider this a humor book). Highly recommended.

If I were to go back and study my Amazon reviews, I bet I'd find that I've given most of the things I've reviewed 4 or 5 stars, with a moderate number of 3s making up the bulk of the rest. Maybe I should be a tougher reviewer, hold things to a higher standard, and then write more about how the author or artist failed to live up to this standard. I should do this, I think, starting with "The Ramen King and I."

The problem is, there really wasn't very much about this book I didn't like. It's not great literature, perhaps, but it is a pretty entertaining story, well written, often funny, and quite open in author's Andy Raskin's portrait of himself and his somewhat busted emotional and romantic life. The flow of the story is relatively complex, in that elements of his narrative seem quite unconnected to one another ... until, that is, Raskin starts to pull them together toward the end. Then you can look back (or at least I did) and admit he set it all up very well.

"The Ramen King and I" is a pretty lightweight memoir compared to, say, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq by Ariel Sabar, which I read and reviewed not long ago. But (time for the inevitable food metaphor) like ramen itself, "The Ramen King and I" was fast, easy, admittedly a little silly sometimes, and pretty darn satisfying. Maybe I'll start being tougher with the next book. For what it is, this title didn't leave a lot to complain about.

I found this book to be beautifully written, honest, funny and oddly profound. I read the Kindle edition in one day, mostly on trains and subways. It made for a very good companion on an otherwise difficult day, and reminded me to accept my limitations and imperfections. David Sedaris fans will love this book.

The Ramen King and I made me want to whistle a happy tune. Andy Raskin searches for the meaning of his life while pursuing the inventor of instant ramen noodles--and without resorting to cliches, he wrote about that search with both humor and insight.

Raskin has a dry humor that is well served by his understated voice; he doesn't hit the reader over the head with the absurdity of the situation, but it's not lost. There aren't too many young Jewish men who use an elderly Japanese businessman that they've never met as a metaphor for God; there are fewer who manage to take that humorous situation and find a deeper, lasting lesson in commitment and self knowledge.

I'm buying a copy for several friends, not just because they need a laugh, but because they need some noodle wisdom too. As Raskin (translating Ando Momofuku) says, Noodlekind is Mankind.