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Musing on this book – over a bowl of ramen – it occurs to me that many men prefer to have more than one wife per life. In parts of India and Mexico and the Mideast, in wild and woolly parts of Utah and New Mexico, polygamy is smiled upon. Even in parts of Europe, a man’s juggling of multiple partners is not held against him.
Many men take a wife, then split, feel just terrible about it, take another wife, split, feel bad about it, and so on. But a sizable number prefer not to settle down at all. They’re locked into the glamour of the hunt. Mention commitment, and their flesh begins to crawl.
So it is with Andy Raskin in this wacky, oddly endearing memoir. Until his late 30s, he obsessed over beautiful girls, but he can’t have one without having another one to play off the first. He’s not happy unless he’s cheating. (But he’s not happy when he is cheating, either.) Indeed, he feels so desperate about cheating on women that he ends up in something like a 12-step program to modify his dating habits. And in a move that parallels the movie “You Kill Me,” in which Ben Kingsley chooses the Golden Gate Bridge as his Higher Power, Raskin chooses Momofuku Ando, the Japanese magnate who invented instant ramen.
No matter that he and Raskin have never met or that Ando was in his 90s living in Osaka. Raskin’s sponsor suggests that he write a series of journal entries to the old gentleman, recording each and every time the specter of sexual misbehavior comes upon him. In addition, the sponsor extracts a promise from the author that he will remain chaste for 60 days.
It turns out that Ando, far from being a model of adulthood and fidelity, has failed in business, been jailed twice, had three wives with a child from each marriage. Not only that, he was stingy with his child support and disowned his elder son. But nobody’s perfect, as Raskin realizes even before he attends Ando’s funeral in an Osaka baseball stadium.
Meanwhile, through his journal entries to Ando, Raskin comes to recognize his own relentlessly scolding inner voice: “You should just cut processed sugars from your diet the way your mother has. It’s that simple.” Or, “You should just hunker down and write some stories about big companies. you should never quit a job before you have a new job.” Gradually, he realizes that this pitiless voice has kept him from committing to a relationship.
The author eventually gets 86’d from his favorite sushi bar and tells us a lot about noodles. He revels in all things Japanese and gets his dating life in some kind of order. But if he’d grown up in pre-revolutionary China, parts of Mexico, India, etc., he might have saved himself all kinds of grief.
