I should be thinner. I should do yoga. I should be married like the people in the New York Times wedding announcements. I should be richer. I should be able to hit higher notes on the trombone, given that I have been playing the instrument for more than thirty years. I should be more discreet.

I should live closer to my parents so I can spend time with them, because one day they will die and I will feel more alone than I can imagine.

I should not be so concerned with my parents, given how old I am.

I should eliminate processed sugars from my diet. I should find great parking spots, the way my father always does. I should be less afraid. I should call my sister more. I should reestablish contact with my high school friends Dan and Dave and Sam, because if I ever do get married, I’ll have few old friends at the wedding, but mostly because I miss them.

I should not write about the letters.

I should be in the moment. I should be taller. I should employ more adverbs and similes, and rely less on anaphora. I should own a big house on Belvedere Street and decorate it for Halloween. I should glide on the dance floor. I should have no cavities.

On Saturdays, when playing Ultimate Frisbee in the park, I should make smart throws and spectacular diving catches. I should not want attention or validation. I should give things another shot. I should be more organized.

When Grandpa Herman bought me the Partridge Family album for my tenth birthday, I should not have cried because it was not the album with “I Think I Love You” on it. I should be friendlier with the guys who run the body shop. I should keep things under wraps. I should not be suffering from what the inventor of instant ramen identified—just prior to inventing instant ramen—as the Fundamental Misunderstanding of Humanity.

Because then there wouldn’t be so many shoulds.

But there you are.

I should start in Uji City, on January 2, 2007.

Blessed by a stunning mountain landscape and famous for its fragrant green tea, Uji City is situated midway between Japan’s ancient capitals Kyoto and Nara. The region is home to Byodo-in, the 950- year-old Buddhist temple that decorates the back of the ten-yen coin, and to the tourist destinations known collectively as the Ten Spots, each in some way associated with one of the final ten chapters of The Tale of Genji.

On January 2, 2007, three days and two months shy of his ninety-seventh birthday, Momofuku Ando played a round of golf in Uji, at the Nissin Miyako Country Club. The inventor of instant ramen shot a 109—56 on the front nine, 53 on the back. He founded the club himself, he once said, “due to my earnest desire to pursue golf as my hobby and to enjoy the game to my heart’s content.” In fact, Thus Spake Momofuku, a published collection of Ando’s famous utterances, contains no fewer than twelve sayings about golf, including:

“As far as I’m concerned, eighteen holes is the only happiness that money can buy.”

“Don’t worry. If I’m playing, the rain will stop.”

“To be on a golf course when I die—that is my true desire.”

Two days later, Ando gave a speech at the Osaka headquarters of Nissin Food Products, the instant noodle empire he had launched nearly fifty years earlier. He addressed an assembly of Nissin employees for thirty minutes and enjoyed a serving of Chikin Ramen in the company cafeteria. Expressing his desire for peace in the world, he unveiled a slogan for the New Year. His practice of coining, brush drawing, and officially unveiling New Year slogans dates back to 1964. Because the slogans were often somewhat cryptic, Nissin’s public relations department began issuing official explanations in 1986.

Ando’s slogan for 2007 was

Kigyo Zainin, Seigyo Zaiten

According to the official explanation, it meant that a company can be built by humans, but its success will always depend on God.

The next day, Ando suffered an unusually high fever. He was rushed to a hospital, where his wife, Masako, and several Nissin executives stood at his bedside. He was not on a golf course when his heart stopped beating, but at least he had played very recently. In the weeks that followed, newspapers and blogs hailed Ando as a food pioneer. Many obituaries cited the number eighty-six billion, which was how many servings of instant ramen had been consumed on Earth in 2005, the most recent year for which data on worldwide demand was then available. Some journalists did the math: nearly twelve bowls for every person on the planet. An airline pilot who blogged on Salon.com declared, “The aviation world was rocked” by the news, explaining that he carried five packages of instant ramen on every flight. Another blogger joked that mourners might pour boiling water into Ando’s casket, turning down the lid for three minutes. The Economist ran a story on Ando’s death. So did Time magazine. For three days the most e-mailed article on the New York Times Web site was an opinion piece by Lawrence Downes titled “Appreciations: Mr. Noodle.” It began, “The news last Friday of the death of the ramen noodle guy surprised those of us who never suspected that there was such an individual.”

I laughed when I read the Times piece. I laughed because I was not a person who never suspected there was an inventor of instant ramen. Here are excerpts from e-mails I received in the wake of Ando’s death:

“Saw this on a blog today and thought of you.” (Carla)

“Are you OK?” (Matt)

“Saw the death of Mr. Noodle. Couldn’t help thinking of you.” (Josh)

“Not sure if condolences are in order.” (Ellen)

My father sent me the Times clipping in the mail, along with an obituary that ran in the Long Island newspaper. He attached a note on his personal stationery. “It even made Newsday,” he wrote. Zen just typed a text message that said, “He is died.”

Three weeks after Ando’s death, I stuffed a cup mute and a plunger mute into a knapsack, carried my trombone out to my car, and drove to rehearsal. The group I played in was a full big band—five trumpets, four trombones, five saxes, and a rhythm section—and it rehearsed in a warehouse in San Francisco’s South of Market district.

Some of us called it the Monday Night Band, but there was no official name.

We never had gigs. We only rehearsed. We rehearsed on a cement floor surrounded by drills, saws, and workbenches. Many of the men in the band were more than twice my age. The lead alto saxophonist had just turned ninety-two. His tone sometimes wobbled, and he had trouble hearing instructions. The average age of the rhythm section hovered around eighty. By comparison, the trombone section was downright youthful. Aside from me, everyone was in their seventies. The band was led by the bassist, a thin man with a white beard who, when he wasn’t plucking his upright bass, worked in the warehouse building props for photo shoots and conference booths. A human figure made out of cereal boxes stared down at us from an open loft, and a golf cart dressed up to look like a spaceship (in which a telecom executive once made his entrance at a trade show) was permanently parked next to the grand piano.

Setting my trombone case on one of the workbenches, I screwed together the bell and slide sections and slipped in a Bach 7 mouthpiece. I blew a few notes, mostly low B-flats, to loosen my lips. I was playing the third trombone part, so I took a seat between the first and fourth trombonists, because that’s the traditional trombone section arrangement.

“One hundred twenty-two,” the bassist called out.

The sheet music was numbered. I searched the folder on the music stand in front of me and found “122” stamped on a Sammy Nestico composition titled “This Is the Moment.” The bassist counted off two measures in a laid-back swing feel. The band jumped into it. The third trombone part wasn’t very exciting—mostly whole notes and background figures—but I enjoyed harmonizing with the other horn players and trying to match their phrasing so we all sounded like one instrument. That’s the goal when you’re playing a Sammy Nestico chart.

The bassist had just waved his hand to cut off the final chord when Gary, the first trombonist, leaned toward me.

“Son, how much would you pay for a thick, juicy slice of prime rib, a baked potato, and a side of vegetables?”

Gary played a silver King Liberty from the 1940s with intricate floral engraving on the bell and a sound that filled you up. It was the third time in as many Monday nights that he had asked me the question about the prime rib, the third time he was going to share with me the deal he had found in Millbrae. I’m still not sure whether his memory was failing, or if he was just really excited about the deal.

“I don’t know,” I said, feigning a guess. “Twenty-three dollars?”

There was a time not long before all this when I would have informed Gary that, first of all, I don’t eat a lot of red meat, and second of all, he was about to share his tip for the third time. But one of the things I had come to realize was that I loved when Gary shared restaurant tips. That his sharing of them was the point, not the tips themselves.

“Well, son, what would you say if I told you there’s a spot in Millbrae where you only had to pay sixteen ninety-five?”

As Gary repeated the name of the restaurant, the bassist called out, “Eight.” It was the number for “Four Brothers,” the up-tempo Woody Herman classic that showcases the saxophone section. “By the way,” Gary continued, pulling the music for “Four Brothers” from his folder, “I read the news.”

At first I had no idea what he was talking about.

“About your ramen guy.”

I had forgotten telling Gary about Ando.

“Oh.”

Gary normally lifted his horn to his lips long before an entrance, but even as the bassist began counting down to the first bar of “Four Brothers,” Gary’s silver King Liberty remained perched on his knee. “Tell me again,” he said, “why did you go to meet the inventor of instant ramen?”

Before I could answer, we had to start playing.

The trombone parts on “Four Brothers” consist mainly of short hits punctuating the saxophone melodies, and there are long rests while the saxophonists take their improvised solos. What I’m saying is that I had plenty of time to ponder Gary’s question. I had plenty of time to sum it all up. Yet as we approached the fermata at the bottom of the page, I still wasn’t sure what to say.

One 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 in front, making the restaurant difficult to locate. The only clue to its existence was a row of tall, green sake bottles in the front window. That, and a business card wedged into the doorframe that said HAMAKO in Japanese.

Entering, I was greeted by a middle-aged Asian woman whose silverstreaked hair had been tied back in a complicated bun. I recognized her voice from the phone, and she seemed annoyed.

“Can I help you?”

I looked around. Just six tables and a sushi counter. No other customers.

“May I sit at the counter?” I asked.

“No,” the woman said. “You need a reservation to sit at the counter.”

The only other person in the sushi bar was the sushi chef. Standing silently at his station, he reminded me a lot of Shota’s master. Shota is the fifteen-year-old main character in a Japanese comic book series called Shota’s Sushi. In Book One, his father’s sushi bar comes under attack by an evil sushi chain. Shota learns how to make sushi to help out, but as a novice he can only do so much. A visiting sushi master recognizes Shota’s prodigious talent, however, and takes the boy on as an apprentice. Shota hones his skills, first as an entrydrka_ level helper in the master’s Tokyo sushi bar, and then as a contestant in the All-Tokyo Rookie Sushi Chef Competition. There are fourteen books in the original series, and eight more in a sequel series (in which Shota competes in the All-Japan Rookie Sushi Chef Competition). Shota’s dream is to become a full-fledged sushi chef so he can return home and save his father from the evil chain.

I had been reading Shota’s Sushi in the months before my first visit to the sushi bar, so I guess that’s why I made the connection. Like Shota’s master, the sushi chef in front of me was stocky with short gray hair, and his wrist muscles bulged out, presumably from making so much sushi. He seemed upset about something, and I had the feeling that, like many of the sushi chefs in the comic book, he was often upset about something. A clean white apron hung from his waist and a blue bandanna circumscribed his head.

Still pondering the catch-22 around the restaurant’s reservation policy, I was directed by the woman to a two-top.

“Would you like a beer?” she asked. “We have Sapporo and Asahi.”

I ordered a Sapporo. Then the chef screamed at me. “Mr. Customer! Which sushi bars have you been to in San Francisco?”

I recognized “Mr. Customer” as a direct translation of okyakusan, the Japanese word for addressing patrons. But the way he asked the question made me feel as if I were on a first date and had just been asked to list my previous sexual partners.

I decided to be up front with him.

“I like Saji and Okina,” I said. “Every once in a while, for lunch, I go to Tenzan.”

The chef shook his head disapprovingly.

“I play golf with Shiba,” he said, referring to Tenzan’s head chef.

“Next time you eat there, tell him that my sushi is better than his. Don’t worry, he knows it’s true.”

Zen used to advise me on how to behave at traditional sushi bars. I should say more about Zen, but for now I’ll just say that Zen is his real name, short for Zentaro, and that he once told me that when ordering omakase—leaving the selection up to the chef—you should carry a picture of what he called “your five starving children.” Near the end of the meal, Zen instructed, you should reach for your wallet and let the picture drop out, causing the chef to take pity on you when he tabulates the bill. Zen also shared with me his foolproof method for starting a relationship with a traditional sushi chef. “Ask about the guy’s knife,” Zen had said. “Specifically, ask how many times a day he sharpens it.”

I asked the chef standing behind the counter, “Is your knife from Japan?”

The chef lifted his knife. The blade was facing in my direction, but he didn’t say anything. I was getting nowhere with him, so I switched to Japanese.

“Ichinichi daitai nankai toide irun desu ka?”

Roughly how many times a day do you sharpen it?

The waitress was in the middle of pulling a tall bottle of Sapporo Black Label from a refrigerator next to the counter when she turned around and answered my question before the chef could.

“Actually, that’s just his demo knife,” she said in Japanese. “His real knife is at home, and it’s huge.” She held her hands in the air, about sixteen inches apart. “Like a sword.”

She brought the beer and a glass to my table, and took my sushi order. The hamachi in the glass case looked particularly good. I also ordered saba, tai, mirugai, hirame, maguro, negi-toro maki, and, of course, ankimo—the monkfish liver. As the woman relayed my requests to the chef, I looked around the restaurant. A decorative white sake barrel rested on a tree stump in the center of the space, and what little there was of a kitchen—just a sink and a single gas burner—was in plain view behind the counter. Crayoned illustrations of the chef and the waitress adorned the walls, along with photographs of famous people dining at Hamako. In one of them, a younger version of the chef stood proudly next to the baseball star Ichiro Suzuki. I recognized several classical musicians, including the violinist Isaac Stern, the flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal, and San Francisco Symphony conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. One photo showed Yo-Yo Ma playing cello—in the restaurant.

Twenty minutes later, the chef lifted a plate of sushi from his work area and set it down atop the refrigerated glass case in front of him. The woman picked up the tray and carried it to my table, where she recited the pedigree of each piece.

“Tai from New Zealand,” she said. “Hamachi from Japan.” And so on.

Then the chef screamed at me again.

“Mr. Customer, you will not find better sushi than this in the entire United States!”

With that, the chef burst out laughing. He appeared to be imagining that I had actually set out on an epic quest to find better sushi than his in the United States, and that I would one day return to concede defeat.