Biography
Noodle was born in Osaka, Japan on 31 October 1990. Noodle first came to Gorillaz in 1998 shortly after their original guitarist and 2-D's girlfriend Paula Cracker was removed from the band’s lineup for having an affair with Murdoc in the bathroom of Gorillaz’ fictional headquarters at Kong Studios. As a result of her removal, the band was left without a guitarist, which led them to run an advertisement in a newspaper in search of a new one. Later the same day, a FedEx crate arrived at Kong Studios, and a small young Asian girl leaped out and began playing a very loud solo on her guitar. After shredding on her guitar, she spoke a single word to the trio; "Noodle", which would then become her nickname. In 2003, Noodle visited Japan in an attempt to uncover her past after being haunted by disturbing nightmares while on tour. She regained her lost memories in a restaurant after hearing the trigger words 'ocean bacon'. She coincidentally met with her mentor, Mr. Kyuzo, who was working as the head chef in the restaurant. Kyuzo helped her make sense of her lost memories and revealed to her that she was a participant in a top secret government super soldier project, and was trained with a specialty in musicianship, mastering many weapons, languages, and musical instruments, with a distinct forte in the guitar as a result of the program. He disclosed to her that out of the 23 children created for the project, she was the only one to survive and the others were all killed by the government when the project was scrapped, with Kyuzo shipping Noodle to the United Kingdom in a FedEx crate after wiping her memory clean. Kyuzo purposefully sent Noodle to Gorillaz as he believed she would be able to perform relatively obscurely. After this revelation, she was suddenly able to speak English after not having any knowledge of the language for years. Following this, Noodle returned home to Kong Studios to begin writing rough demos for a second Gorillaz album, which would end up being Demon Days. When she returned to Kong, she saw that the studio became infested by zombies and the undead after a disease occupied the studio due to it being abandoned for a year. Over a span of six months, Noodle rid the studio of the zombie infestation while hiding in the TV room of Kong. During her time in the TV room, Noodle used her recovered knowledge of the english language to do extensive research on the state of the world, in which she identified a lack of substance in entertainment that she figuratively referred to as "the real infection", which would become her main inspiration for the concept of Demon Days. As she began to finish up the demos, 2-D, Murdoc, and Russel one-by-one began to return to Kong and recording of the album was ready to begin. After Demon Days' release and worldwide success, Noodle was assumed dead and in Hell by the characters following her appearance in the music video for El Mañana in 2006, which appears to show the flying windmill island from the Feel Good Inc. music video being gunned down by two attack helicopters. Noodle is said to have gone on a journey to reunite with Gorillaz in 2010 after four years of alleged absence from the group since 2006, shown arriving at Plastic Beach with a giant Russel in a storyboard for a scrapped Rhinestone Eyes music video. During Noodle's absence, Murdoc replaced her with a cyborg replica named Cyborg Noodle that he created using a strand of her hair that he found in the rubbish from the crash in El Mañana’s music video. Noodle, like Russel, had no spoken dialogue during the Plastic Beach era of Gorillaz, despite eventually reuniting with the band. In Gorillaz’ 2016 interactive short story The Book of Noodle, it was revealed that years after Plastic Beach, Noodle defeated a shape-shifting demon from hell that she accidentally released named Mazuu while in Tokyo, Japan and shipped herself to West London in a FedEx crate in the escape following the battle with the creature to reunite with the band. In The Now Now’s backstory, Noodle visits Patagonia in South America as per an incarcerated Murdoc’s request to confront El Mierda, who he claimed framed him for drug smuggling. In a 2018 advertisement campaign for a Gorillaz line of G-Shock watches called Mission M101 following Murdoc's release, Noodle and 2-D were interviewed by the G-Shock's founder Kikuo Ibe. On 12 September 2019, Noodle sent the first in a set of postcards that the band sent to each other while on vacation in different areas of the world and posted it to their social media accounts with the others following soon after. Noodle sent her postcard from Lake Urmia, Iran and stated that she intends to visit various places across the world before climate change destroys them, asking the other members if they had the parts to a machine gathered. The machine Noodle was referring to would later be revealed to be for the Song Machine, the latest audiovisual project from Gorillaz.