The Story of Sushi (29 page)

T
he last few weeks of the semester passed in a pleasant blur. With Zoran’s absence, it felt as if a weight had been lifted. Tetsu took over the class. He didn’t speak a lot of English, but he got by.

One day, Tetsu told Marcos he was a good student. Marcos walked around in shock. Tetsu let Kate indulge her creativity. He taught the class how to make Japanese desserts, and he let Kate play with her cookie cutter, punching colorful heart shapes out of Japanese seaweed Jell-O.

Tetsu taught the students how to speak sushi-bar lingo. Sushi chefs use their own words for everything. Soy sauce is
murasaki,
which means “purple.” Wasabi is
namida,
which means “tears.” Nori is
kusa,
which means “grass.” Pickled ginger is
gari,
which supposedly is the sound pickled ginger makes in your mouth.

Tetsu warned the students to use this lingo only when behind the bar. “If you’re a customer at the sushi bar, you shouldn’t use these,” he explained. “Some customers think they know sushi and use these, but it sounds ridiculous. This is just for employees to use with each other.”

Tetsu taught them how to cook rice the old-fashioned way—in a pot on a stove—“in case your rice cooker broken.” He told them that when he was a boy in rural Japan, his grandmother had cooked rice in an iron bucket over a wood fire.

They practiced their basic sushi and sashimi skills. Under strict
orders from Toshi, Tetsu used the last half hour of every class for
nigiri
-squeezing drills, including posture. Takumi’s posture quickly improved.

Toshi himself taught a few classes. He spent three days teaching the students how to taste different types of premium sake. Everybody got a little tipsy. On the day Marcos turned 18, Jay brought a chocolate cake with cherry filling to class and everyone sang “Happy Birthday.” They ate the cake with chopsticks.

Without Zoran around, discipline went out the window. But in a way, he no longer needed to be there in person. Kate and Marcos both heard his voice in their heads every time they did something dumb. Kate called it the “Ghost of Zoran Past.” Every few days Marcos would sidle up to Kate, adopt an Australian accent, and yell, “Kate, you’re
terrible
!” and Kate would throw her head back and laugh. As the semester wound to a close, they realized that Zoran had taught them almost everything they really needed to know before he left.

One morning Tetsu arrived at class with a Tupperware container. He peeled off the top and revealed a mass of plump orange spheres: salmon eggs.

Cheaper sushi restaurants purchase their salmon eggs salted and marinated, but better restaurants prepare them in-house. The standard marinade includes the usual suspects—soy sauce, mirin, sake, and dashi. Tetsu fingered the eggs. They were covered with a tacky residue.

“Need to clean them,” Tetsu said.

He ran warm water over the eggs in a strainer and rubbed them with his fingers. The water turned milky white. The smell of the ocean wafted up.

Salmon invest a lot in their roe, which is why salmon eggs are bigger than other caviar. A single salmon egg contains enough food to feed the embryo for an entire winter and on into early spring, as the embryo becomes a baby fish. Marcos plucked one of the orange orbs from the mass, held it up to his face between his thumb and finger, and inspected it like a jewel.

Tetsu lowered the strainer into a bowl of saltwater and picked away bits of white membrane.

“You need patience,” Tetsu said. He quit and handed the strainer to one of the students.

When the student had finished, Tetsu salted the eggs in a brine solution. A bit of salt plumps each egg and causes enzymes inside to digest proteins, generating more flavor-enhancing amino acids. Salt also causes enzymes to strengthen the egg’s shell, making the eggs firmer and therefore more fun to eat. After salting, Tetsu would leave the eggs to drain overnight. Tomorrow he’d marinate them for two or three hours.

Before the arrival of sushi, Americans mostly used salmon eggs as bait, to catch fish. The Japanese have been eating the salted ovaries of salmon and trout for more than a thousand years. But it was the Russians who pioneered the eating of loose salmon eggs as caviar in the 1830s. The Japanese word for salmon caviar used in sushi,
ikura,
comes from the Russian word for caviar,
ikra.
Today, in Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula just north of Japan, the black-market trade in illegal salmon eggs is worth $1 billion a year. Bears are also fond of salmon roe. They will suck out the eggs—20,000 of them in a full female—and leave the mother fish lying dead.

Salmon eggs are a recent addition to sushi. The respected Tokyo sushi chef Jiro Ono began serving them in the early 1980s, at the request of a customer. Now salmon eggs are so popular that Japanese food scientists have perfected techniques for manufacturing fake ones from vegetable oil.

Next, Tetsu brought out a small wooden tray loaded with pale yellow slabs that looked like cat tongues.

‘
Uni,
’ Tetsu said.

Sea urchins—called
uni
in Japanese—share 70 percent of their genetic code with humans. Nevertheless, there are significant differences. For example, humans and most other multicellular organisms develop “mouth first”—the first hole in the embryo becomes the animal’s mouth. By contrast, sea urchins develop “ass first.”

Until recently, Japanese people and Americans both despised sea urchins. Sea urchins commit a terrible crime—they eat kelp. In Japan, kelp is a sacred source of
umami,
necessary for making dashi. Japanese kelp harvesters destroyed sea urchins. In America, meanwhile, factories used kelp to manufacture agar for petri dishes. In southern California in the 1960s and 1970s, dive clubs and local authorities sponsored underwater urchin-killing parties. Scuba divers would swim around smashing urchins with hammers to save the kelp forests for the factories.

Kelp and urchins have been locked in battle with each other for eons. Vast armies of urchins swarm across the sea floor, advancing at speeds of up to 20 inches a day and chewing up all the kelp en route. In response, kelp have evolved a diabolical weapon to defend themselves against the urchin hordes. Kelp produce a protein that tricks at least some female sea urchins into believing that a male sea urchin has already fertilized their eggs. As a result, the female urchins stop making babies.

In Japan, sometime after the seventeenth century, people in a region called Hokuriku on the northern coast of Japan’s central island, came to appreciate the taste of sea urchins so much that they started harvesting urchins instead of destroying them. Since urchins eat kelp, they are loaded with the same delicious IMP that gives kelp its flavor.

Inside a sea urchin, the edible portions are the urchin’s gonads—either its ovaries or its testes, depending on gender. It’s difficult to tell which is which because the male and female sex organs look almost exactly the same. These gonads can occupy up to two-thirds of the urchin’s body. They are delicious, not only because they are loaded with tasty amino acids and IMP, but also because they are composed of 15 to 25 percent fat. The French have long cooked with urchin gonads, adding them to scrambled eggs, soufflés, and sauces.

In 1975, a young scuba diver in southern California named Dave Rudie heard that instead of smashing sea urchins with a hammer, he could make seven cents a pound selling them to a man from Japan. Rudie began collecting urchins from the bottom with a garden rake. Soon he was processing urchin gonads in his garage and selling them to sushi bars in San Diego. Now, his company,
Catalina Offshore Products, is the premier American urchin supplier, selling high-grade California urchin to sushi bars around the country. His urchins are known at Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo as the best outside Japan.

Tetsu taught the students how to wrap a strip of nori around the edge of a rice
nigiri
to hold salmon eggs or sea urchin gonads on top. The Japanese refer to these
nigiri
whimsically as
gunkan
—which means “battleship”—because supposedly they look like little boats.

The following night, Toshi served customers at the front bar. Takumi worked next to him. By now Toshi knew that this might be one of the last nights he would ever stand behind a sushi bar.

Despite several busy evenings in recent weeks, Hama Hermosa had still been losing too much money. Toshi had decided to shut the restaurant for good. He wasn’t sure what would happen to the academy. American sushi, it seemed, had left Toshi behind.

A young lady sat down at the bar. She wore a shirt with a deep V-neck revealing an ample bosom. She leaned forward, her elbows on the bar. There were certainly things Toshi would miss about being a sushi chef. He turned to Takumi and spoke in Japanese.

“Working at the sushi bar really is the ideal angle for viewing breasts.”

Takumi bowed his head and laughed quietly into his chest. Toshi looked at his Japanese student for a moment.

“If you were in Japan,” Toshi said, “you sure as hell would not be standing at the bar making sushi already.”

Takumi had been studying sushi for less than three months. In Japan, a traditional apprenticeship would have taken him years. And he was already nearly 40 years old.

Takumi nodded. “I’d be in the back washing dishes.”

“Your life would be over before you had the chance to make sushi,” Toshi said.

New customers arrived, including a gorgeous brunette whose tight T-shirt barely contained her breasts. She sat in front of Toshi. He sighed and turned to Takumi.

“I can’t help it. When a cute girl sits down at the bar, I always want to make her something special. I’ve always given the cute girls the special cuts of fish.” He shook his head. “It’s sushi-chef discrimination.”

Toshi’s eyes wandered toward the T-shirt. The woman was talking with her friends and remained oblivious.

“Damn,” Toshi blurted in Japanese, “
look
at those breasts! They’re perfect!”

Takumi turned away, his body shaking with laughter. Toshi kept talking. “When I see tits like that, sometimes my dick gets hard and pushes up my cutting board.”

Takumi ducked below the counter and held his stomach. Toshi looked down at his work, but his eyes kept wandering back to the breasts. “God, I can’t stop looking at them.”

Next a blond woman wearing a cowboy hat sauntered in and sat at the bar. Her low-cut strap top barely contained the generous landscape of her chest.

Toshi turned to Takumi, eyes wide.

That weekend, Toshi catered another film set. He took Takumi along.

They had competition. Next to the sushi stall was a truck with a grill serving barbecue. Fragrant smoke billowed across the sushi stall.

At lunchtime the film crew mobbed the sushi stand. Grips jostled each other to get their serving of raw fish and rice.

Takumi was averaging seventeen seconds per
nigiri.
Still too slow. Next to him Toshi knocked out each
nigiri
in five seconds flat. Takumi deepened his concentration and picked up his pace. Ten minutes later he hit twelve seconds per piece.

After an hour, the crowd thinned and Toshi slowed down.

A grip strode past. “Thank you, guys, that was fantastic. I came back for seconds twice.” Two more grips stopped by and thanked them, too.

The barbecue truck had gotten only a handful of customers.

Toshi threw together a few final plates of sushi and carried them next door to the barbecue truck. He returned with a couple of Styrofoam clamshells. He and Takumi sat in the van with the doors open and the air-conditioner blasting. Toshi shoveled seared steak and potatoes into his mouth with a plastic fork.

“Man,” he said in Japanese, “American food is good.”

T
he academy had scheduled a special final student sushi bar. Again, Kate invited her mother and brother. She planned to serve them
omakase
—chef’s choice.

That morning the students rushed around the kitchen making preparations. Kate sharpened her knives.

When Kate’s mother and brother arrived, she took her place behind the bar.

“We’d like
omakase,
please,” her mother said. Kate had coached them beforehand.

Kate nodded. She peered into the fish case.

“Well, let’s see, I could make you tacos,” Kate said, smirking. Her mother looked confused. Kate laughed. “
Tako,
” she explained, “is Japanese for ‘octopus’!”

Her mother frowned. Kate thought for a second. She pulled a tray of albacore tuna and sliced off five neat pieces. She squeezed a bunch of shredded radish onto a plate. She pressed a perilla leaf on top and laid the slices of fish in a slanted row. She straightened up and eyed the platter. She stuck a blue cocktail umbrella in the radish. She handed the plate across the fish case. Her mom smiled.

While they were eating the sashimi, Kate broiled slices of eel in the toaster. She rolled the eel into a pair of hand rolls with crab and cucumber, and squirted on eel sauce—her own concoction. She handed them across the fish case.

Kate built a spider roll. She loaded the standard deep-fried soft-shell crab on the rice, but altered the recipe and layered in cilantro and shredded radish. She chose a wide white plate, arranged the roll elegantly, and handed the plate to her mother and her brother.

Kate pulled a tray of flatfish and cut off two quick slices. She straightened up, lifted her elbows and hands away from her body, and squeezed together a pair of
nigiri
as if she were performing for a crowd, just as Toshi had demonstrated. She dripped lemon juice on the
nigiri
and handed them across the fish case. Her mother bit down, chewed, and nodded. “That’s good.”

“Now I’m going to invent a Kate roll!” Kate said.

She loaded spicy tuna, avocado, eel, cucumber, and shredded radish on a pad of rice and nori and tucked it in tight, just like Zoran had taught her.

On the last night of Hama Hermosa’s existence, Toshi strode into the dining room at 5:15 in his white jacket. He switched on the lights over the front sushi bar and surveyed the row of sea creatures in the fish cases.

There were beige ribbons of eel, tight purple curls of octopus, and orange flaps of shrimp. There were tan blocks of albacore, red bricks of tuna, pink strips of fatty tuna, and translucent sheets of flounder. There was a pale shaft of giant clam. There were orange trapezoids of salmon embedded with zigzag lines of fat, and wedges of yellowtail with maroon triangles of dark muscle. It was like an anatomy booth at a museum of natural history, except that visitors were encouraged to eat the exhibit.

Toshi took his station behind the bar. His wingmen flanked him. On his left stood Tetsu. On his right, Takumi.

Zoran’s departure had left a gap in the lineup of chefs and Takumi had stepped into it. Toshi had begun to delegate parts of his
omakase
to Takumi. He had imagination, whimsy, and creativity. That could only be good for sushi, but none of it would matter if Takumi couldn’t bring himself to perform for customers, just as
he once had for fans. He still acted shy and reserved behind the sushi bar.

The restaurant manager propped open the front door. As the sun sank over the Pacific Ocean across the street, light streamed into the dining room. The colors in the fish case blazed and the white tablecloths glowed. Minutes later the sun dropped below a building and the vibrant colors vanished. A fly buzzed around the sushi bar. Takumi swatted at it with a towel.

Toshi went to the kitchen and entered the walk-in. He sorted through plastic food-storage tubs, now mostly empty, and consolidated the remaining items. He peered into corners of the cavernous refrigerator and extracted a potato growing sprouts and a banana that had turned black. He emerged and hugged himself. “Brrr.”

Toshi returned to the sushi bar, and a few minutes later three customers walked into the restaurant.

“
Irasshaimase!
” the chefs yelled.

It was Kate, dressed up for dinner, with a couple of friends. Toshi narrowed his eyes and scowled at her. She wrinkled up her nose and scowled back. The scowling intensified. Then they both laughed. Kate led her friends to the bar and they ordered sake. Tetsu began squeezing out
nigiri
for his student.

Then, several of Toshi’s most loyal customers came in and sat at the bar. One woman had been eating Toshi’s sushi for twenty years. They all tried to act upbeat, but Toshi could see that they were sad. He served them
omakase,
punctuated by frequent, poignant toasts.

But it was Takumi who delivered a special dish of deep-fried tofu to Kate and her friends. Kate’s eyes popped open.

“For us?” Kate asked.

Takumi nodded.

Kate smiled, then wrinkled up her nose and scowled theatrically again, this time at Takumi. He took the bait and scowled back. He even growled. Kate laughed. He beat his chest and growled again, pretending to be King Kong.

“What about Dancing Sushi Chef?” Kate asked.

Takumi froze. Slowly he raised one arm and danced a little disco, gyrating his hips. Kate applauded.

Takumi went back to work and Kate went back to chatting with her friends. Two Japanese men and a young Japanese woman came to the sushi bar, and Toshi commenced a new
omakase
for them. Takumi helped.

Takumi was fond of squid. For this last evening at the restaurant, he’d prepared a dish that drew inspiration from Italian cooking. He served it to the Japanese customers, explaining that it was calamari marinated in lime juice and dill. The young woman watched Takumi closely while he spoke. She and the two men tried the squid and pronounced it delicious. Takumi bowed his head, looking pleased, and continued to chat with them. The woman kept watching Takumi, her brow furrowed.

Kate and her friends finished their meal and left. Toshi juggled dishes for his different batches of
omakase
customers. He tossed eel in the toaster and leaned on the lowboy. He sighed. In English he muttered, “Sake made me tired.” A minute later he got confused and served several dishes to the wrong customers. He shook his head and berated himself in Japanese. “No good.”

After a while Toshi delegated the rest of the
omakase
to Tetsu and Takumi, and simply stood in the center of the bar, chatting with his customers and watching people come and go from the dining room. When the American
omakase
customers had finished their sushi, Toshi disappeared into the kitchen and returned carrying plates of sherbet for their dessert. He’d decorated each plate with a crisscrossed pair of little flags. One was the Stars and Stripes, the other was the Rising Sun.

The American customers said their final good-byes, leaving the Japanese customers alone at the bar. The young Japanese woman couldn’t stop looking at Takumi. She covered her mouth with her hand, as Japanese women often do when embarrassed, and spoke up.

“I feel like I’ve seen you before somewhere,” she said.

Takumi laughed. “Really?”

“Yes,” she said. Her face brightened. “Do you work part-time at some
other
sushi restaurant?”

Takumi laughed again. “No, no.” He glanced down at his cutting board. “I used to do a little part-time work, ah…on TV.”

The woman giggled and held her hand over her mouth again. “Really?”

He nodded. He was smiling. He stuck his hand in the canister of rice, then straightened up. He lifted his elbows and hands away from his body and performed for the customers, squeezing sushi in an arc across his body.

The woman watched. She still couldn’t place him. She seemed to be trying to remember when on television she’d last seen a sushi chef who looked like this man.

New customers came in and sat at the bar. Toshi turned away, picked up the intercom, and called to one of the students, who was interning in the kitchen. A moment later the student appeared, looking startled.

Toshi smiled. “You make sushi now. Get your knife.”

The student returned and took Toshi’s place behind the bar. He turned to the customers and suggested a few dishes. Toshi stood back and watched him work. A few minutes later, when no one was looking, Toshi closed up his knife case and slipped away.

Later that night, after all the customers had left, after all the creatures had been cleared from the fish cases, the floors had been mopped, and the countertops wiped clean, Takumi and Tetsu stood alone in their chef’s whites under the bright spotlights in the empty sushi bar.

Takumi poured two cups of sake. Then he poured a third cup. Takumi believed that a spirit resided in every object and creature in the world. Tonight the life of this sushi bar and its spirit had come to an end, and it was time for the chefs to express their thanks.

Takumi and Tetsu clinked cups, tipped back their heads, and drank. At the same instant, Takumi flicked the third cup, and thousands of droplets of fermented liquid rice, swimming with little gods, flew through the air and fell across the sushi bar like rain.