Back Seat with Fish

by Henry Hughes

  With the captain watching, I reeled in two aji and suddenly felt a fierce strike. Something like a dragon broke into the glowing arena. “Tachiuo, tachiuo,” the men called from the deck. The long bright fish had swallowed one of my hooked aji and hooked itself. The captain swept down a landing net and scooped up the yard-long beast. Tachi means long sword, a much better name than ribbonfish, as the species is commonly called in English. Stretched over a bladelike body the fish’s skin was preternaturally silver, brilliantly reflecting the lights on deck, and its dragon head narrowed into a mouth of long needle teeth. It twisted powerfully out of the net, the live aji still fluttering in its jaws.

  As the fishing slowed, a few of the men sat around the stern drinking Asahi beer and cutting squid and aji into sashimi, thin strips of raw fish dipped in soy sauce. I had never eaten raw fish before. Watanabe Jun, a broad-shouldered, handsome teacher with a crew cut, pulled a knife from his bag. He held up my stiffening tachiuo and gestured, bringing the two beams of silver together, creating a triangle between us. “Okay?” he asked. “Okay, okay,” I affirmed. He slit the fish lengthwise and skinned it. Then he sliced the pale flesh into thin ribbons, handed me a pair of chopsticks and asked, “Sashimi oishī desu ka?” Is sashimi delicious? I sampled the flesh of the dragon. It was tender and delicate. “Oishī desu,” It's delicious, I said, learning my first bit of Japanese.

  One of the men aboard the Yutaka Maru that night was the tall, thin, and very fishy Kanamaru Mitsuru, who asked me to call him Ken. Ken often took me fishing along the Niigata coast, where we cast from rocks and tetrapod jetties for tai, a bottom dwelling sea bream that reminded me of its cousin in the Sparidae family, the Long Island porgy. For twelve hours we would stand, slip, sit, talk, or stare silently into the waves, angling long rods and strange baits, Ken chirping “kita-kita-kita” when he felt a bite, which wasn’t often. The first time out we each caught one kurodai, the black sea bream, about the size and shape of an average freshwater sunfish, and Ken said it was wonderful. “One fish is worth twenty dollars.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “Way,” he countered with a smile, having watched and loved the new movie, Wayne’s World.

  Ken insisted we eat the fish the next day, explaining that it takes hours for the flavor of some fish to develop. I was incredulous, thinking the fresher the better, but with dictionaries and patience, he explained that the proteins had to break down into mouthwatering amino acids. I told him about aging beef, and he said, “Fish, too. But not too long.” The following afternoon at his house, Ken filleted the kurodai with surgical precision. He then set out small dipping dishes with his preferred mixture of soy sauce, a sweet cooking sake called mirin, and a broth called dashi made with the flakes of a cured bonito. His wife, young son, and I all had a slice of kurodai that we dipped gently in the sauce. Firm, almost crunchy, imparting the subtle flavors of the ocean, it seemed the epitome of seafood sophistication yet required no cooking. “Oishī amino acids,” I said. Ken didn’t catch my joke and asked, “Okay?” with brow-lined concern. “Oishī desu,” I smiled. Never had I eaten a fish with such a heightened awareness of its delicacy and value. Around the Kanamaru house were gyotaku ink prints of trophy fish Ken had landed over the years, and in the family room alcove hung a scroll featuring an ink painting of a carp rising in a lotus pond. The tapestries of the Sistine Chapel and Coventry Cathedral could not have felt more holy.

  Ken may have exaggerated the value of the little black bream, but its red-skinned relative, the famous tai, often called red snapper in America, was a truly precious fish; I saw four-pounders on ice at the market for six thousand yen, about sixty dollars. When I attended the elaborate wedding of a friend, each guest was served a whole cooked tai in a lacquered box, the very name of the fish the tail end of omedetai, meaning congratulations. Honored at shrines, pursued by emperors, revered by the people, the tai seemed almost sacred. But it was also being fished to death. The difficulty of catching a single tai indicates not only the rocky elusiveness of these creatures but also their relative scarcity in many areas. Even on a bad day off Long Island, we could catch a few porgies. Japan’s seas have been supporting human predators for thousands of years, but the population density and industrialization of the twentieth century had taken a serious toll. The thought of a hundred well-armed Japanese men and women dropping lines down on a few lonely tai hiding in their mossy grottoes was discomfiting. I angled Ken toward the more abundant aji and yellowtail, feeling better, but perhaps just hiding my own head from the truth of man’s deep-reaching predations.

  “Don’t get too deep,” the dive master warned before we rolled off the side of the fiberglass skiff. Scuba diving around Niigata’s Sado Island, a couple friends and I chased a football-sized octopus that changed color and shape as it squeezed into a new cave. I followed another octopus into seventy feet of water before the cold and darkness turned me around. We swam with the honored bream and the famous fugu, a blowfish with delicious or, if improperly prepared, deadly flesh. And a huge, bulb-headed kobudai, an Asian sheepshead, dogged us around the rocks, eating squid from our hands.

  On the boat ride back to the island we also saw the Japanese fishing fleet chasing bluefin tuna, kuro maguro. As Japan and the West craved fattier melting bites of sushi, the bluefin’s value exceeded the snapper, sole, swordfish, and every other fish in the sea. In the 1990s, bluefin prices were already on the rise at hundreds of dollars per pound; in January 2013, a 489-pound bluefin tuna sold for $1.8 million, more than $3,600 a pound. At these rates, very few Japanese or American sport anglers will ever catch a bluefin tuna on rod and reel like Hemingway and Zane Gray.

  “Imagine hooking one those giants?” I prompted Ken.

  “They’re too expensive to play with,” he said.

  “That’s a crazy way of looking at it,” I argued. “If we stop fishing commercially for bluefin tuna, or any rare fish, they’re likely to recover.” I’d happily give up eating any fish for a few years or forever if it meant the species’ survival. And if the big fleets would lay off the bluefin maybe the average sport angler could, one day, catch one. “The schools would return,” I said, dreamy-eyed. “Like the great herds of buffalo.”

  “Japanese don’t like buffalo,” Ken snorted, fluffing up his tight curly hair with a pick. “They like Kobe beef.”

  Under the cover of a language misunderstanding or by poetic tangent, Ken would often evade my questions and contrary opinions.

  One afternoon, under a beautiful October sky, I saw salmon leaping and rolling up the Shinano River not far from where I lived. A fisherman casting for mullet told me only commercial netters could pursue them. Fuck that, I thought to myself, making plans to cast some big spinners. When I told Ken, he snapped, “You must never!” His face was red, his tight hair vibrating.

  “Just catch-and-release,” I shrugged. “I’ll say I’m mullet fishing. What’s the problem?”

  “It’s against the law, and Japanese people obey the law. You have no right.”

  It was the first time Ken got upset with me, and I backed down. But I thought it wrong to deny a few anglers the experience of pursuing, hooking, and battling a salmon while gill nets hung across the river. Why should commercial operations have exclusive rights to the tuna and salmon, especially when these rights were abused? Ken was a passionate angler but sheepishly obedient to customs, systems, and laws that favored government-supported industrial fishing over sport angling. And he almost blew a gasket when I told him I was going to fake a few sick days and fish in the mountains.

  “Are you sick?”

  “No,” I laughed.

  “Then you shouldn’t do that.”

  “I haven’t used any of my sick days, and they’re in my contract. Just a couple days.”

  “You’re a teacher. That’s not right.”

  Despite some cultural differences, Ken and I got along. A hair stylist who had studied in England, Ken ran a salon that became an after-hours fishing social club. K
en’s English was excellent, but two languages as different as Japanese and English are prone to pratfalls, and I smiled at his expensive sign, Hair Craps, depicting two friendly looking crabs with scissoring claws. Even if spelled correctly, Hair Crabs is not a great English name for any sort of salon. Sitting in state-of-the-art styling chairs, drinking beer and sake, and eating dried squid and miso mackerel, we would discuss hair, women, pornography, food, fishing, travel—everything under the rising sun.

  Through Ken and the salon, I made more friends, including Teiko, a beautiful woman in her early thirties who seemed, nonetheless, to carry sadness in her dark eyes. I sat in her pottery studio one afternoon, watching her hands press and pull a dull mound of spinning clay into the cylindrical form of a sake flask. “You love to drink,” she said. “So I make you a chōsi. But this one will have fish.” Teiko called herself a modern Japanese woman. An artist who graduated from the Women’s Art College in Tokyo, she attended English conversation clubs, watched new movies, listened to cool music, and dated me, a twenty-six-year-old American. But she confided her increasing problems at home. “Now I embarrass my parents. They want me to marry. Then I will have no time for this,” she said, shaving the inside of the chōsi with a long wooden tool. “My father gets very mad. He say I’m wasting my time with art and you.” She picked up a wide wet paintbrush and groomed the outer walls, leaving them smooth and unreflective, then took another wooden stylus and, with a few lines, engraved a lovely fish. “I’m sorry,” I said. She suddenly smiled, flaring the chōsi’s mouth and pinching a pouring spout where the fish rose.

  Teiko liked the water. We took trips to the sea and walked along the beach. Beaches in Japan are full of delights: people swimming, flying kites, surfing, and racing motorcycles. There were interesting dead creatures and debris printed in bright characters. But I was always surprised by the tide of garbage—bottles, cans, tires, plastic wrappers, even a washed-up female manikin, entirely nude but for a piece of kelp across her eyes as if she were a sea bandit turned to plastic by the dragon, Ryūjin, for trying to steal his jewels. Every culture has its paradoxes, and the law abiding Japanese, with all their civic mindfulness, order, cleanliness, efficiency, cultivated arts, and an obvious love of natural beauty, were still capable of trashing the sea. “Maybe it comes from Korea,” Teiko said. And though oceanic garbage can travel thousands of miles, this empty can of Asahi beer had the stamp of a local distributor.

  Teiko would often stay the night at my apartment. We’d wake on the futon, I’d make tea and slide open the shōgi screens to a field and marsh waving gently with new rushes. Spared by the plow and bulldozer, the wedge of land behind my apartment provided a small sanctuary for egrets, warblers, and shrikes. The waters teemed with frogs, crayfish, dragonfly larvae, and small fish. Stepping onto the gravel along the train tracks directly behind my building, a cock pheasant warily pecked. We noted the iridescent blue-green neck without a white ring and the long gray tail striped in black. I told Teiko about the ring-necked pheasants of South Dakota and Indiana, how they’d been introduced to America from the far fields of China and Japan. She put her hands around my neck and said, “You go the other way, nē?”

  Some mornings I would get up early and fish the town’s river and canals. One drizzly dawn I saw a man riding his bicycle down the cinder path under a line of ash trees, once grown to support bamboo poles for drying rice. Very old, wearing a shoulder cape and a round hat of woven rushes, he may indeed have dried rice stalks on these very trees before the war. Dismounting from his rusted one-speed, I noticed his mitten style rubber boots, which separated the big toe from the other digits. From the rear basket he pulled out a bag and a plastic bucket and then assembled a long two-piece bamboo handle and attached a semicircular net. He began dipping for funa, small crucian carp abundant in the warm rivers, muddy irrigation ditches, and polluted canals of East Asia. Funa, like all carp, seem to flourish almost anywhere, swimming through murky debris, feeding on vegetation, plankton, and small insects. Carp are tough, enduring fish, perhaps that is why they named Hiroshima’s major league baseball team the Hiroshima Carp just four years after the devastation of the atomic bomb dropped on that city in August 1945.

  Following the example of the young boys in town, I was also funa fishing but with a light wand, hair-thin line, and tiny hooks baited with maggots plucked from a dead cat. Catching finger-size fish from an irrigation ditch may not sound like great angling, but it brought me out into the fields where I could watch birds and insects, follow water, and bring home enough tiddlers for Teiko to make kanroi. Back in my apartment, I scaled and gutted the little fish, and then Teiko grilled them lightly over the gas burner and placed them in a pot with soy sauce, sugar, and mirin. The fish simmered all day while we played around, drank sake, and watched a movie until late afternoon when the funa became soft and dark. Served in Teiko’s elegant little bowls with sides of white rice and pickled eggplant, we picked up our chopsticks and ate the sweet stewed fish of the fields.

  Up at school during the week, I was frequently visited by one of our textbook salesmen, Mr. Masugata, the characters in his name meaning “trout inlet.” “I must take you ayu fishing,” he said over and over. “Tomo zuri, nē?” Friend fishing, okay? I had no idea what he was talking about, but his snapshots of the beautiful trout-like fish and the sparkling rocky rivers were enticing.

  It was late July, and Masugata picked me up early in the morning. He knew little English, and my Japanese was basic, but we had a fishing language between us until he popped in a cassette tape of Kabuki, his other hobby, and tried to explain what was going on. We stopped at a 7-Eleven, the popular mini-mart of Japan, and bought some canned coffee and onigiri, hand-size triangles of rice stuffed with salmon or pickled plum and wrapped with crispy seaweed. I loved onigiri. We ate and drove to the river, stopping on a bridge so he could eye the water level and strategize our approach. At a nearby bait shop, Masugata parked the car and said, “Now buy ayu.”

  “Aren’t we fishing for ayu?” I asked.

  Masugata laughed. “I’ll show you friend catch friend fishing. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I had gotten used to entering into events or taking trips where I really wasn’t sure what was going on. One of the young teachers once brought me to a Beach Love Party that I thought would be a blast only to discover I was captive among a dozen missionaries from Kansas, sipping Coke and eating yaki soba while they discussed the Lord’s work in Japan. I saw sharks in the waves and feigned stomach upset, getting home and calling Teiko for some sake and a long surf on the blue futon.

  The tackle shop was busy, but the proprietor greeted us with a smile and netted ten live ayu, about nine inches in length, from a bubbling cement tank, securing them in Masugata’s hi-tech aerated cooler. We drove down to a river looking very much like a North American trout stream, clear water braiding over rocks with riffles and blue-green pockets. The banks and islands bloomed in violet wildflowers and small bright bushes. There was little garbage, and birds flitted through the willows.

  At streamside, we assembled the rods, incredible lances some thirty feet long. “Samurai fished ayu,” Masugata spoke in deep charcoal tones. “Instead of sword when no more war.” I watched an angler downriver. There was, indeed, something of the nodachi, the long sword, in the grace and power of his motions, and I could imagine a scarred warrior finding solace in a summer day wielding a bamboo rod below the cascades. Like Hemingway’s Nick Adams trying to heal after the horrors of World War I, mindfully preparing his gear and casting for trout on Michigan’s Big Two-Hearted River, sometimes one had to practice deliberately at peace in order to find and keep it.

  “No reel but many lines,” Masugata instructed, handing me about a foot of top line that I tied directly to the rod tip and then to about fifteen feet of aerial line running to a marker and a new ten-foot length of underwater line made of fine monofilament to minimize the strain on the bait. The bait, decoy, or friend, was a live ayu, d
etained by a braided line leading to a nose ring snapped through the fish’s nostrils. From the nose ring, another span of braid runs along the body of the unfortunate hostage, ending in a monofilament leader and a single hook pierced through its anus, another treble hook trailing an inch behind.

  Would you do this to a trout? Live minnows for trout, maybe, but never a live trout to catch a trout, though artificial lures are manufactured to mimic small trout, and I’ve had a large brown trout attack a little rainbow I was reeling in. Trout are cannibals, but we still grant them respect. When it comes to speciesism, we differ, sometimes arbitrarily, in the way we treat animals. We love and pamper our dogs and cats yet slaughter and eat cows and pigs. As an angler, I have happily snagged bunker and shad, jerking weighted treble hooks through their bright schools, yet I’d never dream of doing that to trout. Why not? Sportsmen extol the ethics of fair chase, thus we ban snagging and restrict the baits and lures that may be deployed on those game fish we privilege. In some cases, these laws make catching more challenging and less injurious to wild species whose numbers are threatened. That’s good conservation. But even in a pond stocked with hatchery-raised trout, it would be considered unsporting and downright savage to snag fish or use baby trout for bait. Fishing laws and attitudes often reflect the way we feel about certain fish. So how should we feel about ayu?

  Ayu are cousins to the smelt, I reasoned, associated in America with creel limits by the ton, fund-raising fish fries, cheap beer, bowling alleys, and Michigan all-nighters. So in the end, however spurious my logic, I felt okay lowering this store-bought smelt into the river for his friends to attack.

  The territorial, wild ayu becomes “angry,” Masugata said. The fish rams the intruder’s flanks and belly, possibly hooking himself. “So they are not friends?” I retorted. Earlier, Masugata had acted out this drama with finny gestures and butts of the head, and now it was making sense. We both smiled, walked out into the river, and dropped our fake friends into likely living rooms. Masugata was a master angler, and with his conical straw paddy hat, red neckerchief, techy vest, and the graceful motions of his lance, he conjured the time-traveling samurai cowboy or perhaps the mysterious conductions of the ribbon-wanded Kabuki actor. Emitting deep humming sounds and holding firm, he swam the leashed ayu upriver a few feet. His rod tip pulsed with the living decoy, and then suddenly he felt the pull of another fish and swung back, launching two gold rockets through the air and into his fine-meshed net.