The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice

by Trevor Corson

  Kate was glowing. She’d made an inside-out roll with salmon, cream cheese, and tempura-fried mango, presented on a bed of tempura crunchies. Two mango love hearts perched at the back of the plate. It was sweet and yummy. It was pretty. It held together. Most important, it was Kate.

  Toshi examined Kate’s roll. He nodded again and scribbled on the clipboard. When he arrived at Marcos’s roll, he gave Marcos a long, cold stare. He gestured at the roll.

  “This isn’t sushi,” he said, his voice quiet. “There’s no rice.”

  Marcos flushed. “It has to have rice?”

  “It looks good,” Toshi said, “but it’s not sushi.”

  Marcos blinked.

  Toshi turned to the whole group. “Great job, everybody.” He looked around. “Any questions?”

  Marcos stammered, still red in the face. “Are all special rolls supposed to have rice?”

  “We’re supposed to be doing sushi,” Toshi answered.

  On his way out, Toshi leaned down and peered at Takumi’s domino roll again. The geometry was exact, and the cross sections were colorful. Toshi smiled at Takumi. He spoke in Japanese. “That’s cool.”

  That night Takumi helped out behind the sushi bar, assisting the senior chefs with omakase for a group of American customers. As usual, he started off shy and reserved. But the customers were boisterous and kept buying beers for the chefs, and Takumi drank a little too much. He began to chat and then joke with the Americans in broken English. He made them a plate of Italian-style raw tuna carpaccio. They loved it. Then Takumi got a glint in his eye.

  Moments later, he reached across the fish case and placed a small plate in front of them. On it were six slices of cucumber roll, in a circle. He told them what it was. Then he spun the plate.

  28

  COMEDY CLUB

  Saturday night, Zoran and Fie worked behind the front sushi bar. Business was slow. When the couple Fie had been serving had left the restaurant, she surreptitiously poured the beer they’d bought her into the sink. She was watching her figure. So was one of the men at the bar. A few minutes later, he asked her to marry him. He added that she could still have a boyfriend on the side, if she wanted. He laughed. “I don’t want to do all the work!”

  Fie plastered a smile on her face while she made him sushi. “Sounds like a good deal,” she said.

  “No one’s offering to marry me!” Zoran bellowed. He glanced around, eyebrows raised.

  The man seemed not to have heard. He was staring at Fie. “It’s a wonderful offer,” he said.

  Fie kept her eyes on the roll she was slicing. “It’s a wonderful offer,” she repeated.

  He nodded. “Think about it.”

  Zoran turned sideways and pretended to watch the television above the bar but he was keeping his eye on the man. Fie plated the roll and squirted on sauce. She slipped past Zoran to deliver it. Zoran whispered in her ear. “Let me know if you want me to say something.”

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  The ticket printer chattered out a new order. Zoran ripped out the ticket and pulled ingredients from the fish case. The man ate a few slices of the roll and watched Zoran work.

  “So,” the man asked, “what are the skills required to be a sushi chef?”

  “You have to be polite,” Zoran replied.

  In the comic book Sushi Chef Kirara’s Job, the young Kirara has a conversation with a disillusioned older woman chef.

  “Since you are a pretty girl,” the older woman tells Kirara, “you must have been through a lot.”

  “What?” Kirara asks.

  “Like being given a hard time by customers who’ve been drinking, or sexually harassed by co-workers, or seduced by the owner.”

  Kirara protests. “I haven’t experienced anything like that.”

  “You don’t need to play ignorant with me. Female chefs are discriminated against. There’s no way you haven’t experienced anything like that.”

  At 7:00 p.m. on Sunday, a low-slung silver sports car growled past the restaurant. Visible in the cockpit was the silhouette of a head with a jutting chin. A few doors down, the car stopped in front of the Comedy & Magic Club. The car’s door hissed open vertically and out stepped Jay Leno.

  Leno was here for his weekly Sunday-night gig at the club, where he tested new jokes before using them on the The Tonight Show.

  At the sushi academy, Toshi taught every class that a sushi chef had to be an entertainer as well as a cook. Some years Toshi hired actors and comedians to help the students learn to perform behind the sushi bar. He’d taught Zoran to perform. Now, Zoran was up against Jay Leno, appearing in the same block. Tonight Zoran had the better act.

  Zoran was dangling a raw octopus leg in front of three women at the bar. They gazed at it, vacillating between amusement and horror.

  “Would you eat it?” one of the women asked.

  “It’s delicious!” Zoran said. He snatched up his knife and cut a disk of flesh from the leg. He squeezed a lemon wedge over it, sprinkled it with salt, and held it out for their inspection. “Raw octopus leg!”

  The women stared, wide-eyed, as Zoran popped it in his mouth with a flourish. They squealed.

  “Ew!”

  “It’s really quite nice,” Zoran said, chewing. “So next time, ask for the shiny octopus.”

  Suddenly Zoran keeled over sideways, his face contorted. The women gasped.

  Zoran shot back up, chuckling. The women laughed.

  A few seconds later Zoran coughed and started choking. Again they stared. He broke into a smile. They laughed some more.

  Then Zoran’s knees buckled out from under him. He grabbed his throat and yelled, “Water!” The women broke into uproarious laughter.

  Kate had returned to San Diego for the weekend, elated. On the creative-roll test, Toshi had given her high marks in each category: preparation, presentation, and originality. And she was excited about the prospect of the sushi job in the nightclub.

  Kate hadn’t sharpened her knives before leaving for the weekend. She hated sharpening her knives, and she wasn’t much good at it. She still worried about slicing off the tips of her fingers. She knew a sushi chef was supposed to care for her own knives, but she was feeling so good about her mango heart roll that she decided to treat herself to an indulgence.

  On Sunday afternoon she walked into a professional cutlery store in San Diego. They were startled to see a white girl with a pierced nose pass them a case full of Japanese hand-forged blades. She said she wanted them sharpened.

  Zoran would be furious if he found out.

  Week 7

  29

  LONG GOOD-BYE

  On Monday morning, Zoran stared at the table, then lifted his chin. He had an announcement to make.

  “I’m leaving,” Zoran said, his face tight. “I fly out on the twenty-eighth.” He would be returning to Australia. It wasn’t his choice to go, he said.

  The students looked stunned, especially Kate. That was just two weeks from now—only two-thirds of the way through the semester.

  The hum of refrigerators and freezers filled the room.

  “Who is going to be our teacher?” Kate asked.

  “Maybe Tetsu. Maybe Toshi. Maybe both.” Zoran paused. “Okay, just to let you guys know.” He glanced at the clock, then told the class to begin preparing for today’s student lunch counter.

  The students swung into action. Kate switched on the radio. Hip-hop thumped into the room. They loaded ice into the fish cases and set out chopsticks, soy-sauce dishes, and napkins. In the kitchen, Marcos skewered fillets of albacore and seared them over the big burner. He wondered if the two women he’d served last week would return. He’d served them a bone in their fish. It didn’t seem likely they’d come back.

  Around noon, five people walked in and sat at the bar. They looked like businesspeople. The man in front of Kate ordered a cucumber roll. She wet her hands and clapped her fist into her palm with authority. She gathered a handful of rice from the canist
er and squeezed together a cucumber roll.

  After a few minutes Kate’s mother and brother walked in. Kate greeted them with a big smile. She made them a couple of rolls and sliced them, using her long, willow-leaf blade. The cutlery store had made her knife very, very sharp. She was relieved to have found a way to avoid sharpening it herself. But now she had to be extra careful when slicing.

  Two more people walked in. Marcos looked up. It was the women from last week—the ones to whom he’d served bones. They glanced around the room, surprised. “Wow, it’s full!”

  Marcos flashed them a smile. “I was wondering where you ladies were.” He finished squeezing together a rainbow roll—colorful strips of fish pressed atop a California roll. “So, how you ladies doin’?” Marcos’s father was in town, and just then he arrived with his girlfriend. Suddenly Marcos had four customers, all special. And there was nowhere for his dad to sit. Zoran intervened, directing them to a table.

  A young couple arrived and Zoran seated them at a second table. Then a heavyset man with long hair strode in. Seventeen customers now waited for food. The students hustled, sliding past each other to the lowboy and the fish cases, grabbing ingredients.

  Marcos squeezed together a few tuna nigiri for his father and his father’s girlfriend. He crowded them onto a tiny plate with wasabi and pickled ginger, and he delivered it to their table. On the way back, Marcos tried to flirt with the two women. They seemed more interested in the sushi than in him. At least they hadn’t found any bones.

  Marcos’s dad’s girlfriend spread wasabi across the top of the nigiri like frosting and then bit the nigiri in two. The other half fell from her hands. She was quick, and caught it before it landed in the soy sauce. The heavyset man with long hair stirred a glob of wasabi into his soy sauce, forming a paste. Then he dipped his pickled ginger in the paste and ate it as an appetizer.

  Another couple walked in, then even more customers arrived. They had to wait to be seated. The students kept hustling.

  The heavyset man finished his wasabi-laden lunch.

  “This was really excellent,” the man said. “Thank you.” He handed the students some cash. “Keep the change. Next time I’ll bring thirty friends. We’ll fill the place!”

  As the other customers left they, too, complimented the students on the food. The students beamed.

  After class, the students sharpened their knives. Except Kate. Her knives were nice and sharp. She left a note for Jeff, the restaurant consultant, reminding him that she wanted the nightclub job, and left.

  30

  FROM FRESHWATER

  The next morning, Kate was on rice duty. She arrived at school early. After half an hour, on her eighth rinse, the rinse water was still cloudy. She worked her hands through the frigid water, mixing and rubbing the rice. She lifted the heavy bowl and poured the water out again. Her hands were turning numb.

  This is going to give me arthritis, Kate thought. Sushi apprentices in Japan did this every day for two years before they were even allowed to touch fish? Maybe the California Sushi Academy wasn’t so bad. Kate put the rice on to cook just as Zoran took roll. She rushed to the classroom.

  “Today, salmon,” Zoran was saying. “In Japanese it’s called sake, or shake to distinguish it from sake.” In Japanese the two words are written with different characters—one for salmon, another for rice liquor—but they are pronounced the same. Sushi chefs had fiddled a little with the language to avoid confusing themselves behind the sushi bar.

  “Now,” he went on, “I have some news for you. The Japanese don’t usually use salmon for sushi. When I was in Tokyo with Toshi, some tourists asked a sushi chef for salmon, and he stood looking at them as if they were crazy. You know why?”

  No one did.

  “Parasites. Salmon are susceptible to parasites.”

  In fact, they’re worse than mackerel. A study in the 1980s found anisakis larvae in every one of the fifty wild salmon the researchers took from Puget Sound. And because salmon swim in freshwater as well as the ocean, they can carry the larvae of tapeworms, too. In 1981, the Centers for Disease Control issued a warning after a tapeworm outbreak in California was traced to salmon sushi. Tapeworms are a primary reason why traditional sushi chefs seldom serve freshwater fish raw. Once a tapeworm takes up residence in a human, it can grow to a length of several feet. A museum in Tokyo dedicated to parasites houses a tapeworm that was extracted from a man who’d eaten a raw trout, a freshwater relative of salmon. The worm in the museum is nearly 30 feet long.

  Unlike bacteria, parasites are complex, multi-celled organisms. Cooking will kill them, but so will cold enough temperatures. The solution for raw salmon, Zoran explained, was to freeze the fish in the restaurant’s industrial freezer. Some people consider unfrozen fish a requirement for high-quality sushi, but unfrozen salmon are a very bad idea. The chefs at Hama Hermosa froze their salmon for a minimum of seventy-two hours before thawing and serving it. Most sushi chefs are less strict about freezing mackerel because they salt and vinegar it.

  The lower the temperature, the more quickly the parasites die. In the United States, the FDA recommends that distributors or restaurants freeze all fish that will be served raw for eighteen hours at -31°F, a temperature that only a high-powered blast freezer can achieve. At the more conventional temperature of -4°F, the FDA points out that the fish has to be kept frozen for an entire week to destroy parasites. Most home freezers don’t go much below 0°F.

  The FDA simply issues recommendations. Individual states must implement their own regulations, and many have. As of the summer of 2006, California still had no statewide codes to enforce fish freezing. Fish suppliers are supposed to track any health risks, and local health inspectors do visit sushi restaurants regularly and hand out scorecards that must be posted at the entrance. People do not generally get sick from eating salmon sushi. Nevertheless the “Kids Page” on the California Food and Drug Web site puts it this way: Eating sushi “may not be very safe for you.”

  Salmon belong to one of the oldest families of fish in existence. Along with freshwater trout, salmon go back 100 million years.

  There is evidence that the group of creatures we generally think of as fish did not first evolve in the ocean. Like salmon and trout, all fish may have their origins in freshwater. Between about 350 and 400 million years ago the earth exploded with new life forms. In the ocean, the wormlike fishes evolved into new species. Some of these moved into freshwater. There they developed skeletons made of hard bone. Subsequently, many of them returned to the ocean with their new equipment and recolonized the sea. These may well have been the ancestors of the ocean fish we know today. Many others stayed behind. Forty percent of all species of bony fish still live in freshwater.

  Salmon live in both worlds. Salmon are born in freshwater, spend from one to five years in the sea, and return to freshwater and fight their way up raging rivers to spawn in the streams of their birth. Why go to such trouble?

  In the relatively cold climates at higher latitudes, where salmon live, the ocean provides a richer buffet of nourishing food than freshwater. But freshwater streams are safer places for babies to grow up. By taking advantage of both environments, salmon eat well, and their eggs and young have high survival rates.

  Salmon smell their way back to their birthplace. As they begin their trek upstream from the ocean, they eat the last meal of their lives. From then on they will survive by burning their own fat and digesting the proteins in their own muscles.

  As they head upriver they also undergo astonishing anatomical changes, not unlike Dr. David Banner’s transforming into the Incredible Hulk. At sea, salmon are handsome and respectable-looking silver fish. By the time they return to their home streams, depending on the species, they have developed green heads, bright-red skin, bizarre color patterns, beaked jaws with nasty teeth, and hunched backs.

  These monstrous fish flail around in streams that are much too small for them, the males ramming and biting each other and the fem
ales attacking everything that moves. The females turn on their sides and whack their tails into the gravel, digging depressions to lay their eggs. The toughest males duke it out for the right to spray sperm on the eggs. The violent orgy ends in death for all the salmon.

  Meanwhile, bears swipe salmon from the water by the fistful. Bears are finicky sashimi eaters. They eat only a few bites of each salmon before tossing it aside and ambling back into the water to catch another. They leave lacerated salmon strewn across the forest floor.

  At a sushi bar this behavior would merit eviction, but in a forest it’s welcome. Plants living near salmon streams contain large amounts of nourishing nitrogen, and tests have shown that up to 70 percent of it came from the ocean, via salmon. Tree growth near salmon streams is three times greater than near comparable streams without salmon.

  “Now, to farming,” Zoran said. He explained that most salmon served in sushi is farmed salmon.

  Industrial pollution began killing off wild salmon in major rivers around the world as early as the nineteenth century. In England, the last salmon in the Thames were caught in 1833. The construction of dams destroyed many salmon runs as well.

  Norway pioneered the farming of salmon in the 1970s, followed by Scotland. The Europeans expanded salmon farming into Canada, the United States, and Chile. Today, a handful of multinational corporations control much of the industry, and farmed salmon account for half of all salmon sold. Fishermen who catch high-quality wild salmon have trouble staying in business because cheap farmed salmon glut the markets.

  Salmon farming has made salmon more plentiful, but in a sense it has also created a new kind of fish. And for sushi, most Americans prefer this new kind of fish. The reason is simple. As Zoran liked to put it to his customers at the sushi bar, “Farmed salmon don’t work for a living.”