Fish 102

Last night I went to the kaiten-sushi place next door for dinner; it's only 100 yen a plate on Wednesdays (as opposed to the 120 yen on normal days) so I make it in there for a meal most Wednesday evenings before I go to conversation class (English conversation, not Japanese conversation) (teaching conversation class, not attending it...despite what some say I'm already able to converse fairly capably in English). Kaiten sushi means "sushi on a conveyor belt." As far as I can tell, kaiten is a word which means revolving, and is the same as in kaiten-nage, the aikido move, where it means "this is the one where you spin the other guy around ass over tailbone when you throw him."

There are a million different kinds of sushi that come by on the conveyor belt and a million more that they don't put out until you ask for them. There used to be a guy there named Ito san who would make me two ebi-zushi plates the second he saw me locking up my bike outside. I'm a regular! Ebi means shrimp, by the way. And sushi here, to review, means nigiri sushi, the hunk-o-fish-on-rice kind, usually two to a plate unless you get something like "enormous shrimp zushi" or "entire side of an eel zushi." You can also get maki-sushi, meaning rolls (I particularly like the ebi-fry makizushi, which has deep fried shrimp and some Japanese mayo in the middle, though these days I'm trying to cut down on the "fry" portion of my diet to conserve my girlish figure).

Ito san changed sushi shops just after Christmas but there's still my friend Daisuke at the one by my house. Daisuke and I talk every time I go in, but always in whispers over the counter while he cuts and packs the sushi. We have to whisper because, he'll whisper to me, the other guy behind the counter is the boss, and he doesn't like the chefs talking to the customers. This cannot possibly be true. The space that the two men share is a little smaller than the last Manhattan elevator you rode in if you crumpled it at the bottom of the shaft and turned it on its side, and there's no way that the boss doesn't notice us talking to each other when we whisper over the counter: we might as well be shouting at the top of our lungs. Plus, why would he mind? Customer relations are like a quarter of the strength of any business: you've got location, location, location, and customer relations.

And seriously, I am like the #1 one customer to have good relations with. I'm like a celebrity around here! This sushi place is in the district that has my biggest school–the families of some 500 kids all live around here, and their kids all love seeing me outside of class; if this is my regular place, then this is where the kids want to go, not to the other kaiten-suchi place in plain sight down the road. And everyone else loves to come share a few words too. The old ladies all want to know which kinds of sushi I can eat and which ones gross me out (the ones filled with natto gross me out, thanks), the old men want to know why I don't drink sake while I'm eating (because it's too expensive at the sushi bar and because it's a bit déclassé and because it's Wednesday afternoon at 5:00 and I have to teach English class in an hour). And lots of them want to try out their English; can it be a bad thing to have one of your chefs be demonstrably conversant with the celebrity foreign teacher?

Fish 101

So you’ve eaten kappa maki before, right? That’s what we call the sushi rolls that have cucumber slivers in the middle; maki means roll, and for years I believed that “kappa” was Japanese for cucumber. But I never hear anybody call them that. Japanese cucumbers are called “kyurie,” and the rolls are kyurie maki.

There are gajillions of kinds of sushi, but mostly they fall into two bigger groups: makizushi and nigirizushi, or in layman’s (read: English) terms, rolls and bricks. Sometimes sushi comes rolled up inside seaweed, an sometimes it comes like a brick of rice with a piece of fish/shellfish/mollusk/veggie on the top, these ranging in bulk from slice to full out slab. In America, “sushi” means makizushi. I feel like half the time I remember seeing nigiri sushi around we called it “sashimi;” sashimi’s actually just fish. Just fish. Raw fish. We all know it academically, like trivia game-show knowledge kind of knowing—“sashimi is raw fish”—but I don’t think I ever really thought about it until I ate it here: it’s just fish. They take a piece of cold fishmeat, slice it up, arrange it delicately on a plate, and then you FEAST!

It’s surprisingly good. Not that you would expect it to be bad per se, but there’s no way you expect to love eating it like you’ve grown to do. It’s comfort food, in a weird way. Very simple, filling, basic, real food. And unbelievably delicious. I rarely order sashimi when I’m out—largely because I’m still trying to figure out which places serve what, and I don’t want to ask for sashimi at the wrong place and either, A) have everybody laugh at me, or B) have the restauranteur scramble to find fresh fish from a neighboring restaurant so he can fill my request—but I buy it precut from the supermarket a lot, or I’ll get a slab of fish and cut it up myself. This you can do. With ease. There’s only two steps, and one of them is “buy the fish.” Still, somehow at the end of the process as you sit down to eat, you think, “I just made sashimi!

“I can cook Japanese food!”