I don’t blog.
I have never blogged.
But this is a macabre story that must be retold, with no detail spared, and hence, I’m committing it to print (sort of).
I call it ‘The Tell-Tale Fish’.
Sushi-Meijin is a restaurant very near my house in Japan. I go there between two and three times a week when I have no food, am too exhausted to wash up if I were to cook, or, ultimately, want to be healthy.
Every night that I am in my house, I manage to eat anything that might resemble chocolate – kitkats, chocolate almonds, chocolate cereal (getting desperate), or, the lowest of the low, cocoa powder made into a paste with milk. It’s a sorry sight, and not restricted to chocolate, but bread too (first the bread, then the bran flakes, then dry crackers, until the larder is bare). Therefore, the firmest stance I can take with myself is to leave very little food in the house, and go to treat myself to filling and nutritious sushi as often as I can. At 700 yen a go (around a fiver), where’s the harm.
Tonight was such a night, and, with a spring in my step, having finished my ようじ(chores) by 6.30pm, I arrived.
Now, I have fallen into a rut recently regarding my choices. I can’t read the food kanji on the touch-screen menu, so I’m limited to fish that looks palatable in the photograph, or that has hiragana that I can look up in my dictionary. Usually, the menu will go like this: Maguro Harami (Raw tuna from near the ribs); Tempura Ebi Sushi (something akin to Scampi); Inari (rice wrapped in sweet tofu); something tasty looking from the belt, maybe trout; Saumon Sarada (salmon salad) and then Karaage (fried chicken), and ice-cream, and I’m good to go, feeling pretty virtuous.
However, tonight, the seeds of discontent were stirring, revolution was coming. I felt, with some trepidation (was I really going to do this?) my finger beginning to hover over the ‘おすすめ’(recommendations) button. This was the land of the weird and wonderful, I was going through the bloody looking glass now. Buckle up.
Two tiny pictures immediately attracted my attention. One, a plate with what looked like around 10 pieces of sashimi on it, but costing 780 yen – too much for a Wednesday night, and another. This was similar, a small wooden bowl with what seemed to be 5 pieces of sashimi on it, and a fish head.
Ok, I thought. I can handle a head. And, at 500 yen, it wasn’t going to be much of a waste if it was awful. New experiences, ne?
I pressed the button, and sat back.
Not long after, the first seeds of doubt begun to appear. I heard a waitress whisper to a colleague “something something ni juu san ban sama something something…”. I looked up the shelf above my seat. I was indeed ni juu san ban sama something something. Number 23. Hmmm. What was going to happen?
Then, a meek and teeny Japanese Lady crept over, knelt down, and said something in Japanese. “I’m really sorry,” I said, “I don’t understand”. But of course I DID understand. I KNEW it was going to be about the mystery fish. She pressed the touchscreen lightly, and said something akin to ‘you’ve ordered this, but are you sure?’ Too apprehensive and sleepy to argue, I took the easy option, and said ‘yes’. ‘No’, might, in fact, constant reader, seem like the easy option in this situation, but bearing in mind I don’t know how to say ‘look, I’ve changed my mind, I think this has been a terrible mistake, and I just want to cancel it and forget the whole thing,’, my hands were tied.
A few minutes passed. Another waitress, who was obviously deemed by her friends the ‘English-speaking waitress’, as she knew ‘Excuse me’ and ‘thank you’. Her approach was more subtle. In Japanese - ‘Ah, hello, umm, we’re just checking something, it’s like a survey, nothing to worry about. Just let me just take a look here… ah, yes, you’ve ordered one of these… umm, just one was it… that you wanted?’
Me: “… umm…Yes, just the one… thank you”
Waitress: (overly cheery) “GREAT! That’s great! It’ll be right out for you. Sank you.”
She rushed back to her friends, who practically sang ‘for she’s a jolly good fellow’, in complete awe of her grasp of the English Language.
It’s at these moments, when people have stopped eating to stare at you, and the chefs have lined up at the counter, shaking their heads vehemently, that you start to think of the worst. But this is a family restaurant, part of a national chain, selling French Fries and Coca-Cola, not a backstreet stall in the Tokyo Fish Market. I honestly couldn’t have envisaged what was coming.
It was a huge bucket, around 40cm in diameter, filled with ice. On top of the ice, rested a small wooden board, with three pieces of delicious-looking sushi on them, delicately decorated with nettle leaf and wasabi. Resting in the ice above this, was the piece de resistance, a large fish. Perfect in every way, except for it’s body, which had been stripped of all flesh with the skill of a surgeon. Where it’s chest had once been, now there was salad, and the sashimi from this carefully filleted creature, rested on top.
Silence. Shock. But not complete horror. The fish body had been elegantly arranged, with a bamboo skewer joining tail to head, that it might sit above the rest of the arrangement. The sashimi looked wonderful, I’ve eaten it plenty of times before, and even in England you’re readily exposed to head-and-tail-on salmon at wedding buffets, or complete grilled sardines in country pubs.
I tucked in. Ignoring the small flecks of blood, it really was fantastic. I reached out for my cup of green tea, when, from the corner of my eye-
a movement. Little more than a flicker.
Had I jogged the bucket with my wrist? I must have.
As I brought the cup to my lips, there it was again, more pronounced this time.
The tail was moving. The tail was bloody moving. The fish who’s choicest cuts I had just devoured, was still alive.
What could I do? I’d said I’d wanted it. Was I now going to cry, shriek, jump up, in short, be a complete f***ing girl about it? Confirm everything that the staff were probably expecting of a foreigner? It was dead (or at least, the prognosis was not good for this particular patient), but it is difficult for me to explain here the sheer horror and nausea that swept over me as I thought of the notion that was being played out. To prove how fresh the fish was, it would be caught, cut up, and served to you within a manner of minutes, where it could watch its own demise. Can you imagine cutting open a pig, and eating it while it watched you? I was in the middle of my own black, black, black comedy.
The dilemma that presented itself was not easy, and I was feeling desperately ashamed. But, in the moment, the only choice seemed to be what I finally settled on - eat the remainder of the fish as quickly as possible, a small amount of the salad, decide what was done was done, and to move the bowl to my left, just out of eye’s view.
The fish’s tail was really starting to wiggle around now. I was heartbroken, but was also starting to reason, were these my own human emotions I was projecting onto this being? My initial reaction of ‘oh god, it’s trying to free itself’, was based on, I suppose, how I would feel in that situation. It had now been out of the water for 30 minutes, could it still be ‘conscious’? And are fish sentient in the way that we would define it in, say, mammals, or was this movement the mere result of excess motor-neurons misfiring down a dying spinal cord. Having investigated further, I find that most reports of diners eating live fish, particularly in China, refer to its ‘breathing’, whereas this fish was not breathing at all, its head remaining completely still throughout.
I moved it, and continued with my Japanese study, and tea. It would be time to leave soon, and no-one would have paid much attention to my shock. After all, it’s on the menu- Japanese people must eat it. I’ve seen the chefs prepare fish in Meijin before, and was aware that ‘killing’ them before starting to chop them up, was not high on their priorities. I’m not trying to temper what I felt was my own cruelty by passing the blame (‘they did it first!’), but I’m from a different type of culture, one where certain types of fishing are now banned, and where the RSPCA can arrest you if you mistreat your goldfish, and I should know better.
For the next 10 minutes, much as I tried to ignore it, my eyes were continuously dragged to the flickering tail, the almost imperceptible movement seemed to scream out to every patron, my very own Tell-Tale Heart. Perhaps a braver person that myself, would have cut off its head, or made some other steps to end its ‘suffering’, if that’s what it was. However, I felt we were now inextricably bound together, and it was the least I could do to face up to what I’d done, not send it away into the night (or kitchen).
Unfortunately, I was not to be left in peace. A polite ‘sumimasen’ from behind my shoulder. A pretty middle-aged woman, who spoke perfect English, bearing a California roll on a plate. The innocuous combination of avocado, rice, and fish stick, was in stark contrast with my guilt. “Excuse me, where do you come from? Are you travelling alone? Would you like any help using the menu? I see you started with this”, she said, gesturing at the now-stilled remnants. “Yes”, I said, in a small voice, and proceeded to answer her questions with a polite but genuine smile and return-questions of my own about her family, as I have become accustomed to doing while wearing my permanent Gaijin Hat. “Well”, she said kindly, “I’m here with my parents”. I glanced behind her, and they waved enthusiastically. “My mother”, she ventured, “thought you might like this. Our treat”. I accepted the plate with excesses of gratitude and more smiles. “You’re welcome," she said. "My sister is married to a Swiss Man, you see?”
I didn’t see, but I really appreciated the gesture. And the evidence that I was not going to be pilloried by the local community.
In conclusion, perhaps it would be glib, or simply false, to say that these events are going to have me seriously questioning my ardent carnivorism. Neither do I purport that I am the first ‘stranger in a strange land’ to have experienced such things. I might mention the ex-ALT at London Orientation, who, having been forced to swallow live fish at a festival, vomited onto his supervisor’s shoes later in the evening, only to find his prey still very much alive. Then there was my father, who ate pig’s head in Moscow; my mother, who ate live sea-urchin in Greece; the BBC correspondent who ate Shark’s Fin soup in China so as not to offend her Ambassadorial host; the monkey brain stories of legend, and finally the countless ‘I’m A Celebrity’ contestants on British Television who eat live grubs and cockroaches.
But, I am reminded of The Grinch:
And what happened then?
Well, in Whoville they say that the Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day.
Perhaps, my conscience has been, for a long time, ‘two sizes too small’.
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