Yesterday
morning a downpour started, so I stepped out to the covered porch and read
about sushi. I had Trevor Corson’s book, The
Zen of Fish, which uses an American woman’s entry to the California Sushi Academy to explore the history and current state of sushi culture.
“In
the mid-1990s, Reiko Yuyama, a Japanese publishing executive, stopped by a
famous sushi bar for a meal. She was alone. Most of the other customers were
men. The chef chatted amiably with the other customers but ignored Yuyama. She
managed to order several pieces of sushi, but after only her fourth piece a cup
of green tea appeared in front of her. Since green tea is often served at the
end of the meal, she took this as a request that she leave. She stayed for an
hour, continuing to order. When she asked for the bill, it was obviously for
more than she’d been served.
“Spurred
by this incident, Yuyama visited many of the best sushi bars in Tokyo and
around Japan, always alone, and described her experiences in a book called One Woman Sushi. Traditional sushi bars
are like exclusive clubs, Yuyama found—difficult for single women and the
uninitiated to enter, especially since there are no menus.
“The
other women Yuyama encountered in the sushi bars were almost always accompanied
by men, and the men used the opportunity to impress their dates with
ostentatious displays of sushi knowledge. …. When Yuyama ordered sushi herself,
the other women glared at her. Yuyama concluded that traditional sushi bars are
the last place in Japan where men still feel completely superior to women.”
This
came as a surprise to me. Stepping into a fairly Westernized sushi shop in
Missouri, I had no idea the role that gender played in this kind of cuisine. I suspected
that California rolls weren’t traditionally enjoyed in Japan. Corson confirmed
this, but also described how Japanese tourists in America sometimes order the
greasier American sushi dishes they can’t get back home. Cultural legacies,
adaptations, and power struggles all acted themselves out in the apparently
undramatic space of a sushi bar. Reading Corson, as with his previous book, The Secret Life of Lobsters, is a trail
of unexpected revelations about apparently commonplace items. So it is too with
other nonfiction writers—David Foster Wallace’s essay “Consider the Lobster”
and John McPhee’s book Oranges come
to mind.
Is
it selfish to write about sushi? About fine food in general, when people are
starving, no less? Thoughts like this bring me to Doctor Zhivago—the scene in which the narrator, a Bolshevik
commissar, comes to warn his brother Yuri, the poet-doctor protagonist, that
his apolitical lyric poetry was putting “a noose round his neck,” in the eyes
of the revolutionary authorities. Yuri asks his brother, “Do you think it’s ‘personal, petit-bourgeois
and self-indulgent?’” The narrator says “I lied” on the voice-over as his past self
nods to Yuri. But fine feelings aside, people were and are starving.
The
short answer: yes, it’s selfish—in the same sense that it’s selfish to discuss
the shortcomings of Western medicine when people go without basic services
elsewhere. However we angle it, we are all trapped in a web of privilege and
injustice.
However,
what allows us to see this web, and therefore, do something about it? For me,
it’s books.
The
goal of great fiction is not only to give someone an in-depth knowledge of
Russian aristocratic drawing-room conventions, the conditions of a Harlem tenement
in the Depression, or the legal details of inheritance in southern England, but
instead to develop a reader’s ability to think critically about the human motives
that created all of these social structures. No, we don’t improve the world at
large a whit by knowing who the Thane of Cawdor was, but we might by being able
to spot someone like him, willing to murder to become the next King of
Scotland.
In
The Zen of Fish, Corson follows two
chefs, Zoran and Tetsu, from the restaurant Hama Hermosa, in their morning trip
to Los Angeles’s biggest fish market, International Marine Products.
“As
they walked through a loading door in the warehouse, they felt the chill of the
huge refrigerated space. The smell of the ocean assaulted their nostrils. Their
shoes squished over a film of frigid water on the plastic floor. Under a high
ceiling, long tables were covered with plastic bins and Styrofoam boxes full of
ice. Zoran nodded to Tetsu and the two men split up. … Shouts in Spanish and
Japanese filled the room. … Zoran eyed the bins. There were sardines, squid,
and barracuda from the waters of California. There were butterfish, tilefish,
skate, and live Maine lobster from the East Coast. There were amberjack,
grouper, and trevally from Australia and New Zealand. From Japan there were
Pacific saury, blue snapper, red gurnard, largehead hairtail, chicken grunt,
and many other fish that didn’t even have English names.”
 |
| Some nigiri and sushi rolls I had recently. |
It’s
fair to question the motives of a writer who’s writing about something they
love—Trevor Corson and his sushi, John McPhee and his rocks—because such a
project can be deeply rewarding work. (As well as exhausting.) But it’s not
fair to question them and then keep eating sushi unreflectively.
Maybe
if we thought deeply enough about our own food we would notice those who don’t
have any for longer than a few seconds. Maybe if we considered the energy
expended in transporting fresh fish from New Zealand to the U.S., we would
think more critically about the possibility of feeding distant nations stricken
by famine. At the least, maybe we would appreciate people who make our sushi
more completely, with a greater understanding of the training and effort it
takes to make something worth eating.
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