The Ramen King and I (3 page)

“May I sit at the counter?” I asked.

“No,” the woman said. “You need a reservation to sit at the counter.”

 

 

T
he only other person in the sushi bar was the sushi chef. Standing silently at his station, he reminded me a lot of Shota’s master.

Shota is the fifteen-year-old main character in a Japanese comic book series called
Shota’s Sushi
. In Book One, his father’s sushi bar comes under attack by an evil sushi chain. Shota learns how to make sushi to help out, but as a novice he can only do so much. A visiting sushi master recognizes Shota’s prodigious talent, however, and takes the boy on as an apprentice. Shota hones his skills, first as an entry-level helper in the master’s Tokyo sushi bar, and then as a contestant in the All-Tokyo Rookie Sushi Chef Competition. There are fourteen books in the original series, and eight more in a sequel series (in which Shota competes in the All-Japan Rookie Sushi Chef Competition). Shota’s dream is to become a full-fledged sushi chef so he can return home and save his father from the evil chain.

I had been reading
Shota’s Sushi
in the months before my first visit to the sushi bar, so I guess that’s why I made the connection. Like Shota’s master, the sushi chef in front of me was stocky with short gray hair, and his wrist muscles bulged out, presumably from making so much sushi. He seemed upset about something, and I had the feeling that, like many of the sushi chefs in the comic book, he was often upset about something. A clean white apron hung from his waist and a blue bandanna circumscribed his head.

Still pondering the catch-22 around the restaurant’s reservation policy, I was directed by the woman to a two-top.

“Would you like a beer?” she asked. “We have Sapporo and Asahi.”

I ordered a Sapporo. Then the chef screamed at me.

“Mr. Customer! Which sushi bars have you been to in San Francisco?”

I recognized “Mr. Customer” as a direct translation of
okyakusan,
the Japanese word for addressing patrons. But the way he asked the question made me feel as if I were on a first date and had just been asked to list my previous sexual partners.

I decided to be up front with him.

“I like Saji and Okina,” I said. “Every once in a while, for lunch, I go to Tenzan.”

The chef shook his head disapprovingly.

“I play golf with Shiba,” he said, referring to Tenzan’s head chef. “Next time you eat there, tell him that my sushi is better than his. Don’t worry, he knows it’s true.”

Zen used to advise me on how to behave at traditional sushi bars. I should say more about Zen, but for now I’ll just say that Zen is his real name, short for Zentaro, and that he once told me that when ordering
omakase
—leaving the selection up to the chef—you should carry a picture of what he called “your five starving children.” Near the end of the meal, Zen instructed, you should reach for your wallet and let the picture drop out, causing the chef to take pity on you when he tabulates the bill. Zen also shared with me his foolproof method for starting a relationship with a traditional sushi chef. “Ask about the guy’s knife,” Zen had said. “Specifically, ask how many times a day he sharpens it.”

I asked the chef standing behind the counter, “Is your knife from Japan?”

The chef lifted his knife. The blade was facing in my direction, but he didn’t say anything. I was getting nowhere with him, so I switched to Japanese.

Roughly how many times a day do you sharpen it?

The waitress was in the middle of pulling a tall bottle of Sapporo Black Label from a refrigerator next to the counter when she turned around and answered my question before the chef could.

“Actually, that’s just his demo knife,” she said in Japanese. “His real knife is at home, and it’s huge.” She held her hands in the air, about sixteen inches apart. “Like a sword.”

She brought the beer and a glass to my table, and took my sushi order. The
hamachi
in the glass case looked particularly good. I also ordered
saba
,
tai, mirugai, hirame, maguro, negi-toro
maki, and, of course,
ankimo
—the monkfish liver. As the woman relayed my requests to the chef, I looked around the restaurant. A decorative white sake barrel rested on a tree stump in the center of the space, and what little there was of a kitchen—just a sink and a single gas burner—was in plain view behind the counter. Crayoned illustrations of the chef and the waitress adorned the walls, along with photographs of famous people dining at Hamako. In one of them, a younger version of the chef stood proudly next to the baseball star Ichiro Suzuki. I recognized several classical musicians, including the violinist Isaac Stern, the flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal, and San Francisco Symphony conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. One photo showed Yo-Yo Ma playing cello—
in the restaurant
.

Twenty minutes later, the chef lifted a plate of sushi from his work area and set it down atop the refrigerated glass case in front of him. The woman picked up the tray and carried it to my table, where she recited the pedigree of each piece.

“
Tai
from New Zealand,” she said. “
Hamachi
from Japan.” And so on.

Then the chef screamed at me again.

“Mr. Customer, you will not find better sushi than this in the entire United States!”

With that, the chef burst out laughing. He appeared to be imagining that I had actually set out on an epic quest to find better sushi than his in the United States, and that I would one day return to concede defeat.

I
reached first for the Hamako chef ’s
tai
, and as it rolled around in my mouth, it made me recall the first book I had ever read in Japanese.

When I was a student at International Christian University, I lived alone in a tiny Tokyo apartment and absorbed ten new kanji characters every night, writing them over and over until I had memorized their meanings, stroke orders, and multiple pronunciations. In my pocket I always carried a Canon Wordtank—a portable electronic kanji dictionary—so I could look up unfamiliar symbols on trains, billboards, and menus. I heard that a good way to learn Japanese was to watch TV, but as a student I couldn’t afford a TV, so instead I bought a radio with a TV-band tuner that played the sound of TV shows. On Tuesday nights I would sit by the radio listening to dubbed episodes of
Star Trek
, and for a long time I was at a loss to explain the presence of a character named Mr. Kato, whom I didn’t remember from the American version of the show. I finally figured out that he was Mr. Sulu, the USS
Enterprise
’s helmsman (played by the Japanese American actor George Takei), and that the dubbers had simply given him a real Japanese name. Mr. Spock was still Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk was Captain Kirk, but for some reason Mr. Scott had been renamed Mr. Charlie. I never found out why.

It took about six months to master enough kanji characters—around two thousand—to start reading newspapers. When I felt ready to take on something longer, I went to the Yaesu Book Center, near Tokyo Station, and bought
Kanda Tsuruhachi Sushi Stories
. The cover showed four pieces of
nigiri
on a wood counter, and it caught my eye. A memoir penned by Yukio Moro-oka (a famous sushi chef), the book contains the lessons Moro-oka learned from his mentors—not only his father but also several other chefs under whom he apprenticed. For instance, his elders taught Moro-oka that sushi should never be eaten with chopsticks. “Sushi is made with hands, so it should be eaten with hands,” Moro-oka’s father used to say. In an exhaustive chapter titled “The Ideal Size and Shape of Nigiri,” Moro-oka explains that fish should be sliced so that, when viewed from the side, the cut resembles an unfurled paper fan. His take on size is more complex. If a customer cannot eat a piece of sushi in one bite, it’s largely the chef’s fault for not adjusting the dimensions to suit the patron’s mouth. Still, there are limits. A chef should never make a piece so big or small that he upsets the delicate balance between the fish and the rice. Moro-oka says that the only information he cannot reveal in the book is the ratio of salt to vinegar in his rice marinade, because his father once told him that the secret ratio was what made his sushi more than just rice and fish. So, to summarize what takes Moro-oka more than three hundred pages to explain, the rice is important and the fish is important, but the most important thing is the relationship between the rice and the fish. I got through the book in three months with the help of the Canon Wordtank. But I don’t think I ever really understood what Moro-oka was talking about until the
tai
began melding with the rice over my tongue at Hamako.