The Story of Sushi (18 page)

K
ate’s alarm went off at 4:20 on the morning of the test. She drove to the Laundromat and downed a Coke and Snickers bar for breakfast while her chef’s jacket spun in the washer. She was determined to get good marks on her uniform.

Zoran was also awake. He was downtown, buying a thousand dollars’ worth of fish, including 22 pounds of eels. It was just as well that Kate didn’t know about the eels.

When class began, Zoran checked everyone’s uniforms. Kate’s was clean, but Zoran was busy praising another student who had pressed his with an iron. Zoran checked knives, tapping blades on his thumbnail and scribbling on his clipboard.

While they waited for Toshi, Kate cracked open a Red Bull caffeine drink and rummaged in her bag. She pulled out a heart-shaped cookie cutter and started punching heart shapes out of a mango.

Toshi bounded into the room.

“
Ohaiy
gozaimasu!
” he boomed, so fast that the syllables blurred together. The students snapped to attention.

“Today I’m going to do three tests,” Toshi announced. “First, spicy tuna and California roll, four minutes. Next,
kappa-maki
and
tekka-maki.
” Cucumber and tuna thin rolls. “Then, special roll.”

Toshi paused before beginning the test on the first two rolls. “Please, under four minutes. Anyone can do it slow. Okay?”

“
Hai!
” the students shouted.

Zoran reached for the digital stopwatch.

“Ready?” Toshi asked.

One or two of the students responded. “
Hai.
”

Toshi scowled. “
Ready?!
” he bellowed.

“
Hai!
” they chorused.

Kate noticed that some of the other students’ hands were shaking. She looked at her own hands. They were steady.

“
Go!
”

Marcos raced ahead and finished first. The others took close to five minutes, but their speed had improved. Toshi moved on to the next test—two thin rolls. Again, Marcos finished first. But on both tests, he’d clocked in without cleaning his cutting board. Takumi had wiped his cutting board clean both times before declaring himself finished.

Kate had tucked her rolls firmly together the way Zoran had showed her, and they stayed together. The practice had paid off. Toshi glanced at her rolls and nodded his approval.

“Okay!” he yelled. “Specialty roll, ten minutes! The clock is ticking!”

The students scrambled. Takumi quietly built his domino roll. Marcos rushed around in a frenzy, constructing and frying his potato-chicken roll. With seconds remaining, he plated it and squirted on a fancy pattern of sauce. Toshi examined each roll, taking notes on his clipboard.

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.

S
aturday 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.

O
n 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 canister 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.