…He paid and excited out the door opposite that which he'd entered through and walked across the hallway towards the sushi restaurant.
As he walked in, he was greeted enthusiastically by a hip, young hostess. She was petite, yet had a slightly round face which was not at all unpleasing. Her eyes were a little small, something he'd later read was looked down upon in this culture, though Connor loved how it made her eyes look like tiny moons when she smiled. She wore a black polo and apron, which hung over pants which clung to her body before flaring out at the ankle.
She offered Connor a table, but he decided to sit at the bar instead. As with many Japanese sushi restaurants, this one had a conveyor belt which ran along the back edge of the horseshoe-shaped bar. Tightly arranged plates in a rainbow assortment of colors lined the long belt. Each plate held a few pieces of one type of sushi and each color represented a different price point. On the counter between him and the conveyor belt were tea cups, tea bags and a hot water spout. This halted Connor for a moment. He found it a charming contradiction that with all the tradition afforded certain Japanese rituals; a restaurant might also have self-service tea.
Noting that most men weren't drinking tea while eating, Connor got an ice water and decided to dig in. Where to begin, though? Feeling a bit overwhelmed by the selection and presentation, he once again took pause. The sushi was exquisite. Some pieces wore garnishes or were finished with a sprinkle of this seed or that. This made each look like a blossom, sunset, or even, Connor imagined, like one of the fabled geisha of Kyoto which he'd seen in films and, more recently, in the introductory literature which Ken had assigned him to read. One piece of sushi in particular, a white fish with a pink swirl was covered with the smallest star burst of carrot strings and a slight sprinkle of parsley. The entire plate was then glazed with criss-crossing motions by a thick brown sauce. Like a word, which partially scribbled out causes the observer to long for reading it, one was driven by a desire to undress this piece from its strings of sauce.
Deciding that he needed a base before trying such a delicacy, Connor started with one plate each of ebi (shrimp) and maguro (tuna). He mixed some soy sauce with a thumbnail of wasabi in the tiny mixing bowl that was provided and, fortunately, took one last look around the restaurant to notice that here in Japan, even the way to consume sushi was different. In the West, the entire piece of sushi would have been lowered with chopsticks into the soy sauce and eaten. In contrast, here the fish was delicately removed from the top of the entire piece and then placed into the dipping dish before being set back upon the rice square for eating. Though more complicated, this technique did show the proper respect to the true star of the establishment, the seafood.
With some complications, Connor performed the disassembling-dipping-reassembling-eating ritual and inserted the first orange piece of ebi into his mouth. Holding the shrimp between his tongue and the roof of his mouth, Connor reached up and removed the tail with his free hand and set it on his plate. Whereas in the West the soy sauce would've been on the entire rice square, here it seeped out from under the shrimp as Connor depressed the piece in his mouth. The soy sauce and wasabi were rich and awakened Connor's taste buds with a jolt. They were nice tastes, bold and pungent. The next thing he noticed was the amazing texture. The ribs in the slice of shrimp, the texture of the perfectly sticky rice; this truly was art.
There was an active buzz in the restaurant. It could have seemed chaotic, but here, it fit well as an underlying heartbeat. Connor turned his attention to the sushi chefs who continued working diligently at an island at the center of the bar. They alternated between making pieces to refill the conveyor belt and to fill specific customer orders. There were many of the latter. One of these obligations or another kept the sushi chefs in constant motion from their elbows to their fingertips at all times. However, their torsos held a perfectly erect posture while their heads turned not only to receive orders, but also to engage in the occasional small talk. This talk was sparse though, perhaps as a result of their culture and perhaps because of the delicacies at the chefs' fingertips. With this invisible boundary in place, the customers remained rather isolated from those who worked on the other side of the counter, though the two parties sat within a foot of one another. Similarly, Connor noted the fine boundary which existed between him and the two gentlemen on either side of him. The restaurant was filled almost to capacity, but each patron was afforded a perfect and off-limits eating space all to themselves which they shared only with their varying stacks of rainbow colored plates.
It wasn't until Connor had started to settle down from the initial sensory-overload that he realized that the restaurant had been playing nothing but Miles Davis. Almost imperceptible because it made for such an appropriate backdrop to the urban cool of the eatery, the smooth high pitched introduction of one of his earlier cuts was still clearly playing. Connor resisted dipping another morsel and instead took a sip from the cold beer he'd ordered and waited. BOOM! Miles broke out from the rest of the melody with his signature, "Hi, I'm Miles Davis, F… You," note and the room visibly lit up. Each piece of beautiful aggression in this cut seemed to mirror the cool, ageless urgency which Connor could already sense existed in Japanese culture.
Connor wondered if the following selections would feature the angry Miles: he who made urban protests through his horn. Connor thought that this would have been appropriate for the counter-culture he'd witnessed in the streets. Those cuts, however, never came. By the time "Well, you needn't," came on, the harmony of Davis and Coltrane led Connor to wonder if instead, Japan intentionally preferred and presented these selections for their United Nations peace-symposium like quality. Here were two giants of jazz, arguably the two, sharing time and complementing each other perfectly. Their harsher times would soon enough resemble the collision of two giant sumo wrestlers. However, there was exquisite fragility in these calmer earlier sessions. This time, when two forms seemingly too large for any one ring nevertheless occupied it simultaneously, was a beautiful picture of a balance which rarely lasted.
Remaining lost in the music and this recognition, Connor noted how everything here took the appropriate time to come to fruition. In Mexico there were deliberately slow moving donkey-led carts and in America there was the immediacy of rocket ships and drive through, but in Japan, eating was afforded time enough. Likewise, bows and handshakes: time enough. To those who would say that these cultural features made Japan slower than necessary? Need to reach Tokyo? Take the shinkansen, bullet train which once travelled over 550 km/h, see you there.
Connor returned to his food and finished up. He rose and summoned a hostess who tallied up his differing stacks of colored plates. She accompanied Connor to the cashier's stand by the door. As his total was accumulated, his attention was drawn to an older man in the corner. This man wore an impeccable navy pin-striped suit. He too had finished his meal and now sat serenely, alone with his satisfaction. He held a dark brown cigarette in his right hand. Cradling it as one might a child's hand, he neither choked the small cylinder, not relied upon it. He simply sat there, the gratitude he felt for this meal being sent, like a prayer, skyward- perfectly swirling in a plume of gentle cigarette smoke. This wasn't the first time, nor would it be the last, that watching the act of smoking here in Japan would captivate Connor. This simple gesture of thanks and the clear enjoyment of a cigarette without the smallest hint of reliance upon it would stay with Connor both in replication and abstraction long after he had returned to America.
