Night of Karaoke. I’ll let your imagination run wild.
Emerge with the newly-risen sun. Walk towards M’s house (so I can crash with her) but after walking a fair way, realise I forgot my camera so we return to the Karaoke place and collect it; by that time the trains are just about to start running, so we decide we may as well go to the fish market. Wait for the 5h25 metro, emerge probably around 6am to a blue sky at Tsukijishijō station (I think?). Walk through fish market in search of someone M vaguely knows – I hear the story with my ears but it does not register with my brain. Avoid the golf buggy things, whizzy mopeds and polystyrene crates of fish.
Huge tuna, shellfish, bright red snapper. Clean, fresh smell of the morning, the ocean, sea creatures just killed, or crammed into writhing captivity.
We ask someone. We find him. As M chats away, I watch the throbbing paua, like a thick black heart muscle, straining from its pearly green shell to flip itself and suckle onto the plastic board of the scales. Maybe it knows it’s going to die? It’s hard to feel sorry for this extra-terrestrial sea creature; fascination is dominant in my sliver of attention. The man M knows gives us a map with a good place to eat roughly indicated among its scribbly lines.
I see blond tourists getting in the way, and despise them. Gaijin. Clumsy and alien. We are yelled at and trapped between fishmongers who are essentially blocking each other, whether or not we could disappear like they want us to.
It’s all confusion.
My eyes rove slowly over the scene and I mistakenly marry the gaping red and bone of a tuna corpse with the image of a human face in a dim, bluish-lit booth: I momentarily see the decapitated head of a man in my mental slowness. I am relieved not to have seen this and somehow thrilled to have envisaged it.
We go see the guy who works next to M’s shop (she part-owns a shop) and he tells us another place to go, but apparently they don’t like foreigners, who eat too slowly. We want to eat there. He leads us there. Stopping what he was doing. For us. We are fish market royalty.
Personal introduction works a treat, and he gives us ¥2000 so the tuna was on him. The tuna is raw and delicious. Even better is the (other delicious fish – forget name, if I ever knew it), which is seared on its dalmation skin but raw and tender through its flesh.
Then comes the cooked fish, we don’t know what type but the skin is red, cooked in the Sai Kyu style. Heaven. Culinary perfection. Despite the inviting plunge-pool bowls of soy sauce and (vinegar?) I cannot put a thing on that fish because it is so melt-in-the-mouth delicious as it is.
It is still before 7am, and we are fed. The trains are running, so we slope off to bed. Don’t look at me, commuters of Tokyo, I’ve had a busy night and I want to be alone… sleeping… and putting those memories where they belong – in a dream.
