Sato sets a fast pace, filleting iwashi, then plunging the fillets into ice water so that the oily fish won't spoil too fast. With a long, thin knife, he makes his cuts in single, precise, assured strokes. Moving rhythmically, he cleans amadai, aji, kohada; fillets and salts aji and sayori to remove the strong taste, then rinses the salt off. I have the sense that I'm watching a machine. Without missing a beat or wasting a motion, he grabs a handful of wood skewers and impales a pile of giant kurumaebi. On the narrow counter, fresh wasabi waits to be grated, and a stack of green aspidistra leaves needs to be washed.
"I'm sleepy," I say, feeling somewhat ignored. Sato breaks his rhythm only to pour me a cup of tea. He has been up since dawn, when he made his daily phone calls to his regular Tsukiji vendors to discuss the morning's offerings and to ask them to hold certain fish for him. And he still has a 12-hour day ahead of him. Even in a country that lives by the motto "From early morning until late at night, work and more work," a sushi chef's life seems especially grueling.
Sato was 19 when he made what must have been a strange career choice for the son of rice farmers. "I was interested in fish and people," he tells me when I ask. Interested in pleasing people might be more accurate. When he was a boy, so as not to disappoint an American pen pal with descriptions of the dull northern countryside where he lived, Sato copied passages from a guidebook, writing that he could see Mount Fuji from his window, and that the streets of his rural hometown were crowded with geisha.
Still, it wasn't as if there was a sushi college he could attend. In Japan, where even today freedom to choose one's career is a luxury, introductions are everything. Sato had a distant relative who arranged for an apprenticeship at a sushi-ya in Kamakura. After three years there, Sato moved on to a Tokyo shop (it was there that a customer introduced him to his future wife) for another four. In the early days, he mostly did the cleaning and delivery. Gradually, he was allowed to touch, and then to sharpen, the knives.
"I wouldn't have been able to stand it. Didn't you get frustrated?" I ask. It's late afternoon, and we're now sitting in the new Sukeroku, about a ten-minute walk from the first one. The new shop is open only for dinner, so we've come here to relax and talk for a while, leaving his older, more experienced staff to handle things at the original restaurant. "For the Japanese, life is one long apprenticeship," Sato says. "And that's how I learned—by watching. As an apprentice, you get paid a little, you contribute a little, and you watch and gracefully steal."
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