Nai mono ha nai"—"There's nothing that's not here"— my old friend Fumio Sato declares, leading the way through the kaleidoscope of Tokyo's Tsuki¬ji fish market. As I struggle to keep up, dodging careening carts piled with frozen tuna carcasses, Sato-san moves with practiced determination and speed, bouncing from vendor to vendor, calling out greetings and questions. Poking at a display of sardines, he makes a rapid mental calculation (involving everything from the day of the week and the weather to the state of the economy), then places an order, checking off "sardines" on the Excel-generated fish list he carries on a clipboard. Moving on, he sticks a finger under the gills of a shiny snapper and nods, satisfied. Another check on the list. A mackerel catches his eye. He hardly decelerates to stroke its skin, then frowns. No check. In all the commotion—Tsukiji is the world's largest fish market; at six in the morning, it's like Times Square on caffeine—I sometimes lose track of Sato and have to scan the crowds for his red parka and Mickey Mouse baseball cap.
Sato is a sushi chef. I met him more than a decade ago when I was living in Tokyo and wandered into Sukeroku, his sushi-ya just behind the Kabuki Theatre in Ginza and around the corner from the publishing house where I worked. The sushi at his shop was always fresh, and the bargain lunch-time assortment came on an aspidistra leaf instead of on a plate. It was served with the most delicious miso soup I'd ever tasted. And Sato, boyishly handsome and charming, had a streak of irreverence that was a relief to me.
Conformist Japan has a saying: "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down." The only American at the magazine office, I was that nail. Unable to keep my opinions to myself, I was increasingly ostracized by my coworkers. Looking for solace, I started to visit Sato regularly, for I had detected a bit of the "nail" in him, too. He referred to sushi as Japan's fast food.
The Japanese tend to eat lunch promptly between noon and one, so I would arrive at the small restaurant late, when it would be empty, and I could have Sato to myself. Despite our language problems (he spoke about a dozen words of English and my fluency in Japanese waxed and waned), we became fast friends.
It was a symbiotic relationship. Japanese restaurants can be as daunting as Japanese offices; there is a proper way to behave, to order, and to eat. I was often the only blue-eyed foreigner in sight; it was easy to feel like a bata kusai (stinking-of-butter) barbarian. Sato taught me to stop worrying and enjoy myself. And I allowed him to relax, too. I wasn't Japanese, so he could say and do whatever he wanted in front of me.
Over time, I brought everyone I knew to Sukeroku, and they all loved the food—and the chef. Sato has a talent for making everyone feel like a special customer, and Suke-roku's sushi wouldn't have tasted nearly as good served by someone else. "Raw fish is raw fish. The essential ingredient for good sushi, besides rice and fish, is love," he told me once, only half in jest. "You must have good feelings for your customers or nothing will taste right."
Good feelings he had in spades. If anything readily distinguished Sukeroku from the countless other high-quality sushi-ya in Tokyo, it was Sato's heartfelt interest in people, plus a formidable memory for the details of his customers' lives and culinary preferences.
I eventually left my job (to the immense delight of everyone concerned) and then, in 1995, Japan. But on annual visits to Tokyo, I have only to slide open Sukeroku's door and Sato throws a generous slice of anago (my favorite) on the grill as we pick up our conversation exactly where we left off a year before. "You always make your job seem easy and fun," I remarked on a visit last spring, a comment that earned a scowl and a raised eyebrow—Sato had just opened a second Sukeroku. As if to set me straight, he asked me if I'd like to tag along with him for a day to see what a sushi chef's life is really like. I jumped at the chance.
In order to maintain good relationships with his vendors, Sato has always done the fish buying himself—six early mornings a week for the past 18 years. In a normal month, he spends upward of 3 million yen (about $25,000) at Tsukiji. Now, with a second shop, that amount will rise. While I sip a scalding can of green tea from a vending machine and try to stay out of the way, carts arrive and close circle like a wagon train around Sato's three-wheeled motor scooter. Combining the skills of an acrobat and an architect, he stacks the Styrofoam boxes packed with ice and fish onto the back of the scooter, forming a tall pyramid, and off he roars.
By nine, we're back at Sukeroku (I walked). The stools are up on the hinoki (cypress) bar, and the floor has been washed. Like Sato, his three young apprentices are dressed all in white, short hair tucked under their caps, hands jewelry-free and scrubbed. Posted on the kitchen wall is a reminder to be polite, friendly, neat and clean in appearance. "This shop exists because we have customers," it exhorts.
This morning, though, I'm not a customer. And Sato has no time to be entertaining. He unpacks, and they all start cleaning and cutting the fish in silence. Lunchtime is only two hours away. Besides, the kitchen is so small that concentration, and attention to the sharp knives, are essential.
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."
Taking care of people is encoded in Sato's genes, and, even though I have just finished lunch at the other shop, the treats start appearing from behind the counter: a palm-size bowl of marinated baby squid; a few dollops of uni, as rich as foie gras; a sheet of crisp nori to munch on. And a constantly replenished supply of his wonderful tea, which is the greenest and most vivid-tasting I've ever had—an effect Sato achieves by adding maccha, the powder used in tea ceremonies.
When he opened the first Sukeroku, almost two decades ago, Sato was just 26. "I was the youngest person to open a restaurant in Ginza. All the other places here had a long history. But I thought, 'I'll show you.' " He laughs at his own naïveté. "In the beginning I had only one customer."
When he pulls out a pack of cigarettes, it's my turn to raise an eyebrow. He never used to smoke. "Stress from the economy," he pleads, looking slightly guilty as he lights up. "I don't want to live that long anyway." But he knows I disapprove, and, after only a few perfunctory puffs, he stubs it out, then sprinkles some tea leaves into an incense dish set over a burning candle. "Japanese aromatherapy," he quips. Soon, a clean, irresistible scent fills the room. I make a mental note to try this at home.
The new sukeroku makes the original look positively spacious. The counter barely seats ten, and the kitchen area behind it can't be more than four by eight. With all the equipment, there's hardly room for Sato.
If the economy is so bad, I ask, why open a second shop—in Ginza yet, Tokyo's priciest commercial district? Sato's reply is vague, something about the landlord being from his home prefecture. Knowing better than to try and untangle the web of obligations that make up Japanese relationships, I change the subject.
The shop is filled with the robust smell of vinegar. Opening time is only a half hour away, and Sato is mixing sushi rice in a huge wooden tub with a paddle. "Every country has its smell. Korea has garlic, France perfume. In Japan, it's miso," he says, putting the paddle aside and plunging in with his bare hands. "But in a sushi-ya, it should be vinegar and nori."
Sato has his own vinegar recipe (adding sugar, salt, and kombu stock), but it's the rice that makes the real difference, he says. It comes from his family's farm. "Rice you buy in the store is blended, so the cooking time of the different grains varies. You'll hear these days that blended rice is good, but don't believe it."
I laugh. Sato is always telling me, "Don't believe it." Don't believe the TV food shows that say there's an order to eating sushi, that you should start with light fish and move on to strong fish. ("Eat what you want, in whatever order you want. It's not a 'course' meal. That's what's great about sushi.") Don't believe the food magazines that tell you what to drink with sushi. ("Drink whatever you like.")
When it comes to the sushi itself, though, Sato is a purist. "Fish from the sea, rice from the land, wasabi from clean, pure water. You serve it simply, with no additives," he says. "The raw fish should be simple and fresh, so that the taste blossoms in your mouth."
He hands me a slice of hamachi on still-warm rice. I pop it into my mouth. It blossoms.
Five o'clock, opening time. Sato washes out the rice cooker and stashes it away. Then he puts chopsticks and soy sauce bowls out at each place. He looks in serious need of a nap. Gulping down a cup of tea, he cuts sheets of nori into a stack of strips, then sets a pot of water boiling for customers who like their sake hot. The house sake is, predictably, a mild-flavored one, one that doesn't get in the way of the taste of the sushi. Likewise, the house soy sauce.
"If you want to really know the worth of a sushi chef, taste his tamago," Sato tells me as I watch him construct a perfect, multilayered omelet in a square copper pan. When he's done, he holds a tiny branding iron over the gas flame, then burns the Japanese characters for "Sukeroku" into the omelet.
Two women poke their heads in the door, the first customers of the evening. "Are you open?" Sato glances at the clock. It's five-thirty, and he hasn't even hung the noren out over the door yet, so he rushes past the women to put up the short curtain, which signals "open for business." When he comes back in, the exhaustion has disappeared from his face. He's switched into host gear. Smiling and cracking jokes, he takes his trays of assorted shellfish from the refrigerator and puts them on the counter (there's no room here for a countertop refrigerator case); the women ooh and aah, then order sake. Sato gives me a flask, too. Then the fish starts appearing. Hime sazae. Glistening uni dappled with wasabi. Squid that was, I happen to know, alive only hours ago. Iwashi sashimi.
The women, a famous TV comedian and her hairdresser, are soon on their third flask of sake. An awabi on the counter suddenly moves, the comedian shrieks, and we all burst into laughter. Sato opens himself a beer and we toast to the success of his new shop. The fish keeps coming: saba; sayori; hotate; geso; chu toro.
He admits to us that he was so tired last night, he went home and fell asleep in the bath until five in the morning. "You might have drowned!" the hairdresser exclaims in horror.
More customers arrive, some old friends, some strangers attracted by the profusion of congratulatory flowers out front that announce a new restaurant in the neighborhood. A dapper businessman who sits alone and knows so much about fish that I suspect he may be from the competition. An elderly executive with a young woman who is clearly not his wife. A woman with a Betty Boop voice who owns a nearby art gallery. The comedian and her hairdresser leave, and their places are quickly filled. The door slides open but all the seats are taken, and Sato must turn away three men. "I'm sorry. Please come back tomorrow," he says.
Sato is in fine form, keeping up with all the orders, keeping up the conversation, trying out garbled English on me to everyone's amusement. He's a one-man show, and in such a tiny shop, he's always on stage. He looks truly happy right now, and I recall something he once said to me about wanting to create not so much a restaurant as a place where friends could gather and enjoy themselves. With all his complaints about work, it's clear that he's found his raison d'être.
Sato serves everyone soup in giant lacquered bowls, only half full—a wonderful idea, eliminating the danger of sloshing and spilling. His soups, which he makes with koji (fermented rice) miso, have always been sublime. At lunch, he might add amaebi heads; at dinner (when the customers are paying more), hirame bones and clams, which infuse the broth with the heady fragrance of the sea. Tonight's soup is a delightful mix of asari clams still in their shells, dark undulations of aonori, and bright specks of negi. It's almost ten, closing time. One by one, the customers pay up (there is no menu or price list; Sato simply tells them what they owe). As the door slides closed behind the last customer, Sato sighs loudly, and pours himself a whiskey over ice. "Taihen da ne"—"This work is exhausting," he says, mostly to himself.
He rummages in the refrigerator and pulls out a Tupperware bento box, a lunch that his wife packed for him that morning but that he'd not had time to eat. Rice topped with a single breaded fried shrimp, some scraps of meat, and pickles. He smiles at me. "You still think my life looks like fun?" he asks, picking at the cold food, too exhausted to eat now. He still has an hour or more of cleaning up, then the drive home, then, while his wife and small daughter sleep, the day's accounting to do for both shops. Then, at dawn, up again and to the market.
"You know, I shouldn't have opened this new place," he says. "Really, I might be dead the next time you visit." He lights another cigarette. This time, I keep my disapproval to myself.
Sukeroku (old)
Ginza 3-13-4
Chuo-ku, Tokyo
3-3546-1869
Sukeroku (new)
Ginza 7-9-10
Chuo-ku, Tokyo
3-3573-7787
Chef's Secret
From Fumio Sato: To test the worth of a sushi chef, taste his tamago (omelet). If it's not good, leave.