Rice, Noodle, Fish (3 page)

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

Sushi as we know it today was bred in these blocks. Japanese cooks had been cycling through various permutations of
narezushi
, fish fermented with cooked rice, since the eighth century, but it wasn't until the early 1800s, as Edo (Tokyo's original name) was taking shape as Japan's new capital, that the familiar nigiri formulation emerged. Wooden
yatai
, street food stands, dotted this area, serving urban dwellers the best of the day's catch from Tokyo Bay. Cooks shaped warm mounds of rice by hand, covered them with a slice of fresh fish, and served individual pieces directly to hungry customers. To mimic the puckering flavor of the fermented fish of yore, sidewalk chefs added vinegar to the rice; to kill off potential toxins, they rubbed the fish with a dab of grated horseradish; to season it, a few drops of soy. Modern sushi—
edomaezushi
—was born.

Today, in an eight-block radius you will find the finest sushi bars on earth, a concentrated cluster of polished countertops with claim to sixteen Michelin stars among them. The mighty Jiro Ono operates here, Zeus among the sushi gods of Japan, serving his twenty-minute, $350 feast to a rotating cast of curious foreigners and Japanese heavyweights. So too does Takashi Saito, the young Jedi master with the longest waiting list in town, along with many, many others.

On the third floor of an unassuming office building, one of these
shokunin
, the one whom some have dubbed the soul of Tokyo sushi culture, stands behind a beautiful two-tiered hickory countertop, rubbing a mint-green root of fresh wasabi against a sharkskin grater, preparing for his first guests. He's young by sushi standards, forty or so, and built like a defensive back, with
thick arms, shaved head, and heavy eyes that do most of the talking.

I first met Koji Sawada in 2011, when I took a seat at his counter and slowly felt the walls of my food world crumble. To call it a revelation would be to undersell the experience: the meal I had at Sawada was a full-scale transformation, a piece-by-piece poem to starch and sea, not perfect exactly, but a clear indication that a pathway to perfection existed, a stairway to heaven, and that Sawada was climbing it, one step at a time.

This wasn't my first sushi epiphany. On my maiden voyage to Tokyo, I went alone to eat lunch at Mizutani, a Michelin three-star Ginza institution run by Jiro's most famous disciple. There, in a basement restaurant, armed with only three words of Japanese and the one wrinkled button-up I could dig out of my backpack, I learned about the intimacy and artistry of a true sushi experience. (The elegance of the meal came to a crashing halt when I was told Mizutani didn't take credit cards—all too common in Japan's best restaurants—and the chef personally escorted me to the post office to take out 25,000 yen to cover lunch.)

But Sawada is something else entirely—a former trucker who turned to sushi relatively late in life but with all the manic energy and determination of a man possessed by a single idea: to create the best Edo-style sushi experience in the beating heart of sushi's birthplace.

That means starting each day at 6:00 a.m. at Tsukiji, buying each individual piece of fish from the purveyor who knows the species best. That means investing years in developing a system to serve rice at its ideal temperature and texture the moment the customers settle into their seats. That means constructing an elaborate and expensive refrigeration system cooled not by electricity but by giant blocks of ice. That means serving only six people for lunch and six for dinner. That means ending each
night with a terry-cloth towel, scrubbing the hinoki countertop until his arms are sore and his head is slick with sweat and all trace of the fish oils accumulated during service vanish, a cleaning session that marches past midnight, completing an eighteen-hour day that he and his wife repeat six days a week. When I ask Sawada why he doesn't hire someone to clean after dinner service so that he might rest for a bit, he squints his eyes, cocks his head, and points toward the entrance. “You see the name on that door? It says Sawada. I'm Sawada. She's Sawada. Nobody else.”

Sawada could probably wake up at 9:00 a.m., get his fish delivered to his door, use a standard refrigerator for cooling his ingredients, have his counters scrubbed by a young apprentice after dinner, and still serve some of Tokyo's most breathtaking sushi. But he doesn't. Because in Japan, it's not about the end; it's about the means.

“It comes down to
kimochi
,” says Sawada. “‘Feeling.' That's the difference between a good sushi chef and a great one. From start to finish, it's all about feeling. I want you to have the best possible sushi. That's why I go to the market at six a.m. That's why I'm still cleaning at midnight.”

Kimochi
is a part of all
shokunin
, says Sawada, but especially part of the sushi chef. “Your feelings come out in the sushi. There's no fire. We make it with our hands. You eat it with yours.”

With the first bite—and every bite that follows—I realize something I've always been told but never believed: sushi is not about fish; it's about rice. Nigiri—ninety-five times out of a hundred, what Japanese eat when they eat sushi—comprises two components:
shari
, the seasoned rice that forms the base, and
neta
, the slice of fish that rests on top. Anyone can find great
neta
at Tsukiji, the reasoning goes, but only a
shokunin
can master
shari
. “Sushi is eighty percent rice,” says Sawada.

Tales of struggle and sacrifice are told of young cooks who toil for years
learning the tiny details of proper rice cookery: washing off the excess starch in successive changes of water, calculating the perfect ratio of dry to wet, learning how to properly fan the rice and season it with precise slashes of a wooden spoon. An extraordinary amount of thought goes into Sawada's rice, from the temperature (“It should be as warm as my skin”) to the timing (“Rice is at its peak sixty minutes after cooking it”), to the source, which he changes with the rising global temperatures (“The best rice used to come from Niigata, but now it's coming from Hokkaido”).

Sawada's
shari
buzzes with a gentle current of acidity, a divisive move among the sushi cognoscenti of Tokyo, many of whom believe rice should be less assertive (so few and focused are the variables in this discipline that a couple extra drops of vinegar added to a mountain of rice constitutes a controversy). But Sawada's
neta
is rich and flush with umami, and the rice's subtle vinegar edge keeps your palate primed for the long road ahead.

From the salty bite of gizzard shad to the supple sweetness of horse mackerel to the crunch and brine of ark shell clam, Sawada guides you through the full spectrum of ocean taste and texture. A giant prawn split into two pieces delivers dessert levels of sweetness. Saltwater eel is equal parts crunchy skin and tender flesh. Smoked bonito, in all its concentrated, fire-kissed intensity, will keep you awake at night.

Behind Sawada, his wife works heating stones, steaming shrimp, wordlessly anticipating everything he will need to continue his thesis. “We move together. She makes me better.”

Contrary to popular belief, sushi isn't about freshness; it's about timing. Not just having your rice the proper temperature, but also having your fish the perfect age. Serve fish too soon out of the water and the muscles will be tight and the flavor underdeveloped. Wait too long and the protein turns to mush.

Before refrigeration, fish was either served immediately or marinated in
vinegar, but over the years sushi chefs have come to understand that carefully aging fish can bring out its best qualities. The concept, Sawada explains, is the same principle behind aged meat: by removing the water and converting the protein into amino acids, you intensify the flavor of the fish—in particular, the natural umami, the most prized taste in Japan. Tuna tastes most like tuna not when it's still dripping with the essence of the ocean but when it's been allowed to mature for days or even weeks. Every fish has its optimal age: Sawada ages most white fish for two days, scallops and ark shell clams for one week, fattier fish for even longer.

To demonstrate, he offers a flight of tuna:
maguro
, a lean ruby cut a few days out of the water, followed by a lightly marbled, week-old slice of
chutoro
, preceded by an extravagantly fatty
otoro
that floods the brain with a warm rush of endorphins. “Twelve days' aging,” he says as he watches me struggle to control my emotions. “Tons of umami.” The tuna tutorial concludes with a chunk of
otoro
cooked directly over a hot stone, leaving the outside black and smoky and the inside just warm enough to let loose a tide of fat—a bite I would cross the Pacific for again and again.

Sushi at this level is the finest form of culinary alchemy: cooked rice, raw fish, unmitigated bliss. Along the way, progressions of little mysteries are unveiled: the way an angled knife stroke can relax a thousand tight muscle fibers, how cupping the fish with a warm palm can release just the right amount of natural oils, how the quantity and density of the rice base must be matched to each piece of fish. All these revelations can be tasted on the spot, six feet from where they were born. It is performance art of the highest caliber, one of the few great meals in the world I might not want to share with anyone else, lest they distract me from the theater at hand.

So why does he keep it so small? Why does this man limit himself to just twelve customers a day? When I ask him
if he has plans to expand, he tries his best not to look offended. “If anything, we would like to get smaller so we could give more of our attention to our guests. We started as an eight-seat counter, but that was too much, so we downsized to six.” Now his greatest ambition is to remove another two chairs.

Lunch ends with a single gooseberry: bright orange, leaves pulled back like a ponytail, no bigger than a marble. I think it's some kind of Japanese thing I don't quite grasp, and maybe it is, but then I crunch down on the berry and the skin pops and releases a flood of sour-sweet juice and I realize that somewhere out there in a field far removed from Tokyo, a farmer with a soul like Sawada is putting everything he's got into these berries.

米 麺 魚

Not far from Sawada, past an eight-story Gucci building, a billion-dollar department store, a 7-Eleven, and a handful of vending machines, there is a small, quiet café where you can drink a cup of coffee from 1954.

Japan may claim one of the world's great tea cultures, but it's no stranger to the coffee bean. Coffee arrived in the country in the eighteenth century, piled high in the bellies of Dutch trading ships. It went relatively unnoticed by most Japanese until, in the early twentieth century, the Brazilian government began sending free coffee beans to Tokyo shop owners. By the 1930s you could find three thousand
kissaten
(called
kissa
for short), traditional Japanese coffee shops, offering Tokyoites a current of caffeine and a respite from city life.

The war put coffee's ascendance on pause. Beans were in short supply for the Japanese, so
kissa
owners roasted soybeans instead, doing little to win over new clientele. At the same time, the Nazis developed a taste for coffee from the Far East and bought up everything they could from Indonesia and Sumatra. When shipments to Western Europe were cut off during the later years of the
war, the coffee was rerouted through Japan, where it was to be sent by railroad from China to Germany. When fighting between the Nazis and Russians compromised the train routes, the beans sat all but forgotten in warehouses in Tokyo.

Ichiro Sekiguchi, a sound engineer from Tokyo, was serving in the war at the time and learned that the German-purchased beans were being stored on the outskirts of the city. When the war ended, he decided to go into the coffee business, using what he could of the beans left to languish as the Axis powers met defeat. By the time he opened Café de l'Ambre in Ginza in 1948, he was brewing five-year-old beans from Sumatra. What was born out of necessity turned into a groundbreaking technique. “The coffee had a rich, full taste, like good wine.”

Today l'Ambre offers a wide selection of global vintages: '93 Brazil, '76 Mexico, and, the oldest, a Colombian bean from 1954. “Coffee beans are breathing,” says Ichiro. “They evolve and develop different flavors over time.” Ichiro's disciples have spread across Tokyo over the decades, infusing the city with a heady dose of cotton-filtered aged coffee, but at 101 years old, Ichiro still shows up to work every day to toast his ancient beans on a roaster he helped design himself decades back. The classic
kissa
, the old beans, and the man himself stand as a stubborn rebuke to the wave of chain coffee outlets, convenience stores, and vending machines that sprang up during Japan's boom years and today make up the vast majority of the coffee market.