Sashimi West

SASHIMI WEST SASHIMI WEST


Sashimi WestA S H O R T S T O R Y

b y J A M E S N A K A M U R A


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It was the first time in 5 years that I had spent New Years with my parents, and this was the year that

the world said goodbye to Big-Eyed Tuna forever. I had flown back to Kauai after a malnourished year in San Francisco. I was laid off from a small ad agency after they restructured their entire business. The company existed on the scraps of larger agencies, creating small press runs of direct mail pieces, posters, media kits and internal promotional materials. As work became scarce, the creative heads at Blow Up Creative decided to downsize, laying off 3 of their account executives, and myself, the sole project manager. I was on the job hunt for over a year, networking, attending mixers, chasing down leads. I was like a leopard losing rabbits down burrows. The leads vanished. There just weren’t too many positions in the marketing industry, and with looming tax hikes, the industry was as lean as feral

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cat. My parents offered to buy me a ticket home, and with my rent holding fast at $1500 and my unemployment checks dwindling down to it’s final weeks, I decided to sell everything I had and headed back to the home land. To say that Kauai is beautiful is an understatement. The island exists under some protective dome in which time simply swirls around itself, and nothing changes. The plane skipped along the ether above the bay, jerking up and down as it windsurfed the trades, and then settled smoothly onto the pavement of the Lihue Airport. Beyond the terminal, I couldn’t see a single building. There was nothing but a cool blue sky on all sides. I had heard the only new development under way was a second Safeway on the south side a few miles west. But that was news from my parents who hardly ventured out. Who knew what quiet mutations were under way? My mother waited for me outside of the baggage claim, where a total of three cars awaited their arrivals. She left her Sentra running along the curb, and came out to greet me, a broad smile and freshly permed hair like the ribbons on Christmas gift. “You lost weight. Skinny like one stick fish.” “Thanks, ma,” I said. “Welcome home,” She hugged me and we put my bags in the back seat and took off.

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On the car ride home, we spoke very little. We had never been a family of words. We simply took comfort in each other’s presence. I rolled down the window and took in the cool sweet blast of the green cane, sloping fields and mountains on both sides of the two lane highway. When we reached our home, I was immediately hit by the grandeur of a lush green mountain only 3 streets over from our street. It had always been there, but I was noticing the majesty of it just now. Clouds rolled like caravans over the hill in a way that seemed stage-managed just for me. I got out of my mother’s car and peered down the street. It was quiet. You could hear the wind shiver. A car’s whisper traveled down the freeway, snaked through the lawn and echoed off our neighbor’s garage door. The leaves in the avocado tree rattled. A rooster crowed off in the distance. Welcome home, it said. I had arrived home at a time of crisis. A month ago, my father and gotten into a fist fight over the last Christmas tree in Koloa, and was getting sued. Last week, he got into another fight with the same man at a bar. In the living room, a plastic tree stood like a neglected child in the corner. There were round slices of bananas on a sheet of wax paper drying out on the kitchen table. My mother poured me a cup of tea and explained the situation on this island. There

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was a food shortage. Prices were going up. Most alarming for a small island was the lack of fish. “No sashimi,” she said. “No fish, no nothing.” I understood. Sashimi, slivers of raw, buttery big-eyed tuna was an integral part of ringing in the New Year. For other cultures, it was pork, or grapes, or beans, or noodles for long life, or leafy greens for good luck and prosperity. For us, it was fish. The portents had loomed for ages. Every year, there was a story about an impending sashimi shortage. And now, here it was. “How about salmon?” I asked. My mother cinched her eyes shut and pursed her lips. “Pshh. Forty bucks a pound for farmed salmon?” “Farmed tilapia?” “Don’t joke around,” she said. I was well aware of the gross overfishing of the ocean, the lenient seasonal bans, the underground market and so forth. The grand, elliptical cycle of life held feebly in place by the Western and Pacific Fisheries was damaged beyond repair. Underwater, it was the apocalypse we had all deemed as a fable. A storm on the other side of the hemisphere we never thought would hit was upon us. The rising acidity of the water, the rising temperatures, the sudden boom in certain species and the sudden decline of others

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had ecosystems in flux. In Japan, the Nomura jellyfish invasion had reached peak levels, killing off record numbers of fish. The crown starfish was multiplying along all coral reefs. Smaller reef dwelling fish were disappearing, leading to diminishing numbers along the food chain. Big-Eyed Tuna was no legal fare but people fished anyway. With a dwindling food supply, low reproductive numbers, thousands of fishing vessels traversing the seas, stringing purse nets and drag lines with hundreds of baited hooks, snagging premature tuna as well as adults and females, hooking turtles and other by-catches only to lose them in the jaws of undiscerning sharks — the odds for their survival had been slim. The rising costs of oil had meant that each fishing boat would need to double its catch in order to maximize profits. Losing half of their take to sharks forced them quadruple their catch. So here it was now. The seas were depleted. There were no fish. A global food crisis was at hand. This was a part of the reason why I had come home. I wanted to be with my family to look after them. My father had already bought a gun for protection, under my mother’s urging. We had a stockpile of canned goods buried under the floor boards. We had a large garden in our back yard that I was supposed to tend to as well as guard with my life. Of course, this was a paranoid approach to a

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worst case scenario. My folks listened to too many pundits on the airwaves, warning them about the end of days, telling them to bolster themselves for the great fall. My goal was to keep them calm, to convince them that the Garden Island was a fertile island with a relatively small population. Imported goods would no doubt be marked up, but we could get everything we needed from within. If there were some societal breakdown, we’d simply raise our own chickens and cattle and live communally. At least, that was I thought. I dropped my suitcases off into my old bedroom. I wish it could be said that it was just as I had left it, but it had been excavated. It was now where my father paid the bills and walked on his treadmill. My place for the next few weeks would be the sofa. But this was home, and it felt good. My dad walked out of the bathroom and when he saw me, he walked over and gave me a punch on the shoulder. His left eye was bruised, and he had a weal under his lower lip in perfect cadence with his mustache. It was as if someone had torn off his flavor saver. He saw that I was about to ask him about it and waved it off. He reached into his pocket and pulled out $500. “For shibi,” he said. “Port Allen. Go.” * * *

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There were rumors of a 300 pound Yellowfin being chopped up and sold for a hundred dollars a pound at Port Allen in Hanapepe. I took the keys from my mother and headed out the door. “Get some more mochi rice from Big Save too,” she said. She had already purchased 6 pounds of the stuff, thinking ahead to the future, when such items would no longer be available. My parents had pounded ten pounds at a mochitsuki over the holiday at a friend’s house. Most of it was frozen in the industrial freezer in the garage. A few mochi balls sat as an offering to buddha on the butsudon along with a tangerine with a stem and a single leaf still attached in my parent’s bedroom. A third of it was stuffed with azuki beans, another third was coated with kinako, and the other was left plain for zoni, a broth made up of shitake mushrooms, daikon, araimo and mizuna. In the garage sat long rows of red bomb fireworks, like strings of ammo. They were going all out this year, and I could see it in their eyes that they needed the fish. It was this year, or never again. I walked out to the driveway full of purpose when I saw Josie Aki in her mother’s yard peeling an orange. She had been my neighbor all throughout high school. It was a surprise to see her there, sitting on the wicker chair next to the tangerine tree. “Josie,” I called out over the fence.

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She looked up, smiled and flicked her head back as if she were tossing me a quarter off the bridge of her nose. “Holy shit, Ryan. What the fuck are you doing here? Visiting?” “Yups,” I said. “How ‘bout you?” She answered with a shrug, which was no answer. That was that. “Cruising,” she said. She went back to peeling her orange with her teeth. She was never really interested in me or my happenings. Part of a different world really. Back then, I’d try to bring up the news and all she was interested in were sports statistics — and her own — at that. “You guys need Ahi for the New Year?” I asked. She looked up, her eyes locked with mine. I had her interest now. “Why? You got? Fuck that!” “Rumors from Hanapepe. 400 pound shibi chillin in a van being sold pound by pound black market style.” “How much?” she stood. She had long, pale legs, like a pair of fluorescent tubes with knees. I was shocked. She had gone slender. As a kid, she had always been a tomboy. She played Pop Warner football (boys team) and lifted weights well into high school. As a kid, I would see her parents pull up, unloading a phalanx of little football players in shoulder pads and jerseys, Josie among them. She

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was always just one of the guys, but now she looked good. No traces of the tomboy. None at all. “100 bucks a pound. You wanna come? I’m heading over there right now.” “Lemme get my fuckin’ purse!” she said cheerfully. * * * We wheeled along the road in silence and a sudden downpour of rain sprayed us like a fire hose, hissing like radio static and pounding like a thousand miniature taiko drummers on the rooftop. The rain came at us at an angle, and the world was veiled behind a grey scrim as the pick up truck in front of us sprayed mist from around its mud flaps. My wipers were on blast, barely swiping fast enough as raindrops the size of hailstones pelted the windshield. Josie sat in the back seat leaning up against the door, laid out sideways, bare feet flat against the glass. She sat and watched the storm as if she were sitting at home, regarding it through a windowpane. She grew up next to me, but attended Koloa when I went to Kalaheo, then Waimea when I went to Kauai High. When she graduated, she got her degree in nursing and then landed a job at Wilcox Memorial and worked for a few years before being laid off. For that time, I imagine she may have

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been be the most foul-mouthed nurse in the state. I couldn’t imaging a tender side to her. Mostly, I had known her for her cold and abrupt persona. But then I hadn’t spoken to her since I left. Still, that odd familiarity was what pushed me to ask to her along. Although we hardly ever spoke, I was curious as to what she had become over the years. She had moved out to Kapaa five years ago and lived alone. She was still single and was very close to her mother, who had divorced her father when she was still in elementary school. She rarely dated, and didn’t feel the need to date. Her routine consisted of a few one night stands a month, scoop-netted at Dukes on Kalapaki, usually with off duty firemen and lifeguards. She told me she had been arguing with her mother before I showed up. Her mother had always expected her to marry early, and was worried that she would end up alone. I asked her if marriage was something that she pondered from time to time. “Nah,” she said. “Just hop from one branch to the next.” We drove by the mortuary in Lawai. The parking lot was full and families were rushing up the grassy lawn in their floral blacks and black Spooner prints as the rain continued its assault. “You down?” Josie said holding her hand up,

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a sad little joint framed in the rear view. “I thought you were a health nut.” “As long as it’s lean and green,” she said and lit up. Slowing down in Kalaheo, I took note of all of the homes of my childhood friends. I wondered if they were in there now, visiting their folks. Or bumming around as shiftless adults. We passed the neighborhood center where we played basketball over the summer. We passed the trusty liquor store, the doctor’s office, the steak house. And then the rain cleared, right at the Kauai Coffee sign at the beginning of McBride as usual. Rainfall rarely made it past this point. There was almost a discernible line that the rain never crossed. Most of it was sucked up by Mount Waialeale, what Guinness had labeled the wettest spot in the world, something like 11,000 milliliters of rain annually, 360 days a year.We had passed the southern most point and were now entering the west side. The sun was out again. The rampant green gave way to patches of dying grass and red dirt. When I turned into the Ele’ele Shopping Center, I noticed right away that the McDonalds was closed. When I turned onto Waialo Road I knew why. Traffic was backed up to the freeway, heading all the way to the pier. People had left their cars parked in

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the middle of the street and were walking in droves toward the harbor. “Damn! You think they all found out? Can’t be all for the fish!” “Whaat?” she said. “You sure only a hundred bucks a pound?” I could see that whatever auction had been taking place was slowly escalating into a riot. Police officers watched wearily, no doubt they had all gotten a prime cut. There were a group of protesters opposing the sale. They wanted justice. They pleaded to the KPD but the cops ushered them back. I parked the car where it stood and ran out. I was pushed on both sides as I neared the harbor. The crowd surrounding a small barge was impenetrable. People screamed and fought for position. I could hear a girl crying. Was someone getting trammeled? A man was crying out “Stop! Stop!” but the crowd surged, contracting and expanding, as if multiplying from within. God damn it, I could smell it – the fresh smell of blood and guts, and roe and gills all smeared into the asphault, mingling with the sea breeze, the promise of a poke platter sailing toward us from the deep blue. Give me a scale. All I wanted was a scale. Or a gill. I felt alive again. I was close the ocean again for the first time in years and the prospect of having

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fresh fish began to fan the flames of nostalgia. “Ryan! Let’s do!” Josie called after me. She plunged into the crowd, fearless, and plucked out a group of teenagers one by one like stuffed dolls off a shelf. She burrowed into the chaos and began elbowing her way deeper. She still had it. I tried to climb over the crowd and attempted to gain footing on an older gentleman’s head. He threw me down and punched me clean across the chin. I scrambled to my feet, cocked my arm, elbowing a woman in the back of her head (by accident) and then socked the fellow in the nose (rightfully). He folded in front of me and a small empty pocket opened around him before the crowd engulfed him live and wriggling. I could see Josie crowd surfing over a group of girls, kicking them in their faces as she used their shoulders to keep her above the fray. “1000 for the collar! 1000 for the eyeball!” A yokel yelled in my ear. He stiff-armed me in the jaw. In turn, I bit his wrist and he yowled. He punched me across the chin with a small fist and thin wrist. I gouged his eyes and kneed him in the groin. His entire body lifted off the ground and he collapsed and curled up against an onslaught of more knees. “Move! Move!” the people behind him yelled. They poured over him and he was swallowed whole.

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And above it all an iwa bird sailed in circles overhead – it’s wings held out steadily like a pair of black boomerangs – beautiful and mysterious. I boxed an old man in the gut and pushed forward. I looked up, the iwa was moving closer. I put a full nelson on a shorter man in front and threw him aside. The iwa sailed to within a foot over us, the closest I had ever seen one. Its wingspan measured about four feet and I felt like I could just grab on and zipline across the crowd to the front. I had never seen one land but there it was, so close I could reach up and snag it. A fire hose cleaned the pavement of us. The crowd fell back and rolled along the cement. “Sold out!” someone barked through a megaphone. Two men were blasting the crowd with a full stream. The police pulled up and began pushing us back. I could finally see the man with the giant cooler. A rich man. An opportunistic man. I could see that the ice was bloody, and there were puddles of it around him. He had failed to capitalize on everything. I got to my feet and began running for it. “A hundred bucks for the ice!” I screamed. I just needed a little bit of ice, just to taste it. To commit it to memory. I hadn’t realized how desperate I was for it, but I was. I was blasted in the face by the fire hose and fell back. “Have a heart!” I choked.

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* * * Josie and I walked back to the car, soaked and bruised. I could see through her wet t-shirt, but she didn’t seem to mind. She was more upset than anything else. “That samoan guy yanked my head back, next time I see him, it’s lights out for his future offspring.” Cars filed out slowly, a few turning left at the intersection toward Waimea, other’s back east. I gathered those from the east didn’t fare well. This was not their turf. When we hit the crosswalk, the same guy that had punched me in the face waved us through from his jeep. “Ho!” he yelled. “Sorry ‘bout the uppercut!” he smiled. I waved him off. “No worries,” I laughed. “Sorry about the nose!” “You got some?” he asked. “Nope,” I said. “Happy New Year anyway.” He waved and drove by with his wife and two kids and turned into the McDonald’s drive thru. Kauai. Good peoples. * * * I called my dad on my cell and when he answered he was in one of those wild, ecstatic throes of road rage. “Son of a fuck!” he shouted. “What the hell!” Go! Go!” He was driving, I could hear the radio.

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“Hello? Fuck! Sorry. Hello?” he said finally. “Yo, pops. No fish. Ran out,” I said. We were in the car waiting for the crowd and traffic to dissipate. “What?” Josie was in the passenger seat next to me now. She was watching me, awaiting our next course of action. “There was a huge crowd. I dunno how they found out,” I said. “Aaah shit,” said my father through the drumming of wind. “News is all over the radio. KONG 93.5. Go listen,” he said, then screamed at another driver. “Come on!” “So what? Where you at?” I asked. “Kapaa. Heard get Akule somewhere.” “Aight. Go get em.” I said. “Shoot. See you at home,” he hung up. I turned on the radio and Ron Wiley leapt out at me as if he wanted to wring my neck. “No. Fish. Statewide.” he was reiterating. “Once again folks, there is no more fish.” He had been fielding calls since the morning, fueling speculation and rumors of a last yellowfin here, a frozen jack there. But now, he seemed resigned. “Ladies and gentlemen, New Years will go on. We’ll miss the mounds of Sashimi. The poke with limu. The stuffed snapper. But we need to move on and be with our loved ones. There are tons

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of other foods to ring in the New Year with. What’s important is family and safety. Be safe on the roads. Treat your neighbors with respect. What happened out there in Lihue, with the traffic and rioting outside of Kalena’s, and just minutes ago at Port Allen, that’s not right.” Josie and I sat in the car as more families staggered by, shellshocked by the water hose, crestfallen and empty-handed. Ron brought on guests who spoke about larger, wider reaching implications. They spoke of the world’s food supply. The economy. The food industry. How do cultures change? How could any culture change their dietary guidelines? Their aged traditions passed down from generation to generations? “Be safe, kids,” Ron said. “Again, no fish out there. No point in racing out from one point to another, creating a dangerous situation for all on the road.” He sounded desperate. “Stay in and enjoy the new year.” My phone rang. “Hello?” I answered. It was my mother. “Hanapepe town. Big-eye. One cooler. $200 a pound. Go!” She commanded. “What is it?” Asked Josie. I studied her eyes, the small epicanthic folds, the long lashes, the slight crease and tuck under her brows. They were all mine at the moment. “Ahi,” I whispered as my mother spoke on the line.

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“Where?” she mouthed. I listened as my mother gave me the directions. “Hanapepe, along the cliff,” I said and we were off. * * * We sped along the highway and swerved into Hanapepe Road without signaling, straight up. A freshly painted sign that read “Welcome to Hanapepe. Kauai’s Biggest Little Town” stood quaintly at the beginning of the road. Driving in I was taken through a portal of nostalgia. The buildings looked like saloons from the old west - half of which were deteriorating. A small dilapatated house stood under a banyan tree, it’s wooden walls cracked and peeling, ready to topple. A sign on the door said, “taro chip factory” and I strained to see inside as I drove by. The town had been a bustling watering hole after WWII. There were bars and skating rinks, theaters and cafes. Most of it was designed by Asians like myself. This was when the river it was built around was still abundant with fish and crab. By now, the town had been resurrected and rejuvenated as a cultural center, taken over by art galleries - most of them dealing in watercolor paintings of waterfalls, rainbows and mountains

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and hibiscus trees. All of them celebrating natural beauty. “Never got art,” said Josie. “Yeah,” I replied absently. “Too many other things to worry about.” “Creative types are so weird.” This had opened up a sore spot, having lost my job to those creative types. I tried to sound diplomatic and said “They’re all children,” but it came out sounding bitter regardless. Josie looked at me and snorted. They had painted the old theatre front with a new theatre front, and made it look like a store front selling li hing mui and pickled mangos. A painted poster of Flight of the Intruder hung next to the illusory steps that lead into the lobby. This reminded me of the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, in which Elmer Fudd would run flat into a painting of a tunnel. There were auto shops and closed down liquor stores, one of which my uncle had owned. It seemed so much smaller than it was then. There were abandoned homes sliding down the slopes of hills right next to newer, freshly painted homes, as if the family had shed the old house like a hermit crab leaving it’s shell, and moved into another right next door. We turned onto Awawa Road, along the

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Hanapepe river, heading inland toward the mountains. To the left of us was a steep cliff, the wall had the texture of a block of chocolate broken in half. The river snaked right and wrapped around a wide uncultivated farmland. Several cows wandered the pastures, fenced in by barbed wire. Roosters and pheasants ran across the single lane road, disappearing into the thicket. “You know where we going?” Josie asked. “Just to the end.” “We not getting mugged in here, eh?” To the left, we drove by a cave that looked as if it were created by some explosion on the side of the cliff. Red boulders had tumbled out and were now scattered all over. In the cave sat nine or ten goats at different levels up along the cliffside like target practice silhouettes. They came trotting down toward the wire mesh fence as we drove along. “Wonder who’s goats those were,” I asked. “The fish better not turn out to be raw goat meat,” said Josie. The road ended and we continued along a dirt trail. There were a few scattered houses on pastures, green as beer bottles with rattan roofs. Weeds were growing wild in every yard. A patch of banana trees closed off by wire mesh and black tar paper sat next to a warehouse with shattered windows. Property

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lines were unshaped and neglected. More goats wandered along the road. Tractors and pick up trucks and gutted cars on cinderblocks punctuated the greenery. We were kicking up a lot of red dust, driving slowly, listening to the dirt and rocks crumble under the tires, and Ron Wiley telling us over and over again “No fish” and “be safe,” lamenting the end of days. At the end of the road was a small house, uneven as a wet cardboard box. The rooftop was missing shingles, and a billowing translucent tarp was nailed into place over a good portion of them. A mud splattered truck with a boat rack attached to it sat in the grass. I parked the car and let the cloud of red dust over take us. All was silent but the trees and the hissing grass. “Murabayashi!” I called out. My voice hung in place like stuffed mackerel on a wall. I walked up to the screen door and knocked on the trim. The pane of glass on the sliding window rattled. “Hello?” Murabayashi.” Josie walked out to back of the house. I went to the garage and snooped around. There was a quiver of old fishing poles, a stack of tackle boxes and lure. There were discarded reels and lead weights, nets and screens made out of window sills for drying out fish.

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My mother said she had gotten a message on her answering machine. It had been there for an hour. The man, an old friend of my parents who had worked with my father at the Ace Hardware in Lihue for ten years had left a message saying that he had gone out for one last fishing trip – come what may – and lucked out. “Murabayashi!” I called out again. “Oh my god! Fuck! Ryan!” Josie called out from the backyard, if you could call it a backyard. The entire lot was surrounded by back yards gone wild. I ran out to the back, rounded the corner and nearly sprained my ankle in a hole covered by grass. The backyard was overgrown. The grass had grown as high as my knees. Grasshoppers sprang out one by one as I split a trail and made my way to her. There was an old make-shift wooden sink — its faucet attached to a garden hose and the counter made of old splintered plywood — struggling to stay erect under the crushing weight of a 200 pound glistening big-eye tuna. Flies swarmed around its shimmering, silver body. It smelled fresh. It’s eyes had yet to cloud over. How long had it been sitting there? “Murabayashi!” I called out again, my voice trembling, my eyes near tears. Josie was jumping up and down, her athletic

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frame on full display and her t-shirt graciously damp and clingy. I ran out front and knocked on the front door again. “Hey! You home?” I pushed the screen door open. The floor was littered with old newspapers, pots and pans. An old jar of peanut butter had rolled across the floor to the doorway. In the next room, peaking out from around the doorway, on the tile floor was what I perceived to be a pair of bare feet. I stepped inside and quietly walked toward the kitchen. “Murabayashi?” I said. The man, whom I had never met before but had heard about many times, was lying face down. I bent over to feel his feet. He was cold. As cold a dead fish. * * * Now what would you do in this situation? There would never be any fish in the world again. Yet here, incongruously, was a fresh ahi sitting on a wooden platform in the middle of a lush green valley among the cool, dreamlike swaying of the trees and wild birds needling their songs into the wind. And inside, there happened to be a dead body with no hint of foul play. Josie and I sat on an ice chest next to the house, and reflected on the afternoon. She had guessed that

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Murabayashi had died during the morning. He had fallen and hit his head on the corner of the coffee table. There was a broken stool in the corner, and a mess of dishes and glasses shattered on the floor. We had covered the fish with some fine netting to keep the flies off. Luckily the cool weather had been gentle as the sun’s winter arc had spared the fish direct exposure. It had remained shaded most of the morning. Josie mumbled something about the world we lived in, and I agreed with whatever it was she said. She was probably right. She let her forehead rest on my shoulder for a second then straightened. “What should we do?” she asked. “Pack it up,” I answered.

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