The Zen of Fish

As you probably know, I'm an NPR crack-addict. One of the downsides of this (besides the fact that I have no idea what a lot of important people look like) is that, when a new NPR-darling book is making the rounds, I hear about it from noon to night as the author passes through program through program. Morning Edition? Check. Fresh Air? Check. All Things Considered? Check. Maybe even Marketplace? Check. KUOW's local shows? Check. I went almost crazy from hearing about The Year of Magical Thinking and by the time they stopped talking about it, the mere mention of the name made me break out in hives.

Ok, that's not really true. But during this time period, I couldn't stand to hear about it.

Anyway, Trevor Corson's The Zen of Fish was [relatively] recently making the NPR rounds, though on a smaller scale (Googling "zen of fish" on npr.org returns only a couple of pages of results), and since I'm a lot less reluctant to read about fish than emotionally brutal memoirs, I thought I'd give it a try.

Corson interweaves scenes from a semester at the California Sushi Academy with historical and scientific tidbits about sushi and various fish. The CSA scenes mainly follow three students: Kate, Marcos, and Takumi; Kate emerges as the main focus of the "human" side of the book, but it falls flat. I'm not sure if the problem is that he didn't delve deep enough into the students' personal lives or develop their personalities, or if the focus was simply in the wrong place. I just couldn't care, much less sympathize, that this girl who had decided to pay $5,000 to learn to be a sushi chef was upset by the fact that she'd have to use sharp knives and was grossed out by cleaning fish, or that the instructor was mean to her. The whole girl-feels-like-quitting-when-confronted-with-reality-and-mean-teacher/
coach-but-perseveres-and-emerges-with-newfound-confidence-and-
appreciation-for-teacher thing felt forced; Zoran, the instructor, didn't seem like a sadistic drillmaster or a strict, stoic Japanese uber-traditionalist (this is a program, Corson tells us, that aims to train sushi chefs in just a few months instead of the years that traditional Japanese training would take). He didn't seem like a jovial, overly friendly sort, either, don't get me wrong; but he wasn't nearly as bad as we're meant to think. I couldn't see Kat's growing appreciation, either. I was, not surprisingly, also unable to muster any sympathy for Marcos--a teenager who'd attended cause he thought it'd be a good way to pick up girls. Takumi was interesting, but not a lot of time was spent with him. Any time that Corson tries to bring us into the inner lives of these students, the thoughts are a little too overwrought, the drama a little too pat and convenient. The non-student characters seemed much more interesting to me, but unfortunately he didn't spend much time with them: I would've loved to hear more about Zoran or Toshi; Fie also seemed interesting--the author goes to great lengths to tell us of her beauty, how men fawn over her, and how she questions if she's actually a good chef or men are being nice to her because of her looks, only to largely gloss over her. Except to come back once in a while to remind us that she's beautiful. And blonde.

After the exasperating treatment of his human subjects, it's a refreshing change of pace to read about the fish. Refreshing, but not unexpected; I haven't read The Secret Life of Lobsters, but I did read Corson's piece in Best American Science Writing 2003, and it was wonderful. I found myself looking forward to the historic interludes, and wishing they'd go on longer. The bits that touch on science--whether it be chemical reactions or the life cycles of various fish, are at once totally accessible, brisk, entertaining, and tantalizing. Afterwards, I found myself wasting days looking up information about eels or salmon. I wanted to hear more about seaweed, or fish runners in Japan, or about some warlord or another.

All in all, it was a fairly satisfying read, even though those pesky humans kept interrupting the fish narrative; maybe, to a more sympathetic reader, even the bits with the students could be appetizing.