full ride. More frozen sake . . . more food. The last few customers got up
and lurched to the door—like us, red-faced and perspiring from the
booze. We continued. There had to be something we hadn't tried yet! I
was beginning to think that some of the cooks were calling their homes
by now, telling their families get in here and get a load of these gaijins!!
They're eating everything in the store!
After course twenty or so, the chef slit, brushed, dabbed and formed the
final course: a piece of raw sea eel. Earthenware cups of green tea were
delivered. Finally, we were done.
We left to the usual bows and screams of "Arigato gozaimashiTAAA!!!"
and picked our way carefully, very carefully, up the stairs, back to the
physical world.
I left Philippe at Les Halles, had a couple of cocktails at an empty faux-
Irish pub and staggered back to my apartment. I had to get up early for
the fish market.
Tsukiji, Tokyo's central fish market, puts New York's Fulton Street to
shame. It's bigger, better, and unlike its counterpart in Manhattan a
destination worth visiting if only to gape.
I arrived by taxi at four-thirty in the morning. The colors of the market
alone seemed to burn my retinas. The variety, the strangeness, the sheer
volume of seafood available at Tsukiji amounted to a colossal
Terrordome of mind-boggling dimensions. The simple awareness that
the seafood—crazy Japanese were raking, dredging, netting and hooking
that much stuff out of the sea each day gave me pause.
A Himalayan-sized mountain of discarded styrofoam fish boxes
announced my arrival, as well as a surrounding rabbit warren of shops,
breakfast joints and merchants servicing the market. The market itself
was enclosed, stretching seemingly into infinity under a hangar-type