The Story of Sushi - The Writing

What goes into producing a book like this—apart from a lot of fish and rice?

Finding the Story

Both of the books I’ve written so far, The Secret Life of Lobsters and The Story of Sushi (previously titled The Zen of Fish), began with my desire to write a true story about real-life people. Personally, I don’t learn well from textbooks, or from dry treatises that don’t involve at least some element of human drama. I learn best—as both a reader and a writer—when I can relate to a story about human beings whose lives embody the subject in question.

But researching and writing this sort of story is difficult. Like all journalists, I must be loyal to reality as I find it—I can’t make anything up or embellish the truth. To me, that’s the adventure of it. I must find people from other walks of life—people I might not interact with otherwise—then become intimately acquainted with their lives and work, and finally attempt to tell their story in a way that is accurate, engaging, and informative. It’s a challenge.

In the case of The Secret Life of Lobsters, I spent two years living on a small island off the Maine coast and working full-time on fishing boats so I could learn about the lives and labor of lobstermen. I spent parts of another year chasing lobster scientists around New England. I studied these people’s professions, but I also probed into their personal lives, trying to glean insights about their motivations, struggles, and accomplishments. In addition, I spent months in the library, reading through documents, scientific papers, and historical sources. Not until I had completed all this research was I able to begin actually writing the book.

With The Story of Sushi, I faced a difficult question from the very beginning: Whom exactly to write about? An obvious choice would have been to focus on sushi chefs in Japan, especially since I had lived there. But I wanted to write a book that would be of immediate interest average American readers. So as counterintuitive as it sounds, I decided to search for an American story about sushi. I would weave the Japanese historical and cultural background of sushi into that American story.

But would I simply write about a Japanese chef in the U.S., who embodied the sushi tradition here? Or could I find an American sushi chef, and if so, what would such a chef represent? I knew I didn’t want to write a profile of a celebrity chef—the media was saturated with such treatments. I wanted to get off the beaten path and tell an honest story about down-to-earth people in the world of American sushi, warts and all. But who were these people, and how would I find them?

Eventually I discovered the California Sushi Academy in Los Angeles and paid a visit. After a week in the classroom, I felt that the people there represented many of the elements I was looking for. Toshi Sugiura, the CEO of the academy, embodied the story of sushi coming from Japan to America. Z

oran Lekic, the chief instructor, wasn’t an American, but he embodied the story of a Westerner in the U.S. who had mastered the art of sushi as well as many Japanese. And the young American students embodied the story of sushi becoming an American culinary phenomenon in its own right, with its own distinctive characteristics—such as female chefs. In addition, the academy contained both the classroom, which would give me the opportunity to write about a chef’s training and different sushi ingredients, and the attached restaurant, which would let me observe expert chefs at work.

I had arrived at the academy at the beginning of a three-month semester. I quickly developed the idea of structuring the book around the class’s progress, and made arrangements to stay for the entire semester. I also met individually with each of the people at the academy and restaurant and discussed with them my goals, my reporting techniques, and my journalistic ethics. Then I asked them to either sign a release form giving me complete freedom to write about them, or to opt out. Everyone agreed to be written about and signed the form. As the semester progressed I didn’t know what would happen, which characters would have what sort of experiences, or how the story as a whole would play out.

Reporting the Story

I did know, however, that whatever happened, I would have to report it accurately. I also knew that I wanted the resulting book to feel more like a novel or a movie—or perhaps even a reality TV show—than a typical nonfiction book. That would require that I include lots of dialogue and action. To capture

dialogue and action accurately I would have to take copious, and very rapid, notes as events transpired in the classroom.

Every morning I observed the class for nearly four hours, my pen and notebook in hand. I took a break for lunch, then watched the instructors and restaurant chefs perform their prep work during the afternoons. Around 5:00 p.m. I’d grab another quick bite to eat, and then I’d watch the chefs and sometimes the students work behind the sushi bar, often until late in the evening. I even convinced Toshi to let me disguise myself in a chef’s jacket and stand behind the sushi bar while he and the other chefs served customers.

A day of reporting for me might last anywhere from eight to twelve hours. Throughout it all I asked a lot of questions and scribbled down most of what I heard and saw. Since I didn’t know how each person’s story would develop,

I wasn’t sure whom I’d decide to focus on when it came time to write. So I took detailed notes on everyone, including all eight of the students.

At that rate, I filled several notebooks a week. When I got home each night I was too exhausted to type the notes into my computer, so the stack of notebooks just grew taller and taller. Like a squirrel gathering nuts for the winter, I became paranoid that I might loose my work—what if the house where I was staying caught fire, and the notebooks went up in flames? I began taking my notebooks to Kinko’s once a week, Xeroxing them, and FedExing them to myself back home, just so I’d have a backup copy. Writer friends of mine have referred to this behavior as “insane.”

Choosing the Characters

As the semester progressed, I mulled the question of which of the students at the academy I would choose to write about. For a “story” to exist, a character generally needs to face a challenge that leads to some sort of self-discovery—anything less isn’t really a story. In the real-life situation at the sushi academy, the student who faced the greatest challenge was Kate Murray. There were other students in the class—including another woman—who were much more

skilled than Kate. But as subject matter for a story, that actually made them less interesting.

As I watched Kate in the classroom, however, I grew frustrated with her. I wanted her to succeed more than she was actually succeeding. Zoran, the instructor, also seemed frustrated with her, and at times his attitude toward her seemed to reflect his own ambivalence about how best to spur her on—through encouragement or criticism. This, too, became part of the story.

Ultimately, Kate overcame the challenge of sushi school in her own way. Her story didn’t necessarily include the sort of victory or great insight that I as a writer, or Zoran as her teacher, or even you as the reader, would have wanted her to experience. A Hollywood ending might have featured Kate transforming herself into an expert sushi chef. What actually happened was less exciting, but it was exactly what Kate, as a real human being, needed to have happen at that moment in her life.

In the end, Kate was the only student in the class who experienced a significant discovery about herself during the semester—at least, that I could detect. That’s why I decided to focus on her, warts and all.

Facing the Truth

When I returned from Los Angeles and sat down at my desk, my job was simply to portray what had happened. In that sense the task was straightforward. But it was also absurdly difficult. After several months of reporting, I had accumulated a stack of some 40 notebooks filled with scrawl.

Each notebook contained a horrendous hodgepodge—a record of people’s actions and comments throughout each day, mixed with scattered interviews with them about their thoughts and personal histories, alongside all sorts of miscellaneous information about sushi that I’d gathered on the fly.

It would have been much easier just to fudge things and work from memory. But memory can’t be trusted. If I wanted to write a documentary account with action and dialogue that was accurate to what had really transpired, I had to use the notes. But typing all my notebooks into the computer would take too long. I contacted a couple of transcription agencies. They took one look at my handwriting and declined. Finally I found a small outfit of heroic typists who were up for the challenge.

The notebooks began to arrive from the transcription agency in my e-mail inbox as text files. When the transcription was complete, my simple day-to-day account of what the people at the sushi academy had said and done during the semester—not including any of the background information about them or the food they were making—had amounted to 700 pages of single-spaced text.

Boiling it Down

In addition, another few months of research by me and my research assistants yielded a vast quantity of information about sushi and its ingredients—everything from techniques for squeezing nigiri to the reproductive biology of seaweed. I read a couple of books on sushi in Japanese and, with further help from my Japanese-speaking assistant, amassed a trove of details about the history and culture of the cuisine, most of it never before available in English. All of this additional research amounted to another 2,000 pages of single-spaced text.

I’d learned that boiling sushi rice is extremely difficult to do properly. But I now faced the task of boiling 2,700 pages of raw material down to 270 or so pages of finished product, a job that seemed impossible. As I mapped out the basic story line and started to write, I had to make excruciating decisions about what to leave out. Many of the characters possessed interesting backgrounds or fascinating side stories, but the further I went, the more the manuscript was in danger of becoming overlong and unwieldy. I tried to be ruthless, but the whole thing was still excessive when I handed it off to the people who’d agreed to read it and suggest edits. Their help trimming and tightening the manuscript was invaluable. Still, my publisher’s deadline arrived too soon—as deadlines always do. That, like the story in the book, is reality.