Meet the Characters in The Story of Sushi

Meet the Characters

in THE STORY of SUSHI

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Behind the Scenes
in the Story of Sushi

The students who completed the course of study at the California Sushi Academy during the summer 2005 semester, depicted in The Story of Sushi. From left to right: Takumi Nishio of Tokyo, Japan; Elena Puig of Barcelona, Spain; Jenard de Castro of Pasedena, CA; Marcos Wisner of Durango, CO; Kate Murray of San Diego, CA; Shane Koenig of Murrieta, CA; Fabiel Yepo of El Paso, TX; and Reo Julyant of Davidson, NC.

Kate Murray

Kate arrived at the California Sushi Academy unprepared for what lay ahead—she had no prior cooking experience and no knowledge of Japanese culture. She also had a troubled past. In high school Kate was afflicted by a debilitating illness, which destroyed her appetite and her health. She grew thin, fell into depression, and dropped out of school. A friend introduced her to sushi, and it became the only food she enjoyed eating; it helped restore her physical and mental health. Attending the sushi academy was Kate’s attempt to restart her life. She thought it would be fun. It wasn’t. She spiraled back into depression and almost dropped out during the first two weeks of class. The Story of Sushi tells the tale of her struggle to succeed.

Kate’s spunk and sense of humor help her endure sushi school. Here she poses with a fish she’s decorated with carrot-slice sunglasses and a cigarette.

In a dramatic scene near the end of The Story of Sushi, Kate attempts to slice an expensive block of high-grade tuna.

Joking with her classmates, Kate pretends to pick her nose during a practice session behind the sushi bar.

Marcos Wisner

Marcos arrived at the California Sushi Academy while still a student in high school. He had extensive experience working in restaurants, and he was good at flirting with women from behind the sushi bar, but in The Story of Sushi he struggles to muster the self-discipline and attention to detail necessary to become a sushi chef. His exploits form an entertaining thread through the book.

Marcos tries his hand at cutting a $200 hunk of fish.

Marcos distinguishes himself and defends his sushi by making a gang sign for the camera.

Takumi Nishio

Takumi, pictured at left with his wife, the Japanese pop idol singer and TV personality Tomomi Nishimura, was himself famous in Japan as a member of a boy band and comedy troupe called CHA-CHA,

until he gave up his celebrity lifestyle to open an Italian restaurant in Tokyo. Restaurant critics refused to take the former star seriously as a chef, so he closed his restaurant and went into exile in Los Angeles, where he hid himself in the anonymity of the California Sushi Academy and studied his own culture from afar.

Takumi practices the ancient art of Japanese tea ceremony during a quiet moment in the classroom.

In his broken English, Takumi tries to explain the finer points of Japanese food culture to one of his American classmates.

More joking: Kate pretends that her dedication to sushi runs so deep that she sleeps in the kitchen—in the fridge, so she’ll stay fresh. If she needs a midnight snack, the albacore tuna is just overhead.

Marcos’s story in The Story of Sushi ends when he graduates from the sushi academy. After that, he worked part-time at a sushi restaurant in Durango, CO while finishing high school, then got a steady job behind the sushi bar at a club and restaurant called Lobar in the ski resort town of Crested Butte, CO. He began taking college classes as well.

In May 2007, as the first copies of The Story of Sushi were arriving at bookstores, Marcos packed his car and hit the road for Austin, TX. He had just secured a coveted position working under one of America’s hottest new sushi chefs. That chef was

Tyson Cole—a white guy. While Marcos had been attending the California Sushi Academy, Cole was being named one of America’s “Best New Chefs” by Food & Wine magazine. The plan was that Marcos would work for the summer as an unpaid apprentice in Cole’s restaurant in Austin, Uchi. Cole has a reputation for being tough, and Marcos expected to be pushed to his limit—and to learn a lot.

To make his way deeper into the world of sushi, Marcos also planned to take Japanese language classes at the local community college in Austin once he’d gotten settled.

At the end of the semester, Takumi returned to Japan. He has since been working as a chef in a friend’s restaurant in Tokyo. He also worked on a collaboration with his wife—a children’s book about a girl who doesn’t like to eat her vegetables. Takumi, a talented cartoonist, drew the illustrations; the book’s cover is pictured at right.

Zoran Lekic

The day-to-day classes at the sushi academy are taught by the samurai-like drill sergeant Zoran, a sushi prodigy and a former competitive body-builder and veteran of the elite Royal Australian Air Force. In The Story of Sushi, Zoran’s demanding regimen is especially tough on Kate and Marcos.

Zoran shows Kate and her classmates how it’s done. He’s a tough instructor, but he has a big heart.

After The Story of Sushi, Zoran continued to teach at the California Sushi Academy.

Fie Kruse

A knock-out beauty from Denmark, Fie had acted in a Danish film and had received numerous overtures from modeling agencies, but she turned her back on it all to pursue her passion—becoming a sushi chef. In the summer of 2005, she had already graduated from the California Sushi Academy; she appears in The Story of Sushi as a chef in training at the attached restaurant. While most women suffer discrimination behind the sushi bar, Fie’s male colleagues and her customers adored her. But in scenes depicted in the book, it was often hard to tell whether they showered her with compliments because she was a good chef (which she was), or because she was gorgeous. Deflecting marriage proposals from drunk men at the sushi bar kept her nearly as busy as making their food.

Whether she was dressed in a tight black T-shirt or a low-cut top, Fie’s Japanese bandana and bright blond hair always attracted attention at the sushi bar. So did her elegant sushi arrangements.

Subsequently, Fie returned to Denmark and endured a difficult year of discrimination by Asian male chefs at a sushi restaurant there, but was eventually offered the job of head chef and the opportunity to film a Danish sushi-making instructional video.

Toshi Sugiura

Zoran shows sushi academy students the proper technique for creating a packet of rice topped with fish.

Toshi is the CEO of the California Sushi Academy and executive chef of the attached restaurant, Hama Hermosa. After leaving Japan and hitchhiking across Europe, he arrived in Los Angeles in 1978—with not an ounce of chef training. He talked his way behind the sushi bar in a restaurant in Malibu. He had no idea what he was doing, and taught himself to make sushi on the job. Sushi was the hot new trend in Hollywood and his customers at the time included Olivia Newton John, Robin Williams, Neil Diamond, and Barbra Streisand—but at first, he had no clue who many of them were. Soon Toshi became a stickler for high-quality sushi, and throughout the 1980s and 1990s he used a combination of charm, charisma, and ferocity to induce thousands of L.A. residents to try authentic, exotic sushi toppings they might otherwise have eschewed. In The Story of Sushi, Toshi’s personal story is also the story of how sushi came to America.

Toshi proudly graduates another class of chefs from the academy.

An avid sports fan, Toshi always has a football or basketball game on the TV over the sushi bar.

Toshi with one of his graduates in Venice Beach, where he reigned behind the sushi bar of the Hama Venice restaurant for 25 years.

Today, Toshi runs the California Sushi Academy at a new location, and is opening a new restaurant, Bar Hayama, in West L.A. On the academy’s website, Toshi states his ongoing philosophy for the school:

“The educational philosophy of the California Sushi Academy crosses borders, race, and gender to bring greater Japanese cultural understanding and appreciation through culinary experience. In the past it has been solely the right of Japanese males to become sushi chefs. CSA has changed this, passing on its wealth of culinary knowledge to people of diverse backgrounds so that they may in turn share the beauty of Japanese cuisine and culture with others.”

Other members of the class of summer 2005

Trevor Corson has at no time had any professional affiliation

with the California Sushi Academy.

The characters in the book are all real people who are depicted using their real names. Here are their stories.

See comments from Kate’s mother about what it was like to read a book about her daughter.

Several of the students from the class who do not appear by name in The Story of Sushi have sent me news of their lives after graduation:

• Shane Koenig, a native of southern California, was one of the class’s most conscientious students. A recent college grad who’d majored in economics, Shane had learned to love sushi by going out to eat with his father. Shane was stunned at how popular the sushi restaurants were, and quickly hatched dreams of owning his own place. After graduating from the sushi academy, his first move was to start an in-home sushi catering company called Sushi Sensation.

• Reo Julyant (facing camera) had cut his teeth rolling sushi for Whole Foods Market before attending the academy. After a lackluster start at the academy, Reo surprised his teachers with a virtuoso performance on the special appetizers section of the final exam.

After graduation he worked chef jobs in Arizona and Florida before settling into the head chef job at a sushi nightclub in Valdostas, GA called Glo Ultra Lounge, where both of these photos were taken. “Lots lots a women,” he writes in an e-mail. But if he can tear himself away, he’s looking into possible job offers with the high-end restaurant franchises Nobu and Morimoto.

• Jenard de Castro, a native of Pasadena, CA, was all-round foodie who delighted in making up fusion sushi dishes with global influences. A dabbler in many pursuits, Jenard worked several different sushi chefs jobs after graduation and runs a

MySpace site dedicated to a popular Japanese cooking show usually referred to in English as Dotch Cooking Showdown. In a recent e-mail, Jenard announced that he’d been offered the lead sushi chef job at a new “Cal-Asian” restaurant at the Morongo Casino Resort and Spa in Cabazon, California.

• Elena Puig was from Barcelona, Spain, but had spent much of her adult life in Russia and Finland. She developed painful gallstones and got to the point where most kinds of foods made her sick. On a trip to Thailand she ate sushi and discovered that sushi made her feel better—she thought perhaps the seaweed was aiding her digestion. She became addicted to sushi after that,

but because it was hard to find in Finland, she started making it herself at home, with the many kinds of smoked fish available there. Eventually she had the gallstones removed but continued making sushi, and started a sushi catering business in Finland. Just before attending the California Sushi Academy, Elena had moved back to Barcelona, where her father ran a restaurant. At the academy, Elena’s sushi was superb and she graduated at the top of the class. After graduation she set up a new sushi catering business in Spain called Banzai Sushi.

Read my blog entries about meeting up again with some of the main characters from The Story of Sushi, and revisiting the academy, during the Los Angeles stop on my book tour in 2007.

Kate subsequently became a sushi chef in San Diego, at a restaurant called Sushi Fix, where the chefs behind the sushi bar are all Caucasian. Kate was the only woman. She had plans to attend the San Diego Culinary Institute.