Steak by Mark Schatzker

Author:Mark Schatzker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781101190104
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-03-11T10:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

JAPAN

The Japanese are famous for their acutely overdeveloped sense of specialization. They are the world’s foremost perfectionists, even more so than Germans, and it took me all of one hour on Japanese soil to witness this singular cultural trait.

The event took place at one in the morning on the shuttle bus journey from Narita International Airport into downtown Tokyo. Like shuttle buses the world over, the one I was riding was equipped with a transponder allowing it to cruise through tollgates without waiting in line to pay. As we approached the first tollgate, the driver gave no indication of decelerating. It seemed, at first, like nothing more than exuberant driving, but as the gate got closer and the speed remained constant, the driver crossed an invisible line where collision went from unlikely to inevitable. Even if he had wanted to slow down, there wasn’t enough time to do so. I gripped the armrests and braced for impact. There wasn’t time to scream. In less than a second, the windshield would shatter and the tollgate would snap like a twig, helicoptering through the air in slow motion until it struck a toll collector handing out change, perhaps breaking the man’s collarbone. In that endless instant before impact, I pictured myself watching Japanese police push the shamed bus driver into the back of a Toyota squad car as I waited for a replacement shuttle bus to arrive. And then at the last moment, with at best inches to spare, the gate flipped up, lifting with a speed and robotic nonchalance that seemed exquisitely Japanese. The driver zoomed through and continued on toward Tokyo, having shaved seconds off the journey. Every subsequent tollgate—there were several—proved equally exhilarating. After each one, I would notice myself breathing again, and watch as color returned to my knuckles. It was, by several orders of magnitude, the most thrilling trip from an airport into a city I have ever taken.

By five that morning, I was standing in a large room surrounded by the frozen carcasses of many dead, extremely expensive tuna, a can of hot coffee in my hand. There had never been, until that moment, a hot can of anything in my hand. After less than four hours of sleep, coffee was what I needed, and a guide I had hired to show me around took me into a convenience store where, next to the cash register, I found a hot display case filled with hot cans of coffee.

The problem with hot canned Japanese coffee isn’t the taste—the stuff is genuinely good—but that you need oven mitts to drink it. As we walked toward the fish market, I juggled it like a baked potato, and it wasn’t until several blocks later that it was cool enough to grasp, open, and gingerly sip. Later that day, I bought another.

The frozen tuna were so cold, they appeared harder than the concrete floor on which they were lying. They were laid out in long rows, and their eyes were covered with yellow or red stickers indicating their weight.

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