Sashimi

by Zoe Tamaki

Rausu, Japan. Chelsea sat on the cluttered floor of her new overpriced, cramped apartment. She looked out the glass door towards the water. The sun sagged into the glistening blue sea. It was beautiful. Hundreds of dolphins swam in the ocean. In less than twenty four hours, she would be swimming with them. Chills went down her spine. She had dreamt of swimming with dolphins, of helping them when they were sick and teaching them sign language. She had quit her job at the Montery Bay Aquarium as the head veterinarian, left behind her parents and dog, and moved to Japan to follow her dreams and work as a marine biologist at the Rausu Dolphin Research Center.

Chelsea looked around the apartment. Overflowing boxes were piled on top of one another, their contents flooding onto the floor. The room was a mess but instead of cleaning and organizing, Chelsea decided to listen to her stomach and get something to eat. She walked out of the apartment, down the street, and under a tall sign welcoming visitors to the town of Rausu. The first shop she saw was a was a small noodle shop. In the window, plastic noodles were crammed into a small bowl with a Mickey Mouse emblem teased her to enter. She opened the door and walked in. There were only six small square tables and a back counter with the register. A young man looked up from the register and smiled. He had shaggy black hair and was dressed in a black button-up shirt and khakis. He had a nice smile and kind eyes.

“Hello,” he said, greeting her.

“Hey there,” Chelsea responded in Japanese. Her mother was from Japan and she had grown up speaking Japanese as her second language.

“I am Takashi Takemori. You can call me Taka,” he replied. He nodded towards a table and pulled out a seat for her.

“Here for vacation?” He asked.

“No,” she said, sitting down. “I just moved here to work at the Rausu Dolphin Research Center.”

“Oh, I see,” he said. Taka furrowed his brow in thought. Over a bowl of noodles, Chelsea explained to Taka why she had come to Japan and her love for dolphins. Taka told her about himself and how he normally went out fishing with his father and grandfather, but lately had been helping his mother at the restaurant. In Taka’s family, the men caught the fish and his grandmother and mother served it fresh at the restaurant. In his family, all the men were expected to be fisherman.

“But lately, the fishing bad,” he lamented. “So, we’ve been serving mostly noodles. Customers are not happy about that. They want their sashimi, they want their raw fish.”

After finishing her noodles, Chelsea checked her watch. It was ten o’clock. She had to be at work by eight the next morning. She thanked Taka for the meal and told him that they should meet again soon. He agreed. She was happy to have made a friend.

The next day she woke up at six, put on her swimsuit and shorts, and hopped onto the bus for the hour ride to the Rausu Dolphin Research Center.

It was a tall wooden building that sat at the bottom of what looked like a small hill. From pictures, Chelsea knew that beyond the small hill was a beautiful cove that was home to thousands of dolphins. She had read that the closest hospital was three hours away, the nearest department store two hours away and the local town, Rausu, one hour. She walked in to be greeted by a short man with brown hair. He had hazelnut eyes and wore a t-shirt with Hawaiian board shorts. He introduced himself as Brian, said he was half-Japanese and half-Irish, had lived in America his whole life before coming to the Dolphin Center a year earlier and was a vegetarian.

“Have you seen the cove yet?” he asked.

“I’ve seen pictures. I am so excited to see the water and the dolphins though. I’ve heard that pictures don’t do it justice.”

“Yeah, you can’t see it from here, because we have to walk over. But it’s just…just awesome. I’ve been away for a month traveling with my girlfriend. So, it’s almost going to be like my first time seeing it too,” he said breaking out into a big grin.

He got her her snorkel gear, brought her outside and guided her past the protecting electrical fence and towards the top of the hill.

“Get ready to see more dolphins than you have ever seen in your whole life!” he warned. As they reached the top, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath to prepare herself for the most beautiful view she would ever see.

“Oh my god.” Brian said, interrupting her peaceful anticipation. She opened her eyes looking out towards the cove below.

 The sea was red. It slowly faded into a dark maroon as the scarlet melted with the cold navy ocean. There was no movement. No dolphins. No life. A man stood below at the edge of the rocky beach looking out towards the sea.

“That’s Jiro-san, the head marine biologist. We better go down there.” Brian said, grabbing her hand and pulling her down the rocky path towards the beach.

Chelsea had spoken with Jiro Mori before. He was the reason she had gotten the job. She had met him at a conference about marine wildlife where he had spoken about the dolphins at Rausu cove. After some formalities, he had suggested that she contact his supervisor for a position. It was his recommendation that got her the job.

"All that red is blood," Jiro-san said, as the two reached him, panting.
Just blood. Dark red blood mixing with the blue tears of the crying sea.

The three stood in silence. The sea was red. Red with blood.

"I need you two to dive and see if they can find anything." Jiro-san said, his voice shaking.
Chelsea and Brian looked at each other and then back towards the water. The smell of raw fish loomed in the air. Blood was splattered along the shore. Brian unstrapped his fins from his backpack, strapped them on, put on his snorkel gear and silently stepped into the water. He walked out slowly submerging himself into the bloody water, finally diving in. She did not want go in there. She hadn’t come to Japan to be a dolphin mortician. Nassau from shock and raw fish knocked her off balance and she stumbled forward. Jiro-san grabbed her before she could fall. His eyes spilling with sadness.

“Please,” he said. “Go look.”

The water was thick and viscous. She could hear the crackling of the sea as she dunked her head under the water. Someone must have killed the dolphins. In one night. The eeriness of what had happened or what she had assumed had happened wrapped itself around her, dragging on her as she swam scanning the ocean. Nothing different than any other ocean floor she had swam in except that the water was red. Tears dripped out of her eyes flooding her goggles. She swam out towards the ocean, passing pieces of dolphin flesh as she swam. As she came to the entrance of the cove, she saw something black on the ground, slowly swaying. She took a deep breath and dived to grab it. It was a net, a black net. A small fish was caught inside, and as she lifted up the net the bright blue fish swam free.

She brought the net to the shore to find Jiro-san chanting with a purple bracelet of prayer beads. She sat quietly beside him looking out towards the ocean. Brian surfaced a couple seconds later dripping with bloody water. He came and sat next to her on the rocky beach. Jiro-san finished his chant and looked down at Chelsea and Brian.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the net.

“It’s what they used to catch them, I guess.” she said sadly, untangling seaweed from it. Then she saw a tag. It had a Mickey mouse emblem on it and a fish. He grabbed the net.

“I cannot believe this!” he yelled angrily ripping off the tag and throwing it into the water. His breath was heavy as giant tears rolled down his cheeks splashing onto the rocky beach.

“I know, Jiro-san. It is truly terrible. You know, I thought something strange had happened last night,” Brian said. “I just felt it. I could have sworn I heard something clanging and the dolphins crying. I know you can’t hear them when you’re not underwater. But I felt it. And I heard this annoying clanking so I couldn’t go to bed. I should have woken up though. I used to come out here to think. Just leave the house and come to work super early. Watch the sun rise.….Damn.”

Jiro-san looked at Brian, his gray eyes watering.

“For twenty, years I have worked with these dolphins,” he told them. “I have healed them when they were ill, nurtured their young, and helped the old. We are family! What did we do to deserve this? How could they do this?”

He then watched the bloody water lap at his feet leaving behind pink foam that hid in the crevices of the pebbles.

Chelsea went home to try to rest, from the emotionally tiring day. In 24 hours she had gone from euphoric anticipation to a deep, debilitating depression. Her heart felt heavy. She decided to pass going to the police station with Jiro-san and Brian to report what had happened. Her head hurt and her eyes were swollen from crying all the way home on the bus. Her stomach began to growl. She was hungry again. She slipped on a jacket and headed towards Taka’s noodle shop.

As she approached the shop, she noticed a pile of long metal poles in front of Taka’s noodle shop. They were pushed as close as possible to the restaurant but some how she still managed to stumble over them.

She gathered herself and walked into the noodle shop. It was crowded. There were about twenty people crammed into what suddenly felt like twenty square feet.

“Hello!” Taka greeted her with a grin, bringing her to a table and pulling out a seat for her.

“Hi Taka,” Chelsea replied with a half-hearted smile.

“You look sad. I’ll bring you something special.”

Taka returned twenty minutes later with a giant bowl full with sticky white rice and thinly sliced blood colored sashimi on top.

“This is fresh!” he told her excitedly. She looked down at the bright red sashimi. She didn’t feel like eating.

Suddenly, she saw Jiro-san storm through the kitchen panels towards the door.

He looked flustered and his face was as red as the sashimi.

“Jiro-san?” Chelsea asked, confused.

He stopped startled to hear his name.

“Why are you here?” she asked. An older man with peppered hair came through the back. He wore old baggy pants, pants that shouldn’t be in the kitchen.

“I ordered some sashimi,” he said sharply, looking back at the old man. “But they didn’t have the kind I wanted.” Jiro-san said with a hateful look in his eyes, and walked out.

Chelsea wasn’t hungry anymore. She didn’t feel like eating anything. She was sick from what had happened.     

The next day she trekked back the cove. She found Brian hosing down the bloody wetsuits and sterilizing the goggles. He informed her that Jiro-san might not be coming in today because he was feeling ill. Chelsea understood. She hadn’t been able to eat all day. She was exhausted from crying and her head heart from being dehydrated and jetlag.

“I understand it, though. After all he’s gone through to prove he loves the dolphins. Then all of a sudden, he doesn’t have anymore,” Brian said.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Well, I mean he did chose the dolphins over his family,” he said, picking a piece of seaweed off a pair of goggles.

“What? How?” Chelsea asked, puzzled.

“He comes from a family of fisherman, Jiro-san does. His dad was a fisherman. His granddad was a fisherman. His brother’s a fisherman too. They all love to catch fish. But Jiro-san that man likes to swim with the fish. Especially those dolphins. He used to be a Takemori. Jiro Takemori. But after his family said they didn’t want him to have anything to do with those air-breathing fish he changed his last name to Mori so he’d have no association with the fisherman type,” he told her spraying her wetsuit.

Chelsea suddenly felt sick. More nausea. No this wasn’t nausea, she was actually sick. To prove it, she threw up all over the wetsuit Brian had just cleaned.

“Go home and sleep,” he told her. So she got on the bus and headed back to Rausu. After a four hour nap, she woke up feeling somewhat refreshed. Her headache was fading and she didn’t feel nauseas. After the previous day of leaving Taka speechless for rejecting his new sashimi, she decided to go back to try the fresh new fish that he had been so proud of.

She walked into the shop. It was empty. She heard a man’s voice.

“You must understand, brother,” she heard him say loudly. She made her way towards his voice. She walked through the kitchen which was also empty except for the piles of vegetables and thick blocks of sashimi on the counter.

“Don’t do it.” She heard the man’s voice say, it was quivering. “You know we did not do it to spite you. You must know that. There have been no fish. We have gone out as far as we can go. There are hardly any. They were eating them all.”

The voice was coming from what looked like a refrigerator room. The door was cracked open. She peeked through. It was the old pepper haired man she had seen at the restaurant the day before, wearing the same pants.

“The way you did it was too cruel,” she heard a familiar voice reply that she couldn’t seem to identify. “You know they are sensitive to sound so you bang loud pipes creating a sound of intolerable noise? I told you how sensitive they were when I was doing my paper on them in college. You know that was what made me interested in them. Their ultrasound communication. Tell me you did not do it to spite me and you are a liar.”

“How else would we heard them into the cove?” the voice asked softly. “I am sorry, brother. I am sorry, but we had to. You didn’t tell anyone, did you, brother?”

“No. I did not. Why should we all suffer? I am suffering. You should not have to also,” the familiar voice said sharply. “Do not call me brother. I despise you and father. You do not support me! But you never did and never will.” the familiar voice said choking up.

“We are family? No. What did I do to deserve this? What did they do to deserve this? How could you do this?” the familiar voice screamed. Then there was silence.

“Do not do it,” the man with peppered head quivered. The man with the peppered hair suddenly rushed towards the familiar voice, but then there was a loud bang. The sound ricocheted off the walls and into Chelsea’s head.

On the ground, she saw a dolphin. A dead dolphin. A dolphin with a block cut out of its side. Next to it was a man on his side, with purple prayer beads around his wrist a gun in his hand, a bullet hole in his forehead, blood dripping out of his eyes, ears, and mouth. It was Jiro-san.