Out to the freezing banks of the Sumida River he led us, to see the rows of tuna laid out for the morning auctions. Blanketing in the thick cocoons of frost, solidly frozen tuna the size of tree trunks clinked like brittle chimes as prospective buyers picked out slivers of tail meat for inspection. Crowds of buyers and auctioneers warmed their hands at fires stoked with the broken wooden crates lying about. We watched auctions go by in a split second as Watanabe tried to explain to us the hand signals and staccato chants that indicated bids. He led us through warrens of stalls where he or his chef apprentice would stop for a moment to purchase a kilogram of shrimp, or a large cut of tuna, or several legs of octopus, a tray or two of sea urchin roe, and then thrust the purchase into a rectangular wooden basked slung over the junior apprentice’s shoulder. If money changed hands, I didn’t see it. In the fast conversations back and forth I couldn’t catch any discussions of prices. Watanabe and his crew knew exactly where they were going, and what they wanted to buy when they got there. Though they paused along the way to examine products at many stalls scattered around the marketplace, to my inexperienced eyes the ikura (salmon roe) they didn’t purchase where they bought the kamaboko (fish pâté) looked identical to the salmon roe they did buy at the stall where they ignored the pâté.
Excerpted from Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World by Theodore C. Bestor. Published by University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004.