Throw Away the Rice, Eat the Fish — The Sour Sushi That Came Before Vinegar

When we hear the word sushi, what comes to mind is that little hand-pressed thing. A slice of fish laid over a mound of white rice sharpened with vinegar. From the moment it is pressed to the moment it reaches the mouth, only a few counted breaths pass. Quick, light, glistening.

But the oldest form of sushi bore no resemblance to it at all. A fish is buried deep inside cooked rice. A weight is laid on top, and it is left to sleep for months in the dark. In time the rice slumps and dissolves, and turns into something sour that stabs at the nose.

And yet — that rice is not eaten. Whatever clings to the fish is wiped away and thrown out without a moment's regret. What you eat is the fish that was sleeping inside.

This was in the days before there was any such thing as vinegar. Because the rice itself turned sour, the fish could cross the seasons without rotting. Sour things keep things long — no one could put that reason into words, and yet the hands, it seems, remembered it perfectly well. Sushi, to begin with, was not a luxury to be pressed and eaten. It was a last-ditch craft of keeping: a way of carrying one summer's fish alive into winter.

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It was the summer of 1010 — Kankō 7. I was putting up at the house of a fisherman who lived by hauling nets on the shore of the lake in Ōmi.

The master of the house was called Yoichi: a sun-blackened man, heavy with silence. He took fish from the lake, and in exchange for a share of salt he would carry loads. It was on the back of some such bargain that I had borrowed his eaves for a while.

That lake is so wide you could mistake it for the sea. On mornings when the mist had lifted, Yoichi would row his little boat out and cast his net. What came up was funa, the crucian carp of the lake, or dace, and now and then a carp. Of all of them, it was the spring funa, plump and heavy with roe, that Yoichi handled with particular care.

On a morning just after the rains had lifted, Yoichi spread a great heap of funa out across a flat basket and began, one after another, to dress them. He split the belly, scraped out the guts, pulled the gills. But he did not fillet them. Leaving them nearly whole — opened only a little along the back — he worked salt into them, and plenty of it. The ones carrying roe, he said, were packed with the roe still left inside the belly.

"You pack them whole?" I asked. Yoichi nodded without stopping his hands.

He laid the salted funa in a tub, scattered more salt over them, and set a heavy stone on top. They would sit like that ten days, twenty. The salt tightens the flesh and squeezes the water out of it first. When at last they were lifted out, the funa had shrunk a size, and gone board-hard and bitterly salt.

It was from here on that I could not follow him.

Yoichi washed the salt away, and then began to stuff the bellies of those funa full of cooked rice. The bellies alone were not enough. He spread rice across the bottom of the tub, bedded the fish down on it, covered them with rice, laid on more fish — rice and fish, stacked in turn. Last of all he set on a stone larger than any before it, and closed the whole thing under bamboo leaves and a straw mat.

"All that rice — isn't it a waste?"

Rice, in the life of those days, was no small treasure. To wrap it around fish so freely — what on earth was it for?

There was no hesitation in Yoichi's hands as he packed. He pressed the rice with his fingers into every corner of a funa's belly, and bedded it down to the very rim of the tub without leaving a gap. Where a space is left, he said, the fish goes bad from there. Between rice and fish, neither air nor any needless water may remain. Watching him tamp it firm with his fingertips was less like watching cooking than watching some painstaking piece of handwork.

At last Yoichi smiled, a little.

"This rice — we don't eat it. It's a bed for the fish."

The rice was a sleeping bed to keep the fish alive, he said, and not itself a thing to be eaten. Half a year — no, in a hot year, past the turn of it — the fish would sleep at the bottom of this dark tub. The lid comes off in the season of snow. By then the rice has melted to a sludge and gives off a sour smell. But it is that very sourness, Yoichi said, that proves the fish has not rotted.

"The sourer the rice goes, the safer the fish. I don't know the reason for it. My father did it this way, and his father before him. That's how it is."

Why sour should mean unspoiled — there was not one soul on that lakeshore who could have answered it. They only knew, in their hands and on their tongues, that doing it so meant fish all winter. That was enough.

The tub was set in the corner of the earthen floor, in the darkest and coolest spot of the house. Now and then Yoichi would test the weight of the stone, pour off the water that had seeped up, and put the lid back. Days passed, months passed, and the tub only sat there in its corner, saying nothing. Before long I had forgotten all about it.

Summer went by, the rice ripened, and the bustle of the harvest ran through the villages and was gone. I shouldered my loads and went back and forth among the villages nearby, returning each time to Yoichi's house. And each time, the tub in the corner of the earthen floor sat there with a face as though nothing at all had happened. But if you came close, you could tell that the sour smell was growing stronger by the day.

"Sure it hasn't gone rotten?" I teased. Yoichi twitched his nose and said, "It's coming along just right." Rotting, and coming along. The smells that drift off the two are so much alike, and yet Yoichi's nose told them apart without a flicker of doubt. It was an invisible measure, held only by a man who has pickled fish a long time.

When the snow began to fly, Yoichi said, "About time now," and lifted the weight-stone off at last.

The moment he peeled back the bamboo leaves, a sour reek filled the whole earthen room. A smell that jabbed at the back of the nose and made you choke. Yoichi laughed out loud at the sight of me covering my nose with my sleeve. That strength of smell, he said, was the surest proof that the half year had gone well. What makes the unaccustomed pinch their noses is, to the nose of the man who pickled it, the irresistible perfume of a feast.

I looked in. The rice, which ought to have been white, had slumped into a soft mash — a yellowed gruel, wrapped close around the fish. Yoichi brushed the collapsed rice aside with his hand and drew out a single funa from within, gently, the way you might dig a tuber out of the earth. Each time he unearthed one, the sour smell rose up. But his face had softened, as though he had opened a jar of treasure.

The funa, once the rice was brushed from it, had taken on a glossy amber. It seemed impossible that this was the same pale raw fish of half a year before. The bones had softened and dissolved; sliced thin, it clung heavily to the tongue. Each time the knife went in, there was a moist sound of fat weeping out.

I put a slice in my mouth and frowned in spite of myself. Sour. Salt. And then a deep savor I had never caught the scent of before, spreading slowly at the back of the tongue. Nowhere in it was the raw stink of raw fish. Half a year of darkness had remade it into something else entirely.

When he split the belly of a roe-heavy funa, orange eggs came crumbling out of it. Take one on a fingertip and taste it, and it was thick and dense, a savor that stuck to the tongue. Yoichi called the roe the finest treat of all, and set it aside, carefully, in the bottom of a bowl.

"Half a year of waiting, and this is all of it?" I laughed. Yoichi shook his head. This — only this — was to be eaten a little at a time, across a whole winter. A fish fresh from the net rots in two days and must be thrown out; pickled this way, it keeps through all the snow. The waiting itself was the art of keeping the fish alive. That, I think, was what he wanted to say.

By the hearth, Yoichi's small daughter had screwed up her face.

"It stinks," she said, pinching her nose — and put a slice in her mouth all the same, and chewed. Face still puckered, she reached for another. Stinks, she kept saying, and her chopsticks never stopped. Yoichi stroked her head and laughed without making a sound.

That evening, Yoichi portioned thin slices of the funa into a wooden bowl and had them carried to the old couple next door. Sharing fish in the season of snow is, it seems, an old custom on that lakeshore. One pickling tub does not merely fill the bellies of one house; it goes round the neighbours, hunched small against the cold, warming them a slice at a time.

In return, dried melon and a handful of beans came back from the old couple's house. In a village where no coin moves, sour fish and shrivelled melon alike — each household's winter store, laid by in its own darkness — are quietly brought out and shared around. The half year of a single tub went from hearth to hearth like that, warming each of them, faintly sour.

Shut in by snow, with no new fish to be had, a whole winter rests on this one tub. Throw away the rice, keep the fish. Enough that not even the rice they threw away was grudged — the fish, changed into something else in the darkness, was a sure provision for this house. No — for that whole lakeshore.

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That sour fish is the ancestor of sushi.

The craft came, they say, from far-off countries to the south, carried along with the life of growing rice. To pickle fish in rice and keep it alive — that hand loosened, little by little, as time went on, and at some point people began to eat the soured rice along with the fish. Then someone more impatient came along: "Then let us make the rice sour from the start," and mixed in vinegar. No waiting half a year now — sushi you could eat the moment it was pressed.

In the glistening white rice of the pressed sushi, somewhere far back in it, there lingers, faintly, the memory of that old rice, which held a fish in the dark for half a year and went sour doing it. The sourness of vinegared rice may be a distant keepsake left behind by all that discarded rice.

On the shores of the lake in Ōmi, I hear, they still pickle fish by that same old hand. Lift the lid, and there it is, filling the room: that choking smell. There are still people there, it seems, who pinch their noses and cannot put down their chopsticks.

When I pick up a piece of pressed sushi, I sometimes remember that amber funa, and the face of a girl laughing as she said it stinks, it stinks. Sushi was, to begin with, a thing made this leisurely — a thing that took half a year.

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Throw away the rice, keep the fish. A drastic thing to do, I thought at first, and was rather appalled by it.

But on a night of snow, whether that one slice is there or not changes everything about how bleak a winter feels. It had looked like waste; and yet, over half a year, the rice had changed its form and soaked itself into the fish after all.

What looks like waste is what carries people the furthest. Darkness like the bottom of a lake — I find, rather to my surprise, that I am fond of it.

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