August 30, 2000
pearl eyes

Japanese people serve fish much the same way all oriental people do, which is to say that they don't chop off the heads of the fish when they serve it. It's part of the presentation to serve the fish whole, (gutted and scaled and such, naturally), but with the tail and the head still attached. Not too many Americans, I've noticed, inflict this sort of presentation on their guests or family. I started school and learned a few things early on. Not useful things, but just enough things to pass muster among a crowd of American-bred children. For instance. I learned that when one stares at one's plate, one's plate should not be staring back.

Naturally I infected my little sister with these prejudices, and so whenever my mother served fish we'd get rather squeamish about the eyes. My parents never understood this; there was no real reason for them to, being relics of a different culture altogether. My father, who viewed the Three Stooges in much the same way devout pilgrims regard the Shroud of Turin, found this endlessly entertaining. My mother, who only occasionally had a sense of humor in those days, would get rather irritated when she'd glance up at us and catch us playing peek-a-boo with the fishes on our plates. We used to eat fish a lot, being Japanese, and oftentimes they would always be served whole. Smelt, for instance; Mom would batter and fry them up, and we'd come to the dinner table to find three or four little smelts sitting in a row on our plates. My sister and I would painstakingly eat the bodies, leave the tails, then line up the little smelt heads on the sides of our plates so that they'd stare away from us. Having thus removed the source of guilt from direct attention, we would continue on with our meals, perfectly content to have our mother be on the receiving end of several pairs of accusing fish glares. At some point during the course of the meal, Mom would look up and notice the array of fish heads gaping in her direction, and would scold us soundly for playing with our food.

My father had a habit of sucking on the fish eyeballs, something that I never really registered until rather early on in my sister's life. It's possible that he started the habit in order to tease us; it would certainly be in character with his sophisticated sense of fun. It never occurred to me to ask him. I have no idea if they tasted good or not; I've never had the guts to do so myself. Of course, I was grossed out, and made appropriate noises to convey the fact. My sister followed my lead and learned to be grossed out as well. Dad, naturally, thought it was hilarious. "They're pearls," he'd tell us. "You have to suck on them to clean them." He'd roar with laughter. Who knows if this is a Japanese thing. I've never eaten fish with Japanese men of my Dad's generation since. That's not the point of the story, however.

My gullible little sister, who believed implicitly anything that anybody told her, decided that she would like very much if she could make her Mommy a pearl necklace. We used to cut up the JC Penney catalogs that would get delivered to our house, snipping neatly around the jewelry and hoarding them away in pretty Japanese boxes that Mom would find for us. It was only natural that somewhere along that line she would learn that pearls are good things, and pearl necklaces are even better. Thus began the great fish eyeball collection. For several years she collected fish eyeballs whenever we had fish for dinner. My father would suck on one, discard it on his plate, and then my sister would sneak it away from the kitchen to hide it away in her room, secretly, so that Mom wouldn't know. She wanted it to be a surprise. Imagine how delighted Mom would be, if she were presented by a strand of bright, shiny, white pearls on a string that my sister had made all by her own, four-year-old self. At one point she had quite an impressive collection of fish eyeballs stored up in a little glass jar.

Naturally, it couldn't last forever. One day she found out that her carefully hoarded cache really consisted of nothing more precious than fish eyeballs. She was devastated.

When she was nineteen, I came back from college one winter and helped her clean up her old room in Mom's house. It was the year after Dad died.

I found a glass jar full of liquid, with little white marbles floating around inside.

I held it up for inspection. "What's this?"

"Oh. That." My sister flushed. "It's those eyes."

"You still have them?"

"I never got around to throwing them away," she explained, and tossed some crayons into a box. "I suppose I should, huh."

Sick and funny though the story is, I still occasionally get a little teary when I think back to those days. Another little story from the twisted archives of the Hirata family.