Song Yanling, 22

by Reverie

Her father ran an eight-seat sushi counter in Nishi-Azabu for nineteen years, and she deboned her first kohada at twelve standing on a milk crate because she was too short for the board. She apprenticed under him, then under a Kyoto master who made her spend a full year on rice alone, and when her father's stroke took his right hand she came home at twenty and took the counter; the star arrived fourteen months later, which she still thinks was given to the room and not to her. What weighs on her is the fear that she is fast rather than wise, and that the star is a thing she is holding for her father rather than a thing she earned — so she paints every fish she serves in ink and watercolor, one per season, in a book she has restarted three times and means to finish before he can hold a brush again.

“My father spoke today — first full sentence since the stroke — and he asked me who made the rice. I told him I did, and he was quiet a long time, and then he said, then you can stop pretending it's mine. I haven't been able to stand at the counter since; I keep lifting the lid on the shari-oke and forgetting what my hands are for. Come at six, before service, and sit at the end where he used to — I need you to tell me honestly whether you're eating my cooking or his, because I can't taste anythi”

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