The Last Tuna
overfishing
The net comes up screaming.
That is what it sounds like when ten thousand kilograms of bycatch hit the deck of the Hai Feng 远洋: a wet, percussive shriek of hydraulics and cable tension and the slap of bodies against steel. Sardines, juvenile mackerel, a few mangled squid, three small sharks still twitching their tails in confused arcs. The crew has been dragging nets through empty water for eleven days, burning through fuel they purchased on credit in Mombasa, and the haul is garbage. Again.
Chen Wei stands at the gunwale and watches the mess slide across the deck. He is twenty-six. He has not been home in fourteen months. His mother’s last message said his father’s hospital bills had doubled and the landlord wanted payment by the eighth. That was the fourth. Chen Wei deleted the message because he could not afford the data storage.
“Separate it,” the bosun calls. “Throw back the sharks. Keep anything over a kilo.”
Nobody will buy any of it. They go through the motions anyway, because the motions are all they have. Gloved hands sorting flesh from flesh. The sharks go back over the side, limp, their swim bladders crushed by the net’s compression.
Then Li Jun shouts from the port side.
He is standing over a section of net that has folded onto itself, and he is pointing at something large and dark and crescent-shaped within the mesh. Chen Wei does not understand at first. He has never seen one alive. He has only seen photographs, from the years before the Western Pacific stock collapsed, before the Atlantic populations followed, before the Indian Ocean holdouts were chased into corridors so narrow that the fishing fleets of nine nations competed for the same two hundred square kilometers of water.
It is a bluefin tuna. It is enormous. Perhaps two hundred and thirty kilos, mature, its skin like hammered pewter, its eye a black and perfect disc that reflects the overcast sky.
The deck goes silent. Then it erupts. Li Jun is laughing, pulling at the net with bare hands. The bosun drops his clipboard. When Captain Zhou arrives from the bridge, he stares at the fish for a full ten seconds. His face cycles through something complicated: awe, then calculation, then something that might be grief, though it vanishes before it settles.
“Get it into the flash freezer,” he says. “Now. Whole. Do not cut it.”
Chen Wei helps carry it. The fish is still alive. Its tail beats once against his forearm, hard enough to bruise, and he feels the machine of its body, the deep thermal engine that once drove it across entire oceans. He wonders, briefly, how far it traveled to reach this net. How many empty miles of water it crossed, searching for others of its kind.
The freezer door shuts. Captain Zhou is already on the satellite phone, calling the broker in Shanghai.
Twelve days later, Chef Tanaka Hiroshi stands in the preparation room of Mizuki, a restaurant in the Ginza district of Tokyo that has no sign, no listed phone number, and no public reservation system. Mizuki seats eight. Tonight, all eight chairs are occupied. The price per seat is four hundred million yen, settled through a private auction conducted by a Macanese intermediary.
The tuna rests on a block of aged hinoki cypress. It has been tempered for precisely forty minutes. Tanaka has been preparing fish for thirty-seven years. He has served prime ministers and technology magnates. His hands do not shake.
He begins with the akami, the lean red meat from the dorsal loin. His yanagiba knife is a single bevel of white steel, and it passes through the flesh without resistance, parting the muscle fibers along their natural grain. Each slice is exactly eight millimeters thick. He lays them on a ceramic plate glazed the color of sea fog and allows himself one small pause to examine the marbling. The fat is exquisite. Deep intramuscular networks of white lacing the red, a pattern that signals years of deep ocean life, of sustained and powerful swimming through cold water. He has not seen marbling like this in over a decade.
He moves next to the chutoro from the belly, where the fat content increases. Here the knife must travel more slowly, because the richness of the flesh threatens to tear rather than separate. He adjusts his angle by two degrees. The slices come away clean, glistening faintly, translucent at their thinnest edges. He places them beside the akami and adds a single thread of fresh wasabi, grated on sharkskin from a root he grows himself in the mountains of Shizuoka.
Finally, the otoro. The fattiest cut. The most prized. He takes it from the lowest section of the belly, where the meat is so rich it barely holds its shape. Each slice melts slightly under the warmth of his fingertips as he places it onto shari rice that he pressed moments ago, each grain carrying the faint sweetness of red vinegar and the ghost of dissolved kombu. He works in silence. The only sounds are the soft contact of steel on wood and his own breathing.
He serves each guest personally, setting the plates before them with both hands and a shallow bow. The guests do not acknowledge him. They are talking among themselves about a semiconductor shortage and a vineyard in Burgundy that one of them recently acquired.
At the far end of the counter, a woman in a charcoal suit lifts a piece of otoro with her chopsticks and pauses. She leans toward the man beside her.
“I read that this is the last one,” she says quietly. “The last bluefin ever caught. The species is finished.”
The man picks up his own piece of otoro. He examines it briefly, tilts his head.
“Well,” he says. “Supply and demand.”
They eat.