Sushi Dragon
It all started on the mean streets of Brighton-Le-Sands. Don’t ask me how, it just started. A random encounter with a Mr Kawasaki. Yeah, just like the motorbikes.
He’d seated himself opposite me at Sushi Dragon. The tables were all full. I could hardly keep my own entirely when four or five could sit comfortably.
Mr Kawasaki introduced himself, formal and informal at once, a curious manner. He liked the boats here he reckoned. I thought he meant sea craft down on the water; no, he was talking about the long plates of sushi.
I ordered pork gyoza and grabbed a bunch of things on offer on the train circling the restaurant. Crab, rice, cheese, cucumber, I had no idea what they were as they went round and round.
They looked good, tasted good - maybe not the best I’d ever had, but the prices were cheap and when the pork gyoza arrived steaming fresh I was very happy.
“Try the scallop volcano,” Mr Kawasaki suggested. “Or the aburi salmon.”
These required placing my phone against the QR code at our table, a special order well worth it. As the code on the wall was on his side of the table he offered to assist by taking my phone. I had that agitated feeling of being parted from some essential part of myself till he returned it.
Mr Kawasaki looked, appropriately enough, like a maturing samurai with a lash of grey through one side of his oil black hair, poised and running like a hint of lightning from his temple.
He was kitted out in leather, coal coloured Kadoya gear, expensive.
“Given your name and the gear you must dig motorcycles,” I said, pointing to his jacket.
My bodyguard, At Om, stood outside texting on his phone, his hoodie pulled up over his head like a hip hop priest. I figured I was alone in this ‘situation’ and it was evolving.
Inside the well-lit Sushi Dragon my new friend Mr Kawasaki had chosen to sit directly opposite me at our very nice booth table. Single parents with kids and a few groups of teenagers filled the place without it seeming overcrowded.
Each piece of conversation between us took a good minute to garner a reply back - which is why I can practically write a novel in between every bit of conversation I am retelling now.
It should have unnerved me but I got quite used to what became ‘our’ slowness. Paradoxically, if we seemed to be engaged in some kind of Zen challenge that may as well left us trading haikus, the service at Sushi Dragon remained fast and crisp. If we were an art film you’d see us in slow motion, everything and everyone around us a kinetic blur.
Manning the front desk at Sushi Dragon was a cryptic, smiling figure so thin they seemed in danger of being blown away every time the door opened and the wind came in.
The vulnerability was deceptive. When they finally took the bill they counted up out plates and noted every detail, smiled and laughed and still seemed liked the most dangerous person in the whole place.
In case you forgot, Mr Kawasaki was replying to my motorcycle enquiry and how fond he must be of both the machines and the culture.
He dipped a last piece of pork gyoza into a mix of vinegar and soy sauce and said to me, “Not really. I caught public transport here.”
Mr Kawasaki and I discussed other matters amid our encounter. The writers’ festival I was organising and the possibility of a panel on Japanese death poems. The new novel The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgård. Kawasaki said he liked “the Nordic vibe” from murder programs to existential literature and art. I agreed with him.
We sat with our chopsticks stilled for a moment as if they were bamboo daggers. No murders tonight. Respect.
We talked about music (the depressive charms of the new David Sylvian compilation; the young hero of alt-Americana rock, MJ Lenderman; how guilty P Diddy might be). He said he was rather keen on fusion-era Miles Davis. “You must explore. I love Dark Magus but it is best listened to very loud. Not background music. You know what I am saying?”
Mr Kawasaki placed a hand on the table as he spoke. I noted a ring with a blue stone and a portion of his little finger missing.
Our meal over, the whole experience appeared to me again as a Zen challenge: a moment without obvious purpose, a random encounter in a budget sushi bar in Brighton-Le-Sands. I doom-scrolled in my mind through what little we had said for a meaning to it anyway.
My bodyguard At Om signalled the all-clear from outside the glass doors of Sushi Dragon.
Mr Kawasaki thanked me for the meal, although I had only paid my half and done nothing to deserve the gratitude.
He moved off in one direction; myself and my phone-distracted bodyguard walking the other way.
A block up the street, At Om and I stood at an intersection waiting for the lights to change. An old and expensive white Rolls Royce pulled up and idled beside us.
I looked in the window out of curiosity and was surprised to see Mr Kawasaki - the biker samurai and supposed public transport user - behind the wheel.
He did not look to his side to acknowledge I had seen him. The lights changed and he drove off serenely. My bodyguard At Om and I crossed the road, leaving the lights of Sushi Dragon glowing far behind us, calling us to return on some other evening to Brighton-Le-Sands.
~
Copyright / MM, Sydney’s Best Plate Mate
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For another publication? That sounds like fun. And now I am hungry and I want a vintage Triumph motorcycle.