It is 6:48 in the morning at New Sun Market on Geary Boulevard near 25th Avenue. Mr. Tanaka has been at his cutting board since 5:30. The crushed ice in the case beside him glitters under the fluorescent tube. The first delivery, four crates of black cod from Half Moon Bay, came in at 5:45.
He is 64 years old. He came to San Francisco from Sapporo, Japan, in 1988 with a wife who would later return to Japan and a son who is now an architect in Seattle. He answered an ad in the Hokubei Mainichi for a fish counter on Geary. The man who hired him, Mr. Wong, retired in 2003. Mr. Tanaka has stayed.
He keeps a small notebook in his apron pocket. He has filled six and is partway into a seventh. In each book he writes, in pencil, the count for the day: black cod, salmon, halibut, mackerel, sea bream, hamachi. At the end of every year he totals the columns. By his own count, which is approximate but in the right shape, he has cleaned about 1.4 million fish in 38 years.
“My father was a fisherman,” he says, in slow English, then in Japanese to the woman behind me whose Japanese is better than mine. “He told me, the fish gives you everything. You owe it the cut.”
A clean fish, he explains, is not the same as a fast fish. He runs the knife along the spine in one motion. He scrapes the cavity with the back of the blade. He rinses, pats dry, lays the body flat on butcher paper, folds the paper twice, ties it with white string. The whole process for a single sea bream is about 90 seconds. He has done it, he estimates, six hundred thousand times.
In 1996 his wife, Aiko, was diagnosed with severe depression. She had been a translator at a Japantown law firm. She stopped working. She stayed in their apartment on Anza Street for most of two years. In 1998 she returned to Sapporo to be near her sister. She did not come back. They are still legally married. They speak twice a year. Mr. Tanaka still wears the ring.
“I learned to be alone in 1998,” he says. “I learned to come to work. The fish was a kindness. The work did not ask me anything I could not give it.”
The regulars know the rhythm. Mrs. Yamamoto, 88, who lives in the Inner Richmond, comes Tuesday and Friday for the smallest piece of black cod. Mr. Park, who runs a tofu shop on the same block, comes Wednesday for whatever Mr. Tanaka recommends. A woman named Tess, who is 41 and a chef at a hotel in Hayes Valley, comes early on Saturdays for the hamachi collar she serves at her brunch service.
Tess started coming in 2014. She had just moved from Brooklyn. She came in confused about what to ask for. Mr. Tanaka cut a small piece of hamachi belly, wrapped it, and refused to charge her. He said, in his careful English, “you come back next week, you tell me what you cooked. Then I charge you.”
She came back. She has come back almost every Saturday for twelve years. Her son, who is now four, calls Mr. Tanaka “Tana-jiichan.” Mr. Tanaka keeps a small ceramic frog from a Chinatown stall on the counter at child eye level. He moves it sometimes so the boy will look for it.
In 2019 Mr. Tanaka had his right knee replaced. He was out for ten weeks. The store hired a younger fishmonger from Daly City to fill in. When Mr. Tanaka came back, three regulars had stopped coming. They told him later, when they returned, that the cuts had not been the same.
“It is not different fish,” Mrs. Yamamoto told me, in Japanese, while Mr. Tanaka was wrapping her cod. “It is the same fish. The hand is different.”
Mr. Tanaka does not plan to retire. His son, when he visits twice a year, asks him to. His doctor, who he sees in the Inner Sunset, asks him to. He listens politely. He does not answer.
At 6:58 he finishes his first wrap of the morning. The fish is sea bream, the customer is Mrs. Yamamoto, the price has not changed since 2018. He hands her the package across the case with both hands. She takes it with both hands. She bows. He bows back, half an inch shallower. He has been bowing exactly that much in this exchange for thirty years. He does not think about it. The bow is in his shoulders now.
