Image via A Life Worth Eating
There’s a man in Japan who wakes early every morning to make sushi. He’s 86. He owns a modest restaurant that sits adjacent to a subway stop in Tokyo. You might miss it if you were running late for work. The cubbyhole eatery is where the man—an octogenarian—performs a daily ritual he has practiced for seven decades. It’s more art than cooking. And it’s as much toil as it is art. It’s a prayer of sorts. An artful, toiling prayer with a simple, glorious goal: perfection.
The man’s name is Jiro Ono. He’s the subject of Jiro Dreams of Sushi.
The documentary breezed through theatres this spring. More recently, it popped up on Netflix as available to stream. I watched it at DC’s West End Cinema in May and again in my living room last week. It’s a solid character study that features remarkable cinematography, clever editing and brilliant music choices. Although it’s close, the documentary is not quite perfect.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi introduces us to a master who refuses to age. Based on years lived, Jiro is mature to the point of declining. His work, on the other hand, continues to ascend. He runs a shop with his eldest son and a small team of apprentice chefs. Jiro’s other son runs a separate sushi restaurant in a more accessible nook of Tokyo. He’s lucky. According to Japanese tradition, the eldest child is obligated to succeed the father’s position. Jiro’s older son, Yoshikazu, will fill his father’s large shoes when Jiro’s body ultimately fails him. The youngest Ono, Takashi, is free to run his own shop. He’s free to deviate from the methods his father taught.
On second thought, perhaps Takashi is unlucky. Jiro’s shop is one of the few hallowed restaurants in the world to earn three stars from the Michelin Red Guide, a travel publication produced by the tire company. Three stars are the most Michelin awards. Takashi’s restaurant has only earned two. The freedom to deviate from his father’s methods equals the burden of pursuing perfection via a path that’s not fully paved.
After introducing us to the three Ono men and the two sushi shops they run, the filmmakers sprinkle in bits of Jiro’s backstory. His alcoholic father abandoned the family when Jiro was about 7. Consequently, Jiro has functioned as an adult ever since. The late Mrs. Ono gets a mention—the very briefest—to hurriedly illustrate Jiro’s tenure as an absentee father of two rambunctious boys. (Jiro was a workaholic, believe it or not.)
We get a brief history lesson of the sushi industry before the film dives into the full process of how sushi is created at Jiro’s shop. This part flows chronologically: Yoshikazu procures the raw materials, Jiro’s staff massages and prepares the fish parts, and Jiro finally serves a full meal to patrons who’ve booked reservations at his restaurant months—even a year—in advance.
The filmmakers reveal a number of Jiro’s secrets but they don’t give us his entire playbook. Even if they did, we’d need years—decades—to apply his secrets before we could produce his results. Throughout the film, we hear gushing testimony from one of Japan’s finest food critics. A former Jiro apprentice hints at the madness that may underlie Jiro’s pursuit. A current apprentice reports on the old master’s hard-driving, unforgiving work ethic. Jiro, himself, even reflects on his life’s work. Or, to be more accurate, the work he has lived.
Image via cinemaartscentre.org
As soon as Jiro popped up on the theatre screen when I first saw the film this spring, I saw my grandfather. Jiro was lean, quietly powerful, stern and subtly charming. My grandfather was all of those things. He came from Irish stock. He laid brick. But there was so much of him in Jiro. Or, maybe, I wanted there to be so much of my grandfather in him.
My grandfather died last June. He succumbed to a stubborn conglomeration of cancer. It happens. I really miss the dude. That happens, too.
Before there was the cancer, there was my grandfather, a modest American master. He laid brick for more than 50 years. He built homes, schools, hospitals and factories. He worked in Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, Oklahoma and the US Virgin Islands. He dreamt up the fireplace and the garage that imbued elegant functionality into my childhood home. He lovingly lathered mortar onto bricks, blocks, stones and whatever other materials he was supplied. And he adored the crews he worked with wherever he was fortunate to be employed.
I know these things because the people who worked with my grandfather have told me these things. To a man, they have praised his unquestioned brilliance as a mason. To a man, they have doubled over with laughter recounting the days they worked with him. He was an artist. He was one of the guys.
I labored for my grandfather a few times when I was an overgrown boy. I mixed mortar, carried brick and helped build scaffold. All the things any laborer would be tasked with doing. He knew, perhaps immediately, that I lacked the aptitude for his vocation. He never chastised me. Instead, he took joy in my pursuits of the things at which I was pretty good. I lack his gifts. Not simply for masonry, but for anything. My very best at the thing I am best at would pale next to my grandfather’s most ordinary accomplishment. My grandfather, the master, never held this against me. Nor did he hold it over me.
After watching Jiro Dreams of Sushi, I scoured the Internet for more information about Jiro Ono and his vaunted sushi shop. I discovered some things that weren’t flattering. Patrons of his restaurant called him mean, rude, even racist. Some dared to call his technique poor.
I couldn’t imagine anyone saying those things about my grandfather. He had his flaws. Every man does. I could envision a younger version of my grandfather—before he was grand—behaving a little bit badly. But I only ever witnessed him showing predictable impatience and mild frustration. He had a look that revealed as much. If you were his five-year-old grandson with your hand in his cookie jar, when he shot you that look it meant you better put the cookie down or you were gonna get spanked. My grandfather’s capacity for meanness was unremarkable.
His work, on the other hand, was always remarkable. It was in such demand that he had to politely decline jobs due to the lingering problem of having only 24 hours in a day. I just couldn’t conceive of anyone calling it overrated. So my grandfather wasn’t perfect. His work was, though. And through him, I’ve always felt like I’ve known something about perfection. Maybe what has been true is that I’ve known about a certain kind of perfection.
Image via staff.washington.edu
Toward the end of Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the filmmakers follow Jiro Ono as he rides a train back to Hamamatsu, his birthplace, to visit some schoolmates he’s not seen in decades. It’s an all-too-rare glimpse of the human being who dwells under the overwhelming cloak of the master.
When Jiro rejoins the group, the old souls all seem happy to see him. Were they close friends? No. Actually, a number of them viewed Jiro as a bully way back in the early years of Hirohito’s reign over the Land of the Rising Sun. Today, they laugh at the way they were, and they seem oddly inspired by the celebrity their former classmate has achieved. Time may or may not heal all wounds. But if enough time passes, the wounded will commiserate with those who wounded them as there is simply no one left to drink coffee with.
This sequence is telling. Perhaps more telling than anything else we see in the film. We know Jiro is a master. But we knew that back in ’08 when Michelin crowned him as such. (And probably well before that.) Maybe not all of us knew it. And maybe we needed the film to elaborate on the Michelin distinction, but we don’t need to watch it to certify his excellence. We do need to watch it for something more than its gorgeous foodie porn: a subtle lesson on the potential costs of perfection.
When Jiro visits with his old schoolmates, we learn he was a bully. Jiro does not argue this point. In a way, he seems pleased by it. As if he took pride in his elevated principles even back then. When Jiro’s former pupils and current apprentices discuss the physical and emotional toll of learning from the master, there is a sense they were also bullied. None of them say this. Rather, they humbly share their insights on the master’s exceptionally difficult way.
To be clear, we’re not talking about bullying in the Oprah sense. You know, your kid picks on my kid ’cause my kid wears funny glasses. That shit is completely different than what Jiro Ono may be guilty of in his sushi shop. His bullying is more like what Steve Jobs did.
Perfection is not free. It costs. Most often it costs the person who pursues it. Sometimes, it costs the people who happen to be related to them or the people who work with them. You could think of that cost as a type of collateral damage. Steve Jobs had to get angry at the early iterations of the iPhone before he could see what it ultimately should be. Sure, he could have chosen to treat the people who worked at Apple with civility. But that’s not how he worked. For him, it made more sense to breathe his anger into his team to drive them to pursue his more perfect vision. It was his way.
It is Jiro’s way, too. He is a master. He measures his work in a single degree of perfection so tolerance and forgiveness don’t exist in his world. Takashi, Jiro’s youngest son, suggests this in an explanation of what separates his shop from his father’s.
“Some of his customers say they get nervous eating in front of my father at his place. They say we serve the same sushi in a more relaxed atmosphere. That’s why they like coming here.”
Jiro’s sons, of course, would never directly criticize the ways of their father, the master. That wouldn’t be a very Japanese thing to do. In the film, each shows sincere respect for their father, the master. Yoshikazu and Takashi, by virtue of toiling artfully at their father’s prayer, appreciate perfection. But do they pursue it with Jiro’s unforgiving, stone-faced doggedness? Is their master’s way the only way?
Thinking again of my grandfather, it is clear that perfection lies at the end of assorted paths. When I finally grew big enough to handle the tools used to mix mortar, I produced really soupy stuff. My grandfather watched me the first few times, and he showed me how to separate the ingredients into smaller batches so my meager muscles could churn them effectively. He never raised his voice. He never reminded me of how I was cutting into his workday. He might tease me a little bit. But he always displayed a patient kind of flexibility. My grandfather knew he could quietly generate perfection out of someone else’s imperfection–regardless of how gross the imperfection. That was his way.
