Jiro grabbed an especially fine striped tuna. His knife flashed. What could be fresher, what could be more delicious, than sashimi cut from a still-wriggling fish? A slow smile of pleasure spread over his face as he chewed. He offered some of the delicate flesh, almost as red as beef, to his boys. They ate with him, though they didn’t seem to enjoy it quite so much as he did. He sighed. They gobbled down hamburgers and french fries whenever they got the chance. That wasn’t the food he’d grown up on, and it tasted strange to him. To them, it was as normal as what they got at home.

Once the last of the catch was on ice, he said, “Back to it.” He and Hiroshi and Kenzo dumped the guts overboard and spilled another tub of nehus into the Pacific. The lines with their freight of hooks followed. The fishermen waited while the aku struck. Then they hauled in the lines and began gutting fish again.

A shark snapped past just as Kenzo pulled the last of the tuna into the Oshima Maru. He laughed. “Waste time, shark!” he said in English. That was another fragment of the language Jiro followed, mostly because both his boys said it all the time. Waste time meant anything futile or useless.

They fished till they ran out of bait. Not all the sharks wasted time; they brought in several tuna heads, the wolves of the sea having bitten off the rest of the fish. That always happened, most often after they’d been working for a while. The minnows drew the tuna, and the tuna-and the blood in the water from their guts-drew the sharks.

But it was a pretty good day. When Hiroshi said, “Let’s go back,” Jiro nodded. They’d done everything they could do. They would get a good price from the men at the Aala Market. These tuna were too good to go to the canning plants. Once the dealers bought them, they’d be sold one by one, mostly to Japanese restaurants and Japanese housewives. Chinese and Filipinos would buy some, and maybe the odd haole would, too, though Jiro grimaced when he thought about what whites did to such lovely fish. He’d heard of tuna salad. He’d never had the nerve to try it.