“Ready to dieee?”
“W-wait! Wait, all right? I’m sorry!”
“What’re you two doing…?”
Emi, still holding on to Chiho, had finally turned around to see this comedy sketch being played out behind her.
“We were going to eat lunch first anyway. Why don’t we take Chiho somewhere quiet so we can chat?”
“…Chat about whaaat?” a quizzical Emeralda asked, noting the way Chiho was still openly weeping. Albert, meanwhile, was still weeping on the ground for his own reasons as he rubbed his shin.
“I mean, everything,” Emi gravely replied. “About us, the Devil King, and Ente Isla.”
“You’re just, um, joking with me, right, Ms. Yusa? About being from another world and stuff?”
Emi raised an eyebrow. “What’s with that all of a sudden?”
“I mean…”
Chiho kept following behind Emi, a mixture of expectation and anxiety in her mind. They would talk about that other world, about Emi, about Albert and Emeralda, about the two people who had kidnapped her, about Ashiya—and about Maou. All would be revealed, she knew, and so it was with a notably nervous expression that she was guided by Emi straight into…
“Why are we in a conveyor-belt sushi joint?”
The question came after they were all seated in a booth, Chiho still wiping her eyes as the aroma of vinegared rice and seafood penetrated her nostrils.
“You don’t like sushi?”
“No, I do, but…”
It wasn’t a matter of food preference, no.
“Okay, two clam miso soups for number five!”
“Check for seventeen, please!”
“Thank you very muuuch! Uhh, that’s nineteen color plates, three gold plates…”
The restaurant was apparently doing well. Most of the seats were occupied, with parties circulating in and out of the tables on a regular basis. And with all the loud chatter among the staff, it wasn’t the kind of “quiet” place Chiho had been picturing for their conversation. The simple fact that a “Hero” from another world chose a sushi restaurant for their confidential chat left Chiho struggling to figure out how to respond.
“Oh, don’t worry. It’s my treat today.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about! And I can totally cover for myself, thanks!”
“Huuuh?” For some reason, this took Emeralda by total surprise. “R-reeeally?”
“Really what?”
This threw Chiho. The woman wasn’t poking fun at her; she honestly seemed shocked by her offer to pay her own way.
“This ‘sushi’ is raw fish, riiight?”
“Y-yes…” Chiho blinked. Thinking of sushi as merely “raw fish” was new to her.
“Well, that’s verrry fancy cuisine, isn’t it? I can understand if you’re still waaary of us, but I think you should let Emiiilia pay for you.”
“Um, it’s a hundred yen per plate…?”
Chiho instinctively turned her eyes toward the menus on the table. The Gyo-Gyo-En chain was a midsize presence in the industry, with nearly everything on the menu priced at a hundred yen per dish (plus tax). This didn’t apply to things like seasonal items, fancier fish, miso soup, à la carte requests, and so on, but even if Chiho tried to really pig out, she may or may not be looking at a thousand-yen tab at the end, at most.
“Calm down, Eme. All four of us can have our fill here and maybe we’d have to pay the equivalent of one Airenia silver coin.”
“Whoa! For real?!”
Albert looked ready to jump for joy.
“Whaaa?! That’s craaazy! I’ve been able to enjoy raw fish maaaybe a couple of times in alllll my travels, and I live in a palace, I’ll remind you!”
“All right, how about we all just sit down for now, okay? You too, Chiho. Here’s some tea.”
With a learnéd hand, Emi poured packets of powdered green tea into a series of three cups, filled them from a nearby hot-water dispenser, and passed them around.
“Fresh water and tea, at no charge,” marveled Albert as he carefully brought the cup to his mouth. “Wonders never cease!”
Seeing this display only served to further confuse Chiho. She still had no idea why they had gone to a conveyor-belt sushi place to discuss fantastic tales of faraway worlds, and now she felt like she’d been immersed headfirst into a TV documentary about foreign visitors being wowed by Japanese culture.
“So, right, why I brought us here,” Emi finally began once she had passed out tea, moist towelettes, chopsticks, and soy-sauce dishes to the whole crowd. “This is actually a pretty good place to talk in privacy. You have these big booths, pretty spread out from one another. It’s loud inside, and the other customers are too busy scoping out what to try next to care about other people’s conversations. At the same time, though, we’ve got a good view of the entire place, so if someone’s trying to listen in on us, they’ll be easy to spot.”
“…Oh. That kind of thing?”
Chiho gave the restaurant a look around. She hadn’t noticed it until now, but unless they were seated on barstools, there was simply no way to decipher all the chattering around them, no matter how much they strained their ears. Everyone’s attention was focused either on the sushi trundling by or on their nearby ordering touchscreens. Nobody cared about much of anything a foot or two past their own seat. They were near a business district as well, which meant that a small handful of non-Japanese people were also among the customers, making Albert and Emeralda not stand out quite so much.
“Right. So how about we put something in our stomachs first? We can get serious about talking once the blood starts flowing into our heads more.”
Chiho hadn’t fully accepted this yet, but she was at least willing to play along. Emi, realizing this, clapped her hands and promptly took a plate off the belt. This was sayori, the Japanese halfbeak, a pretty hard-core sushi choice for one’s first selection.
“So you take whatever you want to eat off of this conveyor belt, and then you stack up your empty plates to the side. Then they bill you based on the number and types of plates you took.”
That, of course, was meant for Emeralda and Albert. The two Ente Islan women were both next to the conveyor belt as it passed by the booth, with Albert and Chiho facing each other on the aisle side.
Emeralda watched the sushi whiz by, a look of bemused astonishment on her face. “I’m not sure I’m too famillliar with this smell yet,” she said, “buuut is this really fiiish?”
“Yep. They cut raw fish into those shapes and put it on top of rice prepared with vinegar and shaped into those little ovals like that.”
“What’s that thing that looks like a li’l cut-up black log?” Albert asked as a kappamaki cucumber sushi roll came down the pike.
“That’s called norimaki sushi. The black part is called nori, and…um, it’s kind of a processed seaweed, I guess you could say? It’s all edible, though.”
“Ooh, ooh, ooh! There’s that thing of noriii, and, and, it’s got fish eggs on top of iiit?!”
“Yeah, they call that gunkan maki, or ‘battleship roll.’ And you’re right—that’s ikura on top—salmon eggs. It’s really good.”
“‘Battleship’?”
“Yeah. It kind of looks like a boat from the side, doesn’t it? That’s why they call it that.”
“Oooh! That’s so cuuute! And if you think of it thaaat way, that green melon-like thing looks like a ship’s saaail!”
The sight of the slice of cucumber carefully balanced on top of the ikura made Emeralda’s eyes sparkle. How were they ever going to have a serious conversation in here? Chiho flashed an unamused look at the other three people in the booth, carrying on about their meal and all but leaving her in the dust. Do Albert and Emeralda even know how to use chopsticks? And raw fish is one thing, but are they okay with wasabi? Any Japanese people watching a foreigner eat sushi for the first time would think the same things.
“Well,” Albert said as he pointed at the conveyor, �
��let’s give it a go. Emilia, can you choose some fer me? ’Cause none of this looks at all like fish to me. Like, if you told me that red guy over there was meat, I’d believe ya.”
“Oh, the chutoro? That’s medium-fatty tuna. Wanna try it?” Emilia answered as he pointed directly at a piece.
Most offerings at this place came as two pieces per plate, but the more expensive selections, such as chutoro and snow crab, gave you just one piece for the same hundred-yen price. And watching that pass by, the sweet-looking white bands of fat passing over the red flesh in beautiful fashion, it really could pass for the meat of some land animal.
Emi casually took it off the belt and placed it in front of Albert, Emeralda steadily watching every motion along the way.
“Mmmmh…”
The sight of this monolith of a man carefully eyeing the little piece of tuna presented before him was pretty humorous.
“Just looks like a hunk of raw meat, if y’ask me… You’re sure I should just eat this as is?”
“It’s fine! And here, you take this soy sauce—it’s a Japanese specialty—and dip it in there before you eat it. It’s okay to just use your hands, too.”
“Okay…”
Guess he can’t use chopsticks after all, Chiho thought, not that it particularly mattered. Albert, meanwhile, gave the tuna a deadly serious look as he grabbed it with two fingers, his reluctance abundantly clear as he gave it just a light dab in the soy sauce. Chiho heard somewhere once that it was more proper to put the sauce on the fish, not the rice, but bringing that up would just confuse him even further.
Slowly, Albert brought the chutoro up to his lips, then—abandoning all reserve—tossed the whole thing into his mouth. Deliberately, he began to chew, eyebrows arching upward at the unfamiliar texture. The reaction from that point forward was dramatic. His eyes shot open, as if he’d just been exposed to some vital truth. Chiho spotted Emeralda visibly quiver as she leaned up and out of her seat. They were treating this single piece of sushi with far too much trepidation.
Albert sped up his chewing, his eyes staring into space. Then he winced, putting a hand over his nose.
“Ooh!!”
Chiho and Emi immediately knew what happened. Emeralda was somewhat less familiar with the inner workings of sushi. “Is…is there something wronnng?” she worriedly asked. But the wincing was gone in another moment. He started chewing again, his face serene, and then swallowed.
“……Hahhh.”
Albert brought a hand back to his tensed-up face, eyes still wide open. A couple nervous beads of sweat were even visible on his forehead.
“Are… Are you all riiight?”
Instead of answering, Albert looked straight at Chiho in front of him.
“…Little lady?” he intoned.
“Y-yes?”
“Is… Is this really fish?”
“Huh?”
The experience had made Albert shudder.
“It’s raw, but it doesn’t taste raw at all… It’s…sweet, even.”
“Sweet?!”
“Y-yeah, but not sweet like sugar, y’know? I dunno how to put this. The sweetness of meat, maybe? And it mixes together with that sauce and the grain to create this kinda…texture. Yeah. Texture. I think she said it’s called umami.”
It wasn’t exactly the kind of terminology sushi restaurants would use (and turned sort of rambling at the end), but Chiho could tell that Albert really enjoyed the chutoro.
“Wh-what does all of that meeean?”
“Well, no, um, eat it, Eme—you eat it, too, or else you’ll never get it. I mean, I can’t believe it—this is fish? This can’t be the same thing as all that smoky, salty stuff I’m used to eatin’…”
He lowered his head to the table, hands covering his face.
“Um, Albert?” Chiho asked, concerned about this reaction.
“This reminds me a lot of when I first tried sushi,” Emi commented, deeply moved.
“Oooh… But didn’t you say ‘oooh’ in the middle of it, tooo? There’s got to be something foooul to it…”
Being told “eat it” wasn’t quite enough to quell Emeralda’s fears, on the other hand. The “oooh” bit was Albert pinching his nose, no doubt reacting to the sensation of fresh wasabi in his sinuses. It was something any Japanese person would be aware of, something Chiho was about to point out before she stopped herself.
What…was wasabi, anyway? How would she convey everything that wasabi meant—this knobby green plant, its roots grated to produce a lime-green paste that brought heat, sweetness, and a unique clearing sensation to the nose—to someone who had no concept of what it was? Chiho’s concern was that the more detail she dared to get into, the more it’d sound like she was rattling off the traits of some kind of poison.
Emi was stewing about it for a bit as well, playing with a used wasabi packet in her hand. Then, perhaps coming to the same conclusion as Chiho, she returned it to the pile of empties without further comment. And in the time Albert had spent on his little speech, the conveyor belt had done a complete cycle and that sushi with the ikura was on its way back.
“Well, how about that ikura? It’s coming right up, and the stuff that made Al go ‘oooh’ isn’t in it, so I think it’ll be easier for you to eat. You’ve eaten fish eggs before, haven’t you?”
“Y-yesss…but they were boiled down with fish sauce and saaalt…”
“Well, if you can’t finish it, I’ll take the rest.”
“Ooooh…”
Emeralda looked about ready to die as she stared at the gunkan maki flowing on by.
“Just try it. Remember what Al said?”
“A-all riiight… Hyah!”
It took far too monumental an effort to pick up the dish. Even when placed in front of her, she was so hesitant about it that she put a virtual choke hold on the sushi when picking it up. The nori just barely managed to keep it together as she stuffed the whole piece into her dainty mouth.
One bite was all it took for her eyes to shoot open.
And thus, the promised “serious conversation” between the Earthling and her three space-alien acquaintances didn’t begin for another two hours.
“…Sixty-five,” Chiho whispered after counting up the empty dishes on the table, the combined effort of all four of them.
“I wanna live in this country, Eme.”
“Yesss, I don’t wanna go home eitherrr…”
With Albert’s sizable frame, his knack for packing it away was understandable. However, even the diminutive Emeralda had whizzed through the plates at such a pace that nobody was sure where it all went inside her body.
Out of the stack of sixty-five, Chiho was responsible for only six, holding back a bit since it was on Emi’s tab. Emi made it to ten, a respectable figure for a young woman, but considering Emeralda and Albert had basically split the rest evenly, Emi’s performance was essentially a blip.
“Not to ask after we’re done ’n’ everything,” Albert asked Emi as he sipped his tea, “but yer sure we eat this much of all these amazin’ delicacies and it’d still amount t’just one Airenian silver?”
“Mmm, maybe two by now.”
Emi chuckled, clearly not expecting to see this, as Emeralda slumped against her seat in a state of pure bliss.
“That hundred-yen thing most be worth a lottt… I’ve never eaten a slice of caaake that was so velvety, so taaasty, without being too sweet. The cake at the palace is just nothing but sugarrr…”
Besides the sushi, Emeralda had copiously availed herself of the à la carte menu, from French fries and other snacks to miso soup to chawanmushi savory egg custard, all the way into the dessert menu. The chocolate cake was a particularly big hit with her; Emi wasn’t fully paying attention, but she seemed to remember three slices in a row on her placemat.
“And you can enjoy a slice for five Vesian coppers apiiiiece? I find that faaar too difficult to believe. If you searched for a cake like this in Saint Aire, where would you even gooo; how much
would they even aaask for it…?”
Emeralda was heaping it with praise, but to Chiho a hundred-yen cake was, well, a hundred-yen cake. She recalled a pastry shop near her house that was both better than this and still reasonably priced. It made her wonder what Emeralda would do if she ever took her there.
“Did you have enough, Chiho?” Emi asked.
“…I dunno, just looking at your two friends kind of filled me up.”
Chiho wasn’t a particularly light eater, but even making allowances for that, the sight of Emeralda and Albert’s eating spree was enough to overwhelm her.
“I hear you,” Emi said. She looked at them, took another sip of tea, then sat back up in her seat. “By the way, sorry if this is too sudden, but does it seem like there’s something…different about us from you? Like, from your perspective? I mean, besides the capacities of their stomachs, I guess.”
“…Huh?”
Chiho blinked. It was too sudden.
“I haven’t forgotten that we had stuff to talk about, so… I know we kind of ate a lot first, but…”
“Ha-ha! Sorry ’bout that.”
“It was so goooooood…”
Neither of them seemed too apologetic, as Chiho finally recalled what brought them all to this restaurant.
“Well, me, and Eme and Al as well… We’re all people, just like you. I mean, I guess I’m half-angel, but given how much these two can apparently eat, they’re a lot closer to monster-class than I am.”
“Y-yeah…”
Realizing Emi was trying to steer their talk in a constructive direction, Chiho sat up as well, sipping her tea. Albert and Emeralda were still sprawled out across their seats.
“The reason,” Emi began, “why they were so suspicious about sushi is because in our world, working-class people would never see raw fish on the dinner table. There isn’t the distribution network or freezer technology you see in Japan, so instead, fish gets smoked or salted, then cooked like that. And even that’s considered a high-ticket meal where I’m from. Maybe you’d get to enjoy it once a year.”
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 14 Page 2
