Vince had never been much of a fisherman. Indeed, he found the sport quite boring ... and, although never much of an animal liberationist, he considered it very cruel to the fish. This did not mean that he hadn't been on his share of fishing trips. Fishing trips often meant a nice drive in the country and a chance to down a few stubbies with the boys. The only remotely tedious part was actually baiting a hook and dropping it into the water. After a few drinks, most of the company had forgotten about fishing in particular and seafood in general. Even as a casual observer, Vince had seen a fair number of globe fish, blow fish, guppies or whatever you wanted to call them. They were hooked, pulled in and then thrown back. Apart from being the ugliest fish that he had ever seen, he was assured that they were poisonous. They looked as if they had a severe case of acne and they would be so puffed up with air that they would float on the surface of the water for a number of minutes before pitching and sinking out of sight.
It was a fair bet that Vince's friends, the Matsumotos and the Atsukawas, had never seen a live globe fish or fugu as they called them. Yet, every year, for their end of year bonenkai celebrations, they ordered some through the postal order system. Vince could never get used to the idea of posting food, not since a West German friend had once posted him a pizza from his favourite pizzeria in an envelope specially padded with bubble plastic. It had arrived five days and 700 kilometres later and Vince hadn't even looked in the package before depositing it in the bin.
He had seen the special omiyage order forms at every post office. These were for special presents at Obon time in August, Oseibo time at New Year, and St. Valentine's Day in February. Polite present givers always made sure that what they gave was consumable and this usually meant food. You could post coffee, tea, soba noodles, crab, pickles, beef, fish of all kinds including fugu, and numerous other items at any time of the year.
To their credit, both the Matsumotos and the Atsukawas did forewarn Vince that fugu was poisonous and that the cutting of such a fish had to be done by an expert. They made a great drama of how you were in fact challenging death when you ate fugu.
Vince, however, had done a little research of his own and was well aware that the only parts of the fugu that were actually poisonous were the liver and the ovaries. The testes of the male fish were also poisonous, although they supposedly acted as a powerful aphrodisiac if you survived. He had also read somewhere that fugu was only poisonous because it consumed a special type of seaweed. Under such circumstances, Vince was only too happy to eat some. He delighted in trying new dishes and was especially proud of his ability to stomach anything whether it be exotic or totally alien.
If someone had told Vince to eat nails or light bulbs, he would have probably done it. During any number of visits to various restaurants, he had been the only person present game to eat snails, frogs' legs, rocky mountain oysters, haggis and the worm in the bottle of tequila. Even before he came to Japan, he had enjoyed many plates of sushi and sashimi and soon after he arriving in the country, he had tried shirako (sperm of the red schnapper), chicken brains, hachi (bees), cactus steak (Saboten) and inago (honeyed grasshopper). Why would he worry about a Japanese delicacy like fugu? Connie, on the other hand, was a most pernicketty eater. It had taken twelve years for her to agree to taste-test her first Big Mac. As Vince had noted many, many times, she ate more with her eyes than with her mouth, tasted more with her imagination than with her taste buds. The day he had suggested that she try natto had almost ended in divorce. She claimed that it looked just like frozen rabbit diarrhoea and that she would never eat anything that looked vaguely like frozen rabbit diarrhoea, thank you very much. She thought that tokaroten, an arrowroot jelly, which was one of Vince's favourites, looked like transparent worms and that sashimi bore a hideous resemblance to raw fish.
While Connie was totally unadventurous in any culinary sense, she did have a strong social conscience and could never bring herself to tell anyone apart from her husband that the food over which they had slaved the afternoon away was horrible. At dinner parties, she would nibble her way around the edges without really tasting it and state quietly that it was not her cup of tea.
Fugu presented her with no problems. She had been there when it arrived encased in polystyrene and dry ice. She actually helped in its preparation and felt no moral pangs when declining even the slightest nibble. After all, Connie came from a family of expert anglers. She had once wrestled a marlin out of the waters off the coast of North Queensland. She knew what a guppy was when she saw one - a hideous-looking, goblin-like fish that might well have been made out of rubber or worse, coagulated porridge. Even if it hadn't been poisonous, she would never have eaten it. A fugu, even on a good day, reminded her of nothing so much as a face full of pimples abounding with puss, not that she would have ever have repeated such a comparison in company.
Connie prepared herself an omelette while the others enjoyed pre-dinner drinks. Vince had already had four beers by the time the first course arrived. Fugu sashimi had a milky transparency. He found the raw fish rather grainy and sticky. Osamu noticed it too and apologised: "Ah, it's not fresh. It was caught more than a day ago." "Really?" "Of course, it's difficult. It comes all the way from Yamaguchi prefecture and the post office won't deliver it on a Sunday, so we have to get it delivered on the Saturday." "Oh well, it tastes pretty good to me," Vince held up his glass of beer. "And if it doesn't, we can always wash it down with some more of this." "Which reminds me," Osamu leapt lightly from his haunches to his feet. "Let's have some fugu sake." Fugu sake turned out to be atakai or heated and garnished with the fin of the fugu. It arrived along just as a steaming pot of vegetables in the middle of the table came to the boil and Nozomi stirred in some of the chopped fish to make fugu chanko. This was soon ready and was a lot tastier than the sashimi. Vince found himself wondering why the poor old guppy had been so maligned. He even thought of tempting Connie with some, but thought better of it.
The final dish of the evening was the fried skin of the fugu, which certainly was a vast improvement on the Kentaki that had been the centre piece of the first meal he'd had with the Atsukawas. They had reasoned that since he was not Japanese, he would have difficulty coping with a full Japanese meal and so had bought some fried chicken on the way home. The fried fugu was succeeded by a glass of whisky. And then, Osamu, rather flushed in the face, brought out a bottle of Chivas Regal and Mr. Matsumoto produced a bottle of wormless tequila which he had been saving for just such an occasion.
Somewhere around 2:30 a.m., Connie helped Vince back up four flights of stairs to their own flat. She was grateful on two counts. Vince could still stand up if only a little and that the Matsumoto's apartment was only floors below their own. Vince was very talkative on the way up. He was still holding a conversation with Mr. Matsumoto, who had just passed out on the tatami floor. Osamu had fallen asleep more than two hours earlier. Once inside, Vince realised just how drunk he was and proceeded to tell Connie if not the whole neighbourhood in a very loud voice that he was very pissed indeed. If he was asleep before his head hit the pillow, it was probably because he had really been sleep walking up from the Matsumoto's.
Vince would have been the first to admit that he who lived by the bottle often died by the bottle. However, like so many confirmed drinkers, he could never hold the alcohol itself accountable. It could well have been the bottle's fault but not its contents. It was never the beer that gave him headaches. No, the potato chips must have been off. It couldn't have been the bourbon either, there must have been something in the water, some bacteria that the bourbon had failed to kill. In fact, he might conclude that he would have died of cholera had it not been for the trusty bourbon.
Thus, when Vince woke up at 6 o'clock in the morning and found his head spinning inside a toilet bowl, every joint and nerve ending in his body pulsating to the tune of Ravel's Bolero, his stomach as well as its contents coming up out of his mouth, then he jumped to the only conclusion he could. It was fugu poisoning. Somehow, he'd digested a piece of liver or ovary and he was going to die.
Actually, Vince didn't die. It did take him more than a week to come to terms with his own survival and three months to even look at another bottle of Chivas Regal. He might have recovered even sooner had it not been for a newspaper article three days after the fugu night. Two men from Fukuoka prefecture had been rushed to hospital with fugu poisoning, but had later died. Tears filled his eyes. Here he had survived seventy-two hours and he was reading his own obituary.